What distinguished DuBois' close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. Black Reconstruction was his first extended effort to shine Marxism’s sweeping floodlight on the tortured history of his homeland.
The Civil War was a revolutionary upheaval that crushed slavery and stoked hopes of a broader emancipation against the rule of property. We should draw on that memory today for struggles against racism and capitalism.
I would be failing future generations if I did not to write about who owns the narrative of our country’s evolution. It is difficult to have productive discourse about liberty and justice in this country if we don’t first have command of basic truths
A Zinn Education Project report is a resource to help people press for more rigorous and truthful teaching of Reconstruction history, and to counter the "anti-history" proposals that are under consideration in 37 states.
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The dominant and distorted scholarship framed Reconstruction as an illegitimate enterprise that failed to sustain multiracial democracy. For much of the 20th century, this bogus history was used to justify denying Black people full citizenship.
How state standards fail to teach the truth about Reconstruction.
The KKK should be understood not just as a white supremacist organization, but as an employers’ organization: it violently resisted the revolutionary gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and sought to keep the black masses toiling in submission
“It’s not that Gen. Granger was giving information to the enslaved people. He was giving it to the masters” — at the barrel of a gun.
A false story of Reconstruction spread by propagandists for Jim Crow segregation and disseminated in popular culture through Birth of a Nation continues to shape the national imagination.
Spread the word