Let me read you something.

It will be only fair to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this

story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race.

If he believes that the Negro in America is an average and ordinary human being, then

he will read the story and judge it by the facts adduced.

If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation who can never successfully

take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures

against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have said

down.

W.E.

Vergart de Bois, December 1934.

And that opening note to readers from his seminal historical corrective on the reconstruction

era called black reconstruction in America.

Ddu Bois is preparing readers to engage with what until then had been an era largely

seen through the lens of white supremacy as a failure.

A moment of America at its most naive in which the victorious North and the federal government

handed power and privilege to undeserving, uneducated, and ungrateful, formerly enslaved

black people, who simply couldn't handle power, let alone freedom, or so-called democracy.

The Bois writes that American history had been falsified to see reconstruction as a failure.

He writes that reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, that delivered freedom to

black people, was being taught as, quote, a disgraceful attempt to subject white people

to ignorant Negro rule.

...