80 years later, W. E. B. Dubois’s history of Black Reconstruction looks like a masterpiece

Slaves freed themselves.  With this majestic assertion in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois all but cemented Black Reconstruction as one of the most influential American history books of the twentieth century.  At the time of its publication, it was widely denounced.  Writing from the depths of the Great Depression, and amidst a burgeoning black communist internationalism, Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his finest. By deftly applying classical Marxist analysis to a population so often overlooked by its orthodoxies, Du Bois’s general strike thesis emerged not only as a historical corrective, but as a stark critique of Western philosophy and modern academic inquiry itself.  It brought together the study of class with the study of race and foreshadowed what we now call intersectionality. Yet, it also sat on the shelf for decades until, like so many great masterpieces, it was dusted off well after its creator’s death and celebrated only in Du Bois’s absence.  As the great American poet/sometimes performance artist Kanye West reminds us: “people never get the flowers when they can still smell them.”

Du Bois’s insistence on black people as a revolutionary proletariat during the Civil War pointed to a glaring hole in both Marxist theories surrounding slavery and the more general study of African Americans by professional academics. Yet even as he bemoaned the neglect of black people within the intellectual annals of modernity, Du Bois paradoxically worked outward from a deep grounding in German Romanticism, classic liberalism, and traditional political theory. As a seminal figure in what Columbia University Professor Robert Gooding-Williams has since branded “Afro-Modern Political Thought,” Du Bois’s general strike thesis continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary historiography and black intellectuals alike. It also represents a place where Du Bois’s often-bemoaned elitism seems to fizzle away into oblivion.  Eighty years later lessons still abound in Black Reconstruction.  This is true not only for scholars working on postemancipation America, but for today’s diverse cohort of intellectual historians who are constantly at risk of ignoring the next Du Bois in their midst.

The elegance (and some would say folly) of Du Bois’s general strike thesis rests upon its simplicity.  Slaves are workers.  As workers, slaves constantly struggled with their masters not only over their working conditions but over their legal and social status as well.  The end game for any slave insurgency was not just to own the means of production but to own one’s very self.   This yearning for freedom found its climax during the American Civil War where slaves increasingly ran away, took up arms against their masters, and intentionally sabotaged and disrupted global cotton production.  These actions were not accidents.  They were a form of politics.  They emanated from a class conscious slave community. For Du Bois, the general strike forced the hand of President Lincoln while turning a war to save the Union into a war to end slavery.  In this way, the American Civil War should not be euphemistically romanticized as a ‘war between the states’ but instead re-understood as the most massive slave revolt in the history of the New World.  Slaves freed themselves.  It was a revolution—one that came and went.  “A splendid failure.” ...