“Or what is it you buy so dear/with your pain and with your fear?”: Black Reconstruction and the Tragedy of Allegiance to Whiteness

Abstract

We argue that Black Reconstruction remains the most important work of United States history published in the 20^th Century. It is unmatched for its scope, which insists on understanding Reconstruction in a longer timeline than conventionally done, and for its clarity of purpose. It exposes how allegiance to white reunification with the South led northern white historians to promote racist interpretations of what Reconstruction sought to accomplish, by whom, and to what degree its goals were democratic and profoundly viable. By situating the end of racial, chattel slavery in the United States in multiple processes of democratic reform that included the mass self-direction of enslaved people, Du Bois invalidated decades of historiography that continued to deny the capacity of Black intellectual leadership. Du Bois further demonstrated how, in emerging from chattel slavery, Black people joined already existing networks led by free Black people and their white allies providing resources and political commitment to building and sustain Black equality and securing the rights guaranteed in the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution in the post-war United States. Its expansive research base, its rigorous methodology, and its conclusions laid the basis for subsequent generations to continue the project of studying relationships between racism and the limits of class-for-itself organizing in the US; the failure of US labor to intervene against American imperial expansion and militarism; and the ongoing willingness to retain allegiance to racial rather than class aspirations, even when not named as such.