'The Accident Of Color' Looks At The Failure Of Reconstruction

Why did Reconstruction fail? It's a heady question for American historians — not least because despite seminal scholarship on the subject, from W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, key elements are still missing in our narratives about Reconstruction.

This is, perhaps, due to some not-insignificant resistance to the ideas of Du Bois and Foner themselves; for being too Marxist, for instance, as with Du Bois' idea of the "psychological wage" gained by poor whites that allowed the white worker to feel superior to the black worker. Or for emphasizing labor along with race, as with Foner's focus on the formation of a class structure subservient to Northern industrialists.

That Reconstruction did indeed fail is clear in 1935, he responded to a historical consensus that Reconstruction was a failure because it was fundamentally a mistake. The infamously racist film in 1915 that depicted black people as savages and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic is a reminder of that narrative. Traitorous Radical Republicans and racially inferior freedmen were simply incapable of exercising their political rights.