History of History of WEB Dubois’ Black Reconstruction, Challenging Lost Cause Myth & Dunning School

Today we will study and reflect on the ground-breaking book by WEB Du
Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, in which we see how
the contrariness of WEB Du Bois can advance the cause of black history.
The established dogma was that the Reconstruction Era following the
Civil War was a dark period in American history, where black rule bred
corruption and unwanted federal interference in the governments of the
Deep South, but WEB Du Bois counters by claiming that the Jim Crow
Redemptionist Era following Reconstruction was the dark era when
blacks lost the right to vote and any semblance of due process and fair
play, that many blacks were, in effect, re-enslaved in a more brutal
segregationist society, and that, in contrast, the Reconstruction Era was a
time of greater democracy where the civil rights and liberties of all races
and classes were respected.

We have already recorded a blog/video on Black
Reconstruction, we will summarize this book, but
this video covers the history of the historians, the
history of the history of Black Reconstruction.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources
used for this video. Please feel free to follow along
our PowerPoint script posted to SlideShare. Please,
we welcome interesting questions in the comments.
Let us learn and reflect together!

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WEB Du Bois As A Youth
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WEB Du Bois & Booker T Washington
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WEB Du Bois and the NAACP
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Was WEB Du Bois a Communist?
Black Reconstruction
History of History of
Black Reconstruction
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During his tenure as professor of sociology at Atlanta University, WEB Du
Bois sought to advance the cause of the Negro by scholarship as well as
by activism, and his efforts had real effect, as he was published in the
national press, including the Atlantic Magazine, founded during the
abolitionist era, and Foreign Affairs, as we discussed in our video on the
later part of his life. During the transition period between his first stint at
Atlanta University and his co-founding of the NAACP civil rights activist
organization, Du Bois obtained funding to attend and deliver a paper on
Reconstruction at the American Historical Association, he considered it
as both “a personal honor and a racial challenge.”

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/web-du-bois-doctrine-race-america-century

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David Levering Lewis, WEB Du Bois’
biographer, says it best, “To suggest that
there had been benefits to Reconstruction
was equivalent to describing benefits in the
aftermath of the plague. Only a few feet away
from the lectern on which Du Bois arranged
his speech sat Columbia University’s William
Archibald Dunning, high priest of the regnant
dogma in Reconstruction scholarship, founder
of the Dunning School, whose successive
generations of historians deplored the decade
of federal intervention in the South as a
‘tragic era’ of Negro misrule.

We couldn’t find a picture of Professor Dunning,
except for the cover on this collection of essays on
Reconstruction and the Dunning School of history,
which includes a foreword by Eric Foner. We may
purchase this collection and do a video on this in
2023 or 2024.

Du Bois told his fellow
historians, “Granted
then that the Negroes
were to some extent
venal but to a much
larger extent ignorant
and deceived,” the
real issue was
whether they showed
“any disposition to
learn better things?”

Du Bois, in contrast, contended that it was the
federal government who failed to create and sustain
the Freedmen’s Bureau, which in its short existence
worked to better black education, public hospitals,
fair labor contracts, judicial due process, and
guaranteeing black suffrage, confronting white
supremacy and sometimes the KKK night riders.

Man
representing
the Freedman's
Bureau stands
between armed
groups of
whites and
blacks, by
Alfred R Waud,
circa 1868

In his presentation,
WEB Du Bois
summarized three
accomplishments of
Negro rule in the Deep
South during
Reconstruction:
• Democratic
government.
• Free public schools.
• New social legislation.

Mr Dunning had mild praise for this paper by WEB Du Bois that sought to turn
Reconstruction scholarship on its head, and the paper was published in the
American Historical Review in July 1910, but was virtually ignored by mainstream
scholars, overwhelmingly white, until the Civil Rights era of the Sixties, after World
War II. One minor accomplishment that Booker T Washington had also promoted is
a change in style in scholarly publications, that the word “Negro” should be
capitalized. This small change emphasized that Negroes should be treated with
dignity like all other people.
Ironically, the current holder of the Dunning history chair at Columbia University is
Eric Foner, who has advanced the thesis of Black Reconstruction by careful
historical research in the newspaper articles during this time period. He has
published many books on Reconstruction history, including the Second Founding, a
history of the Reconstruction Amendments abolishing slavery, granting citizenship
to all males born in the United States, guaranteeing due process to all citizens, and
guaranteeing that all citizens have the right to vote.

In our discussion on our video on WEB Du Bois’ roughly two decade stint
as co-founder of the NAACP and editor of the NAACP Crisis magazine,
which successfully helped the NAACP gain recognition as the leading civil
right activist organization, we discussed that one of many reasons for his
resignation from the NAACP, though he continued to submit important
articles to the Crisis magazine, and his reemployment as professor of
sociology at Atlanta University, was that he wanted to embark on a major
research project, the ground-breaking book based on the ideas of his
paper so many decades prior, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-
1880. He was encouraged in this project by black leaders, including
James Weldon Johnson.

What cultural influences did his book Black Reconstruction seek to
combat? One of the first public relations battle of the NAACP and WEB
Du Bois as editor of the Crisis magazine was the popularity of JW
Griffith’s movie, the Birth of a Nation, that glorified the Ku Klux Klan as
Ivanhoe-like white knights seeking to protect the sanctity of white
womanhood, rather than the brutal white supremacist night-rider thugs
who terrorized, vandalized, and sometimes raped and murdered blacks
who were trying to vote, stand up for their rights, and earn a decent
living. This movie led to the second incarnation of the KKK, the original
KKK had been driven out of existence by federal troops ordered into the
South by General Grant under the Civil Rights legislation passed by
Congress.

Hooded Klansmen catch Gus, portrayed in
blackface by white actor Walter Long.
Scenes From Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation was both an unapologetically
racist movie, shocking many even in the prewar
times in 1915, leading to many communities
banning this film from their local theatres, and it
was also a technologically groundbreaking film in
the history of film making. This movie was the
longest movies of the time by a long shot, running
for a full three hours, using revolutionary filming
techniques which you can read about in Roger
Ebert’s review of this historical film.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-birth-of-a-nation-1915

WEB Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction when he was becoming
more interested in communism, but WEB Du Bois mostly uses
communist code words, such as comparing the black proletariat
to the white proletariat, while noting that in America there is
little class cohesion along economic lines, as the white workers
are just as hostile to Negroes as more well-to-do whites. Never
does WEB Du Bois promote the Bolshevik idea that the lower
classes should overthrow the established social order with
armed violence, his is more of a gentler, kinder kumbaya kind of
communism found only in utopian dreamlands.

Summary Book/Video, Black Reconstruction

WEB Du Bois in Black Reconstruction reminds us that before the
Civil War the market value of slaves was the most valuable asset
class in the country. In today’s dollars, a slave was worth as much
as an economy car is worth today. Slaves were treated like they
were talking livestock, most slaves were denied the ability to
marry, healthy young Negro women who were considered to be
potential “breeders” fetched high prices on the slave auction
blocks.
The chapter subheads are a good summary of the book.

A Southerner wrote: “In the (upper states) as
much attention is paid to the breeding and
growth of Negroes as to that of horses and
mules. Further south, we raise them both for use
and for market. Planters command their slave
girls, married and unmarried, to have children;
and I have known a great many Negro girls to be
sold off because they did not have children. A
breeding woman is worth from one-sixth to one-
fourth more than one that does not breed.”
WORTH OF SLAVES:
Slaves, in today’s dollars, were worth
as much as a new economy car.

Chapter 1: Black Worker
“How black men coming” over three centuries
became both a “challenge to its democracy and
always an important part of its economic history and
social development.”
Chapter 2: White Worker
“How America became the laborer’s Promised Land,
and flocking here from all the world the white
workers competed with black slaves” “and with
growing exploitation.”
Chapter 3: The Planter
“How seven percent of the nation ruled five million
white people and owned four million black people
and sought to make agriculture equal to industry
through the rule of property without yielding political
power or education to labor.

WEB Du Bois subhead:
“How the Negro became free
because the North could not win the
Civil War if he remained in
slavery. How arms in his hands, and
the prospect of arms in a million
more black hands, brought peace
and emancipation to America.”
Chapter 5:
THE COMING OF THE LORD

WEB Du Bois subhead:
“How the planters, having lost the
war for slavery, sought to being
again where they left off in 1860,
merely substituting for the individual
ownership of slaves, a new state
serfdom of black folk.”
Chapter 6:
LOOKING BACKWARD

An eyewitness tells a Senate Committee: “Some
planters held back their former slaves on their
plantations by brute force. Armed bands of
white men patrolled the country roads to drive
back the Negroes wandering about. Dead
bodies of murdered Negroes were found on
and near the highways and byways. Gruesome
reports came from the hospitals, reports of
colored men and women whose ears had been
cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows,
whose bodies have been slashed by knives or
lacerated with scourges. A veritable reign of
terror prevailed in many parts of the South.”
REDEMPTION: BLACKS TERRORIZED

Dubois writes, “While all instruments of group
control, police, courts, government
appropriations, were in the hand of whites, no
power was left in Negro hands. If a white man is
assaulted by a white man or a Negro the police
are at hand. If a Negro is assaulted by a white
man, the police are more apt to arrest the victim
than the aggressor; if he is assaulted by another
Negro, he is in most cases without redress or
protection.”
REDEMPTION: BLACKS HAVE NO
REDRESS OR DUE PROCESS

Lewis continues, “Historians have been critical of WEB Du Bois
for limiting his sources to relatively easily accessible sources such
as Congressional Reports and convention proceedings,
dissertations and monographs, with only the occasional
newspaper article. These sources were sufficiently
comprehensive to paint a coherent picture of the Civil War and
Reconstruction eras. He would have risked his life traveling to
rural courthouses, libraries, and newspaper offices in the Deep
South to consult the original sources, not to mention the fact
that he did not have the research budget to enable him to do
this research.”

WEB Du Bois and staff in Crisis Magazine Office

Lewis continues, “After several years of research, Black
Reconstruction was published in April 1935. Although the book
did not sell out its initial print run of several thousand copies, it
did garner many approving reviews by publications outside of
the Deep South, especially the New York Hearst daily
newspapers. Many historians reconsidered their views of
Reconstruction, even in the Deep South. There was some
denigration, the New Yorker proclaimed that the author took the
“odd view, in distinction to most previous writers, that the Negro
is a human being.”

Another issue that is directly related to white supremacy is the
issue of lynching, whether lynching was justified to protect the
sanctity of white womanhood, or whether it was simply a brutal
murder. Publicizing the false narratives that justified lynchings
was the lifework of another co-founder of the NAACP and brave
journalist Ida B Wells. The NAACP magazine, the Crisis included a
monthly tally of lynchings so it would be continually in the public
eye. There were likely over ten thousand blacks who were
lynched in the years after the civil war, lynchings somewhat
stopped at about the time of the Civil Rights era of the Sixties.

Portrait of Dred Scott, by Louis Schultze, 1888
Dunning Historians’ Attitudes on Negroes

DID THE DUNNING HISTORIANS REGARD BLACKS AS INHERENTLY
INFERIOR?
Our biographer Lewis includes several quotes from leading
Dunning School historians that suggest that they agreed with
Chief Justice Taney in the infamous Dred Scott Decision, which
we discussed in our Second Founding video/blog, not only was
the black man inherently inferior; the black man “had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect,” blacks were
considered lesser human beings. Indeed, under slavery, slaves
were regarded as if they were talking livestock.

We also explored this white supremacist attitude in
our survey of slave autobiographies of Frederick
Douglass, the first generation of black leaders;
Booker T Washington and Father Augustine Tolton,
the second generation of black leaders, and WEB Du
Bois Souls of Black Folk, who was born during
Reconstruction and belonged to the third generation
of black leaders.

https://youtu.be/yxDnJ6sBoJc
https://youtu.be/7VkzhyNnuQk
https://youtu.be/dZbzWJkAf5k https://youtu.be/x212gx1lNIA

Dunnings’s professor John
Burgess in Reconstruction and
the Constitution stated that “a
black skin means membership in
a race of men which has never
of itself succeeded in subjecting
passion to reason.” In 1910
Albert Hart in the Southern
South concluded that “the
Negro race is inferior, and his
past history in Africa and
America leads to the belief he
will always be inferior.” Booker T Washington speaking at Atlanta Convention, 1898

Perhaps his view is: once a slave, always a slave, and
this slavishness is inheritable, ignoring the obvious
intelligence shown by the black leaders we
mentioned, the first three were illiterate and learned
how to read and write with great effort.

Also, in 1910 the future
President Woodrow
Wilson published Division
and Reunion, that
“interpreted the purging
of Negroes from office-
holding and the voting
rolls of the South as
merely the belated result
of the natural, ‘inevitable
ascendancy of whites.’”
Official Presidential portrait of Woodrow
Wilson, by Frank Graham Cootes, 1913

Lewis has similar quotes from white historians, including
the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw the
closing of the frontier in the 1890’s as a key transition in
the history of the United States, a viewpoint that
downplayed the effect of the struggles of Negroes on
American history. Often white historians blamed the
blacks for their subservient position, some claiming they
should have been more enterprising under slavery! Lewis
also quotes from black historians more sympathetic to the
arguments of WEB Du Bois in Black Reconstruction.

A Dash for the Timber, by Frederic Remington, 1889

The Encyclopedia Britannica invited WEB
Du Bois to submit an entry on the Negro
in the United States for its 1929 edition,
but his article was not included because
WEB Du Bois insisted that these two
sentences be included that the editor
objected to: “White historians have
ascribed the faults and failures of
Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and
corruption. But the Negro insists that it
was Negro loyalty and the Negro alone
that restored the South to the Union,
established the new democracy, and
instituted the public schools.”

The Depression and Historical Interpretation

HOW DID THE DEPRESSION AFFECT VIEWS OF HISTORIANS?
History, like relationships, can be complicated. Some historians,
such as Charles Beard in his 1944 New Basic History of the
United States, who recently experienced the Great Depression
tended to interpret history from an economic viewpoint. WEB
Du Bois could not ignore economics, slavery itself was the
foundation of the antebellum economies of the Deep South
slave states. Charles Beard may have read Black Reconstruction,
but since he did not include a bibliography, we cannot tell.

Charles Beard has this
curious passage, “Millions
of Negroes, hitherto held in
bondage, generally illiterate,
little experienced in
management if often skilled
in the arts of industry,
without property, were now
‘free.’ Most of them in the
Confederate states had
been loyal and helpful to
their masters and
mistresses during the war
and had not deliberately
sought their freedom.”
The Cabin, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

No doubt there were some kind masters, and we
explored some of these relationships in our slave
autobiographies, and we also reviewed a vivid story
in the Yale lectures of how slaves felt even under
king masters. The kinder slave owners may have
imagined that their slave would be loyal, but nearly
all slaves were grateful to be freed, if for no other
reason than they were free to marry and legally have
a family and not work under the overseer’s whip.

There is some variation, in the biography of Father
Augustine Tolton, some blacks owned by Catholic
masters were allowed to marry.

Beard mentions the Emancipation Proclamation only
in passing, as if it were not truly a turning point in
the Civil War.
The painter William Aiken Walker preferred scenes
of ordinary black folk in the Deep South, this looks
like North Florida. The sickly dog may represent the
decrepit state of the South after the Civil War.

The Cotton Wagon, by William Aiken Walker, around 1900

Maybe he did read Black Reconstruction,
as Charles Beard adds, “There were
exceptions, thousands of exceptions” of
slaves eager to be freed. “At least
100,000 Negroes had served in the Union
armies as soldiers and laborers. As the
Union armies advanced in the South,
other thousands of Negroes gave them
aid and support in the hope of
forwarding their own liberation.” Beard is
understating the role Negroes played in
the Union victory, if there were 100,000
Negro soldiers, there were hundreds of
thousands aiding the Union cause. In 1863, the Union army accepted Freedmen.
These are Black and White teen-aged soldiers.

Beard continues, “In the
South as well as the North,
hundreds of Negroes,
intelligent and educated,
furnished some leadership
for their bewildered
people.” Beard also notes
how the black codes were
passed restricting the
rights of the freedmen,
which he says that
Northerners saw this as an
“attempt to restore slavery
under another name.”

There were many narratives Charles Beard chose to ignore.
Although he mentions Frederick Douglass in passing, he does
not mention either Booker T Washington or WEB Du Bois, he
does not mention the brutality of Reconstruction and the Jim
Crow Redemption era that lasted until the Sixties. There is only
one footnote reference for the Ku Klux Klan, there is no mention
of the tens of thousands of lynchings in the Deep South, there is
no mention of the total lack of due process for blacks, no
mention of how blacks lost the right to vote. Beard declines to
speculate how segregation actually hurt the Southern economy.

https://youtu.be/kmLg8CDjOOY
https://youtu.be/89ulb20cy8Q
https://youtu.be/f5nPNnvDBCY https://youtu.be/GQesHoV5IdI
https://youtu.be/weGmYOe0Lyg

Nazi Race Laws and Historical Interpretation

HOW DID THE NAZI RACE POLICIES AFFECT CIVIL RIGHTS ERA?
Historians often tell you more about themselves, the times in which they live, and
the historical culture that absorbs into their pore than the histories of past
civilizations they paint. It was no accident that both the Civil Rights movement,
social justice, and the Second Vatican Council all peaked in the Sixties, a mere two
decades following the Second World War. This shift in historical perception meant
that WEB Du Bois’ ideas in his book Black Reconstruction became the predominant
historical narrative, while the Dunning School became an historical curiosity.
The experiences of the horrors of fascism and totalitarianism, and millions of Jews
murdered in the Holocaust, preceded by the persecutions of the Jews in the Nazi
race laws, affected how historians viewed the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim
Crow Redemption eras. There are explicit links between white supremacy and
Nazism, the Nazi lawyers used the Jim Crow laws as precedent when drafting the
Nazi Race Laws soon Hitler assumed power.

This political shift occurred in public attitudes about
peonage, the enslaving of poor blacks under
vagrancy statutes in the brutal convict labor system,
which was really an American system of abusive
convict labor camps with high mortality rates from
harsh working conditions, inadequate food and
medical care, and hazardous working conditions.
This was a more brutal form slavery than before the
Civil War.

We compared Martin Luther King’s Letter from a
Birmingham Jail to Hannah Arendt’s work on the Banality
of Evil, drawn from her observation of the Israeli trial of
Adolph Eichmann, the bureaucratic Nazi who
administered the Nazi death camp system. There are
parallels, Martin Luther King explicitly compares the black
experience of segregation and lack of due process to the
Nazi persecution and murder of millions of Jews in the
Holocaust, viewing the tens of thousands of lynchings of
blacks over many decades as an American Holocaust.

We have also cut a video/blog on how the World War II
experiences of the Catholic Church and all Christians and
clergy under the fascist regimes of Europe affected the
calling and decrees of the Second Vatican Council. These
decrees explicitly reject anti-Semitism, preach respect for
other religious traditions, rejects totalitarianism, views
Democracy as a long-term friend of the Church, and
reaffirms the Catholic Church’s preferential option for the
poor, supporting social justice.

Achievements of Book, Black Reconstruction

Our biographer Lewis notes that,
“By far, Black Reconstruction’s
greatest achievement was to
weave a credible historical
narrative in which black people,
suddenly admitted to citizenship
in an environment of feral
hostility, displayed admirable
volition and intelligence as well
as the indolence and ignorance
inherent in three centuries of
bondage. It invested these
former slaves” “with what a
later generation of historians
would gravely call AGENCY.”

WEB Du Bois reveals how the emancipated blacks
sought to improve themselves, were hungry to learn
how to read, how to become educated citizens, how
black citizens, like all American citizens, deserved
respect, human dignity, due process under the law,
an equal chance to education, an equal chance to
learn and practice a trade and earn a living wage,
and the right to vote, which safeguards all other civil
rights.

W. E. B. Du Bois in the office of The Crisis

WEB Du Bois describes his view of
American history. “Of all that most
Americans wanted; this freeing of
slaves was the last. Everything black
was hideous. Everything Negroes
did was wrong. If they fought for
freedom, they were beasts; if they
did not fight, they were born slaves.
If they cowered on plantations,
they loved slavery; if they scowled,
they were impudent.
WEB Du Bois, Laura Wheeler Waring

DISCUSSION OF SOURCES:
We used as our primary source the biography of WEB Du Bois
and his introduction to Black Reconstruction by David Levering
Lewis, consulting WEB Du Bois’ autobiography as well, plus we
had picked up the American history book by Charles Beard
published in 1944, plus the many books we consulted for many
of the other videos we mentioned.

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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History of History of WEB Dubois’ Black Reconstruction, Challenging Lost Cause Myth & Dunning School