#black reconstruction

[demonius-darkblade]

Here's one last Du Bois quote, which seems to perfectly reflect our present fight for truthful education despite coming from 1935:

“Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center.”

[virtue-boy]

[thelonguepuree]

Thus by a singular coincidence and for a moment, for the few years of an eternal second in a cycle of a thousand years, the orbits of two widely and utterly dissimilar economic systems coincided and the result was a revolution so vast and portentous that few minds ever fully conceived it; for the systems were these: first, that of a democracy which should by universal suffrage establish a dictatorship of the proletariat ending in industrial democracy; and the other, a system by which a little knot of masterful men would so organize capitalism as to bring under their control the natural resources, wealth and industry of a vast and rich country and through that, of the world. For a second, for a pulse of time, these orbits crossed and coincided, but their central suns were a thousand light-years apart, even though the blind and ignorant fury of the South and the complacent Philistinism of the North saw them as one. Reconstruction was an economic revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide reverberation. Reconstruction was not simply a fight between the white and black races in the South or between master and ex-slave. It was much more subtle; it involved more than that. There have been repeated and continued attempts to pain this era as an interlude of petty politics or nightmare of race hate instead of viewing it slowly and broadly as a tremendous series of efforts to earn a living in new and untried ways, to achieve economic security and to restore fatal losses of capital and investment. It was a vast labor movement of ignorant, earnest, and bewildered black men whose faces had been ground in the mud by their three awful centuries of degradation and who now staggered forward blindly in blood and tears amid petty division, hate and hurt, and surrounded by every disaster of war and industrial upheaval. Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood. Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a new pattern and build a new economy. Finally Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished, and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in defiance of law and order, and in in the face of a great labor movement of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political framework.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

[toastyslayingbutter]

“Had it nor been for the Negro school and college, the Negro would, to all intents and purposes, have been driven back to slavery. His economic foothold in land and capital was too slight in ten years of turmoil to effect any defense or stability. His reconstruction leadership had come from Negroes educated in the North, and white politicians, capitalists and philanthropic teachers. The counter-revolution of 1876 drive most of these, save the teachers, away. But already, through establishing public schools and private colleges, and by organizing the Negro church, the Negro acquired enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new slave drivers. They avoided the mistake of trying to meet force by force. They bent to the storm of beating, lynching and murder, and kept their souls in spite of public and private insult of every description; they built an inner culture which the world recognizes in spite of the fact that it is still half-strangled and inarticulate.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, 667 (1935, 1992)

[lets-talk-about-politics]

Yes, honorable men can fight for dishonorable causes ...

David French makes some good points in this article, even if his overall perspective is bad.

He’s right. Honorable people certainly fought for the Confederacy. The Union wasn’t out to end slavery as much as they were out to restore order. Turner’s rebellion wasn’t simply a glorious revolt, as they slaughtered men, women, and children.

But he’s also wrong. Honorable people can still be complicit in genocidal violence. The Union may not have been out to end slavery, but ending slavery was still an honorable action. Turner’s rebellion, while horrific, was a predictable result of generations of brutal oppression.

Where French is most wrong is at the end of his article, where he says that we need to keep Confederate statues up. The cause of the Confederacy was brutal, unrelenting violence against black people. People can learn about that in books, in museums, Statues glorify. Statues tell us who to honor. But Confederate statues were put up in eras when black people were supposed to be terrified, especially during the early 20th century, when black people were brutalized in the streets, subject to indiscriminate and horrific violence.

French doesn’t understand the sheer brutality that was inflicted upon black people during slavery, during “Reconstruction”, and during Jim Crow. All it takes is some reading, Black Reconstruction by Du Bois, White Rage by Carol Anderson, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi.  Black people didn’t want to slaughter all of the white people. They wanted their lives back. They wanted not to be brutalized. And history tends to back that up.

Confederate statues, even if they were of people who aren’t evil, need to be taken down not only because their intent was malicious, but because they do glorify a cause. And that cause was slavery.

[trylonandperisphere]

“It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro In America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.”

- W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS

from the introduction of “Black Reconstruction,” 

Atlanta, December, 1934

Racists got read.

And it's still true today.

[demonius-darkblade]

He had, then, but one clear economic ideal: That was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right. This was a perfectly fair and natural demand, and ought to have been an integral part of emancipation. To emancipate 4 million laborers, whose labor had been owned, and separate them from the land upon which they had worked for nearly two and a half centuries was an operation such as no modern country had for a moment attempted or contemplated. The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American negro slave was emancipated without such rights, and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery.

W.E.B. Du Bois

[thelonguepuree]

The inevitable result of the Civil War eventually had to be the enfranchisement of the laboring class, black and white, in the South. It could not, as the South clamored to make it, result in the mere legalistic freeing of the slaves. On the other hand, it would not go as far as economic emancipation for which Stevens and the freedmen clamored, because the industrial North instinctively recoiled from this and the Northern white working man himself had not achieved such economic emancipation. The politically enfranchised slave was accused, as every laboring class has been, of ignorance and bad manners, of poverty and crime. And when he tried to go to school and tried to imitate the manners of his brothers, and demanded real economic emancipation through ownership of land and right to use capital, there arose the bitter shriek of property, and the charge of corruption and theft was added to that of ignorance and poverty, just as we have seen in our day in the case of Russia. Democracy, that inevitable end of all government, faces eternal paradox. In all ages, the vast majority of men have been ignorant and poor, and any attempt to arm such classes with political power brings the question: Can Ignorance and Poverty rule? If they try to rule, their success in the nature of things must be halting and spasmodic, if not absolutely nil; and it must incur the criticism and raillery of the wise and the well-to-do. On the other hand, if the poor, unlettered toilers are given no political power, and are kept by exploitation in poverty, they will remain submerged unless rescued by revolution; and a philosophy will prevail, teaching that the submergence of the mass is inevitable and is on the whole best, not only for them, but for the ruling classes. In this argument there is seldom a consideration of the possibility that the great mass of people may become intelligent, with incomes that insure a decent standard of living. In such case, no one could deny the right and inevitableness of democracy. And in the meantime, in bridging the road from ignorance and poverty to intelligence and an income sufficient for civilization, the real power must be in someone’s hands. Shall this power be a dictatorship for the benefit of the rich, the cultured and the fortunate? This is the basic problem of democracy and it was discussed before the people of the United States in unusual form directly after the Civil War. It was a test of the nation’s real belief in democratic institutions. And the fact that the ideal of abolition-democracy carried the nation as far as it did in the matter of Negro suffrage must always be a source of intense gratification for those who believe in humanity and justice.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America