In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. du Bois contests the accounts of the Reconstruction period that were dominant at the time – accounts that he terms ‘The Propaganda of History.’ His work is grounded in a simple methodological premise: “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.”
During the Civil War, the Union Army forced the removal and four-year incarceration of the Navajo, resulting in the death of half their population. During the same time the Dakota Nation was forced by the Union Army out of their homeland in Minnesota, while unarmed Northern Cheyenne were massacred in their reservation at Sand Creek in Colorado. After the Civil War, six of the seven divisions of the US Army were stationed west of the Mississippi, where they carried out genocidal wars against the Plains and southwestern Indigenous nations, including the intentional extermination of tens of millions of bison. These troops were pulled out of the South, where they were supposed to be occupying the defeated former Confederate states to allow for land distribution to former slaves and for their political participation in democratic elections. Without sufficient US Army troops to stop them, the Ku Klux Klan made Reconstruction impossible, imposed a reign of terror, and restored the ex-Confederate elite.
In 2013 the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Tribual denationalized more than four generations of Black Dominicans of Haitian decent rendering them stateless.
This hybrid panel asks three scholars to speak about the relationship between Marx and Du Bois by drawing on their engagements with the text Black Reconstruction in the classroom and in their research.
A Pan-African Conversation between S'bu Zikode and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
