DuBois and Black Reconstruction

 

PROPAGATION OF HISTORY AND FAITH

 

DuBois, W. E. B.  Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1998).

 

Dr. DuBois knew what was problematic about his revisionist history in Black Reconstruction.  He made his intentions clear in his note "To The Reader" (December 1934).  His ideal audience consisted of people who believed a black person in America "and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings…"  DuBois was not trying to convince those who regarded " the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization…"  Indeed, the Negro, in my mind at least, is the chief architect of civilization.

 

Is it only a matter of accident that Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro was published  two years before Black Reconstruction?  No.  It wasn't an accident.  It was a future opportunity.  Prudence might insist that we consign the proximity of publication to a wasteland of accident.  I refuse to concur with prudence.  It is no accident that two distinct items of ancestral wisdom should speak in tandem.

 

David Levering Lewis got it right.

 The final chapter of Black Reconstruction , "The Propaganda of History ,"   is magnificent.  It clears the air. It punches us in the eye so that we might see better, believe better.  In short, the final chapter sounds as if it were written in 2020.  The best black writing always speaks to a future we have already experienced.

 

A single paragraph of the final chapter delivers a necessary stab of recognition-----

 

"In the first place somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard  to his own wish and desire and belief.  What we have got to know , so far as is possible, are the things that actually happened in the world.  Then with that much clear and open to every reader, the philosopher and prophet has a chance to interpret these facts;  but the historian has no right, posing as a scientist, to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between these two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times over " (722).

 

The rumposity of pandemic  urges us to expose, as DuBois did, how the wrong historical narrative can sponsor systemic ignorance, the ignorance of enslavement that Woodson illuminated in his  judicious echoing of David Walker.  The wisdom need for action is no accident as we engage the complicated moment of Black Lives Matter. Keep the faith!

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 26, 2020