Slave Religion, Slave Hiring, and the Incipient Proletarianization of Enslaved Black Labor: Developing Du Bois’ Thesis on Black Participation in the Civil War as a Revolution

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Errol A. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Labor ◽  
Du Bois

A Splendid Failure?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vijay Phulwani
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Political Agitation ◽  
The Subject

In this essay, Vijay Phulwani posits that Du Bois uses the language of tragedy in 1935’s Black Reconstruction in America to emphasize the constraints and limitations created by white supremacy and subvert the tragic legend of Reconstruction. Informed by his changing understanding of the role of slaves and freedmen in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois’s ideas moved from an emphasis on internal racial uplift and external political agitation to a theory of economic separatism and a strategic embrace of segregation. Du Bois returned to the subject of Reconstruction many times throughout his career, using it to rethink and further develop his ideas about the form and content of black politics. Phulwani argues that by continuing to analyze Reconstruction, Du Bois was able to simultaneously narrate its history and model alternative strategies for building black political and economic power.

Reconstructions: Faulkner and Du Bois on the Civil War

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Austin Graham ◽  
Jay Watson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
Novel Approaches

The Unvanquished was Faulkner’s most sustained fictional account of the Civil War, as well as an occasion for him to model various methods of studying the conflict. The novel approaches the war from several historiographically distinct viewpoints, sometimes presenting it as a demonstration of abstract, universal principles, and other times as a fight over slavery. In making the former case, The Unvanquished resembles some of the most cutting-edge, “revisionist” Civil War histories of the 1920s and 30s. But in making the latter it echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’ then-unfashionable, now-accepted insistence that the war was fundamentally concerned with black subjugation and liberation.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-192
Author(s):  
James Edward Ford
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Law ◽  
Critique Of Violence ◽  
General Strike

Notebook 3 continues to build on the concept of the multitude. Du Bois calls the region of the multitude that pursues truth and justice the “dark proletariat.” This chapter theorizes the dark proletariat’s revolutionary force analyzing the argument and form of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, especially the chapters on “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord.” With this analysis, Du Bois’s account of the dark proletariat during the Civil War marks the historical expression of the divine violence Walter Benjamin identifies but cannot historically locate in his enigmatic essay “Critique of Violence.” Divine violence undoes the guilt that binds the oppressed to the law and State. While Benjamin sought his example among the working class in Europe’s metropoles, Du Bois makes the figure of the fugitive slave the protagonist of his narrative.

Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 715-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Economic Value ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Black Labor ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
Southern Black Belt ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
Over Time

Abstract W. E. B. Du Bois wrote extensively about African-American cotton growers and the Southern Black Belt, beginning with the sociological studies he conducted while at Atlanta University. Over time, his approach to these subjects became increasingly literary and experimental. He made the region—and specifically its dirt—a medium for analyzing the history and dynamics of racial capitalism, and for imagining forms of value not grounded in the violent extraction and mystification of black labor power. In doing so Du Bois countered the blame narrative developed by white southerners like Alfred Holt Stone, who attributed soil exhaustion and economic stagnation to the “monstrocity” of self-possessed black labor. He dismantles racist figures of black encumbrance, nomadism, and decay in which antebellum theories of climate determinism were retooled to promote new forms of racial exploitation. This essay analyzes Du Bois’s dirt poetics in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Drawing from Ernesto Laclau’s work on the rhetoricity of Marxist social movements, it examines the revolutionary forms of radical contingency that Du Bois discovers at the intersection of linguistic and economic value.

The Ex-Slave in the Post-Bellum South: A Study of the Economic Impact of Racism in a Market Environment

1973 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger L. Ransom ◽  
Richard Sutch
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Economic Impact ◽  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Market Environment ◽  
Black Labor ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Plantation System

Immediately after the Civil War, southern landowners attempted to preserve the plantation system by offering to hire the newly freed ex-slaves on an annual contract for wages. However, serious problems soon developed. Foremost among these were difficulties engendered by views of white landlords and white overseers regarding the performance of the free black labor. Because they insisted that blacks were incapable of working productively without strict controls and corporal punishment, the landlords were convinced that only the workgang-overseer organization of the slave regime would be feasible. Many freedmen, quite naturally, were reluctant to work under conditions approximating those of slavery. Perhaps the landlord who would have preferred to hire wage labor might have succeeded had he been willing to offer higher wages. However, his views of black productivity inhibited him from doing so, and this approach was soon abandoned.

Rights Through Knowledge and Reason

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Frymer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Black Labor ◽  
American Life ◽  
Department Of Labor ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Societal Problems

This chapter focuses on the work of African American activists in the Department of Labor (DOL) during the Progressive era, and on two men in particular: W. E. B. Du Bois and George E. Haynes. The labor problem was in many ways at the heart of the Progressive project, and the establishment of the DOL and its forerunner, the Bureau of Labor, represented an early victory. Like many of these early institutional victories, the DOL was not a huge success. Its power was at the margins, and it rarely used such power for anything more than conciliation and tepid reformism. In the area of race, the DOL did little to disturb a racially fragmented labor market dominated by white employers and by unions that discriminated against African Americans. But the department, following the Progressive spirit of believing in the power of knowledge, science, and expertise to expose societal problems and begin the process of solving them, participated in a quite wide-ranging examination of black labor in American life. Some of this was through issued reports. Du Bois wrote three of these reports for the Bureau of Labor in the years around 1900. In addition, the DOL created the Division of Negro Economics, headed by George Haynes.

Modernizing America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Social

The United States became recognizably modern in several key ways in the half-century after the Civil War. Changes such as the end of slavery, urbanization, and the suffrage movement posed formidable challenges to religious authority. Many of the most significant writers on religious politics in this period were not government officials but reformers who sought to remake Americans' public life. This chapter presents the following documents: Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism (1885), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible (1895), W. E. B. Du Bois' “Of the Faith of the Fathers” (1903), Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), and William Jennings Bryan's “Mr. Bryan's Last Speech” (1925).

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