Skip to content

Quotes from Black Reconstruction in America — W. E. B. Du Bois

1868–1963 United States

← All quotes by W. E. B. Du Bois

6 quotes

To have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

President Johnson, forgetting his own pre-war declaration that the “great plantations must be seized, and divided into small farms,” declared that this land must be restored to its original owners and this would be done if owners received a presidential pardon. The pardoning power was pushed and the land all over the South rapidly restored. Negroes were dispossessed.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

So far as the Negroes were concerned, their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified, and to give them anything less than this was an economic farce.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law. ... In this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of building a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: W. E. B. Du Bois (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.