![]() ![]() This view was memorialized in the 1915 cinematic defamation The Birth of a Nation and echoed in 1939 in that twin of Hollywood calumny Gone With the Wind. Rather than a time during which the newly emancipated and their allies struggled to create a new democratic order in the South, Reconstruction was described as a tragic period of corruption and misrule, and only after it came to an end was the South able to be “redeemed.” When Black Reconstruction was published, the ruling consensus on Reconstruction-the period immediately following the Civil War, from 1865 to 1876-was that it had been an outrageous failure, virtually justifying the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. ![]() ![]() In the wake of Du Bois’s book, our view of Reconstruction would never be the same. Black Reconstruction also revealed the shortcomings of the popular and scholarly consensus on the era, preparing the ground for subsequent revisionary texts that thoroughly rewrote this complex history. Infusing Marx’s materialism and class analysis with his own anti-racism, the book also offered a solid foundation for the emergence of like-minded scholars, from Eric Williams to Philip S. But Black Reconstruction was his first extended effort to shine Marxism’s sweeping floodlight on the tortured history of his homeland. Du Bois had been exposed to Marx’s penetrating analytical framework in the early 1890s in Berlin, then the site of what was probably the most advanced socialist movement in the world, and became a member of the Socialist Party in the United States about two decades later. But what distinguished his close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. The first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, Du Bois cofounded the NAACP in 1909 and thereafter helped organize a pan-African movement that bedeviled European colonizers. Dapper and diminutive, and nattily clad in suit and tie, he was renowned throughout the country. Du Bois was already a rara avis-a prominent Black activist-intellectual in the midst of Jim Crow. By the time his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, was published in 1935, W.E.B. ![]()
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