I had mixed feelings about the lens through which Du Bois writes this book, about halfway through. Every word he writes is correct, and his conclusions are all compelling, but to view the Reconstruction as he does, to me, gives more power than actually existed at the time, to both the freed slaves, and also even to the labor movement and the North. Nevertheless, to see all of the facts gathered at a time when history had just moved on enough to give a bit of perspective to the war, and also to see how little the actual situation had advanced, was almost shocking. That he had to defend an entire group of people from pseudo-scientific balderdash heaped upon us merely for not being white still angers me, and that we continue to need to defend ourselves is still worse.

I agree with his assessment that the endgame was always economic, as he says on page 399/767:

"The free admission of such testimony in all cases would not have involved the surrender of power by the whites since they were to be the judges and jury. The occupational restrictions, instead of tending to restore order, created the impression that the dominant race desired to exclude the blacks from useful employment."

and the saddest part is

"Democracy died save in the hearts of black folk. Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863."

And of course, education remains the key lever for change. One note on literacy: if all work contracts had to be in writing, how could the newly freed slaves not have had free schooling immediately?

So he recorded, at the same time, interestingly enough, that the PWA was creating the Slave Narratives, a crucial set of events that were being distorted as fast as possible by those who would keep everyone in the erroneous belief that race existed, and that this concept of race made those of us who fall on the wrong side of an arbitrary line to be inferior, by our very natures, to those defined as white. The charges of corruption and stupidity leveled only at Colored voters and legislators were often simple inventions and always distortions, with the effect of continuing a labor monopoly that harmed absolutely all workers and small business owners, merchants, etc. And Du Bois essentially points out that events at this time paved the way for the large industries, from the railroads to Standard Oil, to form monopolies that would eventually have to be broken up, but after making a few men very rich, and tilting the economic structure of this country almost irreversibly in favor of those very ultra wealth who fixed the system. He points out again and again how all workers, Black and White, in the South, and even the Planters, were denied education, or educated only in the superficial fineries of life, and never really looked much below the surface. The culture of living on the subservience of another creates classes of people who only appear to benefit from that service and degradation of the other. But it takes an outside observer to help those inside of a closed system, as the South tried to be, to see that, and to step into a new perspective just long enough to understand how to change, and why change would benefit everyone. Du Bois points out that very very few people of such clarity of vision even existed at that time, let alone had any effective voice. That is the great tragedy of all of this, the terrible waste of human potential that continues even to this day, due to those ingrained ideas that so many have trouble putting aside, even for the moment that it takes to imagine a different perspective.

Education, and the ballot.

Du Bois was right, then, and remains right, now.

We can Do Better.
S. Destinie Jones