What’s striking is that in the piece, the writer claims that "the germ" of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction "was a dispute Du Bois had with the editors of Encyclopedia Britannica in 1929.”
The writer does not include a critical piece of information. 1/5
The writer does not include a critical piece of information. 1/5
https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1470028900948447245
According to Du Bois’s biographer, David Levering Lewis, the “immediate goad” for Du Bois’s book on reconstruction had been The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, a 1929 runaway bestseller written by a political operative and editor named Claude G. Bowers. 2/5
“That the Southern [White] people literally were put to the torture is vaguely understood,” the preface declared, “but even historians have shrunk from the unhappy tasks of showing us the torture chambers.” What put them to the torture? To Bowers, multiracial democracy. 3/5
Jim Crow segregationists hawked The Tragic Era between the world wars. Just how many White people read the book in the 1930s and then saw The Birth of a Nation once again and pledged never to support Black voting and multiracial democracy—no one from *this* tragic era knows. 4/5
In vilifying Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, the writer stated: “The plain truth is that Reconstruction was bad, objectively bad.” Not surprisingly, the writer regurgitated the central thesis of The Tragic Era. 5/5
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