Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880

It's hard, and terrible, and impenetrable, and lyrical, and moving, and heartbreaking, and grinding, and long, and bleak.

And vital.

“We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided education for the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it on the road to prosperity.”

Thomas Ezekiel Miller was an American educator, lawyer and politician. After being elected as a state legislator in South Carolina, he was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as disfranchisement reduced black voting. After that, no African Americans were elected from the South until 1972.

You start the book wondering why something as beautifully powerful as this monster tome isn't taught, because the chapters leading up to Reconstruction absolutely glitter. W.E.B. Du Bois was an absolutely incredible writer. Then you get into the meat of the book, which is organized by chapter, and which is W.E.B. Du Bois serving witness. The man basically built a Vietnam War Memorial for every injustice in every state, one name and dollar figure at a time. Before too long, though, you recognize that his initial argument that no man will be free so long as he is a slave to labor dovetails nicely with his framing of the American Civil War as a battle between Northern capital and Southern capital and that fundamentally, African Americans in the American South did best when they strove towards Marxism, that W. E. B. Du Bois recognized Marxism as the best solution to oligarchy, and that the Socialist leanings of every underclass in the United States are a demonstrable consequence of every conflict being the poor dying for the ideals of the wealthy.

Some takeaways, some synthesis:

- The only reason the North cared about slavery is an economy based on labor can't compete against an economy based on labor being free

- The only reason Northern capital cared about slavery at all is freeholders weren't interested in competing against plantations and a frontier full of plantations was seen as weak against Native Americans and foreign invasion

- The North barely won the Civil War and wouldn't have won at all if they hadn't emancipated the South's slaves (slaves in Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia weren't freed by the Emancipation Proclamation)

- The South knew the North barely won the Civil War, and only won by freeing the South's slaves, so as soon as white people from the North stopped shooting white people from the South, white people from the South proceeded to recreate de facto slavery

- The North knew the North barely won the Civil War, so let the South carry on, confident that the Southern plantation model would be limited to the South while garden-variety serfdom spread West

- The United States persists in being a tribe of rich white people who could care less what color you are so long as you do what you're fucking told, and a tribe of rich white people who hate you extra-special hard if you aren't white

- The United States persists in painting minorities as Marxists not just because anyone who isn't a Republican is obviously a Communist, but because fuckin' hell man the biggest social successes in the United States have been brought to you by - wait for it - socialism

- The whole of "reconstruction" was black people under siege with the deck stacked against them overperforming heroically but with not quite enough superhuman excellence to deal with chronic underfunding and massacres by the KKK and other less organized forces of inhuman malfeasance so it's taught in the US as a failure of graft and corruption we never should have trusted those poor darkies to govern.

You know Star Trek? Basic post-scarcity economy, a buncha aspiring normies who are doing the jobs they love without ever truly encountering any of the first four levels of Mazlow's hierarchy? Frickin' hippie dippie dream wherein sci fi writers don't bother to come up with a functional economy?

Fuckin' everything old is new again.

This book taught me that every few generations America has to have a knock-down, drag-out fight between the people who think everyone should be equal and the people who think everyone shouldn't.

And we have been pretending for so long that good wins that we believe it.