Read on Twitter
In 2005/6, I taught a seminar for BPI at Eastern Correctional Facility on one 728-page book: Black Reconstruction in America, by WEB Du Bois. I’ve been rereading my worn old copy for insights into today’s events. Any single passage is virtually predictive. Here’s just one...
On page 330, in a chapter called “The Price of Disaster,” he tells us how by 1867, the South’s rejection of the 14th amendment, along with Trump-like (my words) Andrew Johnson’s rejection of it, led northerners to support Reconstruction laws and ultimately the 15th amendment.
There was “a growing conviction that an arrogant South was returning to Congress with increased political power; that its leaders were essentially the same men who had disrupted the Union and precipitated a costly and bloody war;...”
...no reason to suppose that these men had changed their convictions in the slightest or surrendered for a moment in their determination to dominate the country, and fight monopoly in industry with monopoly in agriculture.” Du Bois goes on to observe that....
In the face of their fatal failure, Southerners were demanding increased political power, and that political power...would be used against the spread of democratic ideals; it would be used for further increasing the political power of the South; it would be used...
...against industry, property, and capital... It was in vain that before, during and since the war, the North had offered to compromise with this unyielding bloc. There was only one defense against the power of the South....
...and while that was revolutionary and hitherto undreamed of, it was the only way, and it could not be stopped by the stubbornness of one narrow-minded man. That was Negro suffrage.”
It should be obvious to anyone who knows Reconstruction’s fate that we can’t coddle the GOP today. But don’t take my word for it. Du Bois tells us on p 708:
“The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance[.]”
“The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance[.]”
“If the Reconstruction of the Southern States... had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living today in a different world.” That was 1935. It could be now.
*Finally, I apologize to you and Du Bois for my crap salad application of quotation marks in this thread. I was rushing to walk a whiny dog.
