Black Reconstruction In America 1860-1880, by W.E.B. Du Bois

Description

Once published in 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois’s now lauded book Black Reconstruction in America offered a revelatory new analysis of the Reconstruction Era in America. An analysis that focused on US democracy and its failings in regards to newly freed Black people. One of the most influential African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois summoned all his intellectual prowess to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow. In regards to the need for his text Du Bois said “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.”