During his lifetime, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American, was among the most famous poets in the United States. It is one of the great paradoxes of the early Jim Crow era. This biography sheds new light on the writer's life and work.
Du Bois’s mode of analysis in "Black Reconstruction" can help us look past so much of the ephemera of our politics to focus on the roles of power, privilege and, most important, capital in shaping our political order and structuring our conflicts.
Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. It’s also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism.
The abortion ban map is a Southern map. The Supreme Court's 'ordered liberty' judicial vision is rooted there too. But the South is also the birthplace of the Freedom Movement and emancipatory visions.
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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