Analyzing Du Bois' Restoration of African Americans in Racial Justice

This essay delves into W.E.B. Du Bois's contributions to the struggle for racial justice in America, particularly focusing on his work, Black Reconstruction. Du Bois argued that Reconstruction, despite its challenges, represented a step forward for American democracy due to the self-emancipation efforts of Black individuals through resistance and collective action. This marked the emergence of Black agency, a concept central to understanding Reconstruction's significance in American historiography. The essay further explores Du Bois's Marxist perspective, highlighting the relationship between emancipation, slavery, and capitalism, where Black labor played a crucial role in shaping social structures and industries. Du Bois emphasized the revolutionary nature of Black resistance against slavery and its potential to challenge capitalism, as evidenced by events like the West Coast Waterfront Strike of 1934. Despite the initial lack of recognition for Black Reconstruction, its radical ideas, such as Black self-liberation during the Civil War, influenced later scholars. The essay concludes by noting that while Du Bois's work demonstrated that post-liberation South did not devolve into economic or political chaos, the rise of American capitalism saw the exploitation of black people through increasingly brutal methods.

Running head: AMERICAN RACIAL JUSTICE STRUGGLE
The Analysis of Du Bois restoration to African Americans in racial justice struggles
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AMERICAN RACIAL JUSTICE STRUGGLE 2
In the struggle for racial justice in America, Du Bois in his work bring forth the black
reconstruction in a number of ways. Even though reconstruction proved to be difficult, corrupt
and prone to calamities, Du Bois believed that the American history’s democracy at that time had
advanced. This is because the black liberated themselves through the resistance to work in
plantations and taking the union approach for solving their miseries. Through this more
procedural and organized ways of solving discrepancies evolved. It now became the birth of the
black agency theory which demonstrates the Black Reconstruction that gives enormous light on
historiography America (Edwards, 2006).
On the other hand, Marxist exploration gives Du Bois’s classic revisionist account which
gives the relationship that took place between the emancipation, slavery and capitalism. The
black emancipation was an extraordinary thing that occurred and this is grounded on capitalism
and slavery. The labor as a result of black people became paved the way for social structure
setting, commerce and machine industry. It is augmented by Marx’s explanation that slavery
necessitated necessary condition for development of modern industries, world trade, and creation
of colonies as well as adding value. Under this situation, the rebellion against slavery and labor
that is not free destroyed system of slavery and set a revolution against capitalism and is
evidenced by the black resistance of West Coast Waterfront Strike of 1934. These created a
revolution in bourgeois republic. Du Bois augmented that the waged people as opposed to the
white working class are the black slaves who created a proletariat revolution (Foner, 2013).
The dictatorship of the proletariat gets illustrated in that the black f slaves had power over
the white bosses. Du Bois put that there are instances in which the judges had issues judgment in
relation to property to the black people indicating that there was great revolution in the history of
the world. The revolution according to Du Bois went across to the white people in which the

AMERICAN RACIAL JUSTICE STRUGGLE 3
whites had begun agitating for their rights as well which went beyond class structures. The
struggle for class was seen cutting both ways and later this was seen to have gone too far by the
northern capitalists and it failed. According to Du Bois, the elite created division among the
working class as one of the strategies of ruling while making the blacks as serfdom with the use
of sharecropping (Holt, 2013).
Despite all this effort, Black Reconstruction only sold 2000 copies in its first three years.
There were many reasons for such poor sales: the depression; it was a relatively expensive book;
illiteracy persisted among black Americans; and, of course, most white Americans were
indifferent. The last factor was the weightiest and was magnified by the fact that Black
Reconstruction was “an heated book” as John Hope Franklin later described it. Du Bois admitted
the book was not designed to be a best-seller. But he also in the long run, it can never be ignored
(Parfait, 2009).
The youthful age of students of history appreciated a portion of the radical elements of
Black Reconstruction, for example, the thought that blacks liberated themselves amid the Civil
War. Others worked through Du Bois' thoughts regarding black leadership in the Reconstruction
South. Eric Foner demonstrated that the black want self-governance and this set the motivation
for Reconstruction in his book (Stein, 2016).
Reconstruction was a courageous exertion at making a multiracial ruling system; black
organization was serious to forming the Civil War and Reconstruction; violent southern
extremists, with northern world class involvement, destroyed Reconstruction, setting American
popular government back a century. The new standard way of thinking had some Marxist effects,
yet generally one could read the pattern setting in the writing of the Civil War and

AMERICAN RACIAL JUSTICE STRUGGLE 4
Reconstruction when the new century rolled over and not need to think of Marx (Edwards,
2006).
Marx's investigation of how enterprises abuses work is no longer reverberated amongst
common laborers that are distinguished as "white collar class." Moreover, radicals later
contemplated on the issue of the free nation than on private entities and the type of private
enterprise that formed the thoughts of first Marx and followed later by those of Du Bois (Holt,
2013).
Du Bois' exploration demonstrates that the post-liberation in the South did not worsen
into financial or political turmoil. He noticed the endeavors of the bigger class to hold control
and get property that was lost in the war. This a set of brutality conferred by a gathering,
regularly from the previous disadvantaged white class of people in the South. These gatherings
regularly utilized fear to subdue black association and suffering, they were frightened by the
colossal power of over 4 million people would have on the state in future (Parfait, 2009).
The American private enterprise was predicated where the entrepreneurial enslavers
ventured into an exceptionally productive industry accurately on the grounds that they
discovered progressively brutal approaches to abuse black people. There is a tight association
amongst free enterprise and subjection (Edwards, 2006).
The American capitalism was predicated, which entrepreneurial enslavers made into an
extraordinarily profitable industry precisely because they found increasingly ruthless ways to
exploit black labor, including innovative torture techniques. There is a tight connection between
capitalism and slavery.

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References
Edwards, B. S. (2006). WEB Du Bois between worlds: Berlin, empirical social research, and the
race question. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 3(2), 395-424.
Foner, E. (2013). Black Reconstruction: An Introduction.
Holt, T. C. (2013). “A Story of Ordinary Human Beings”: The Sources of Du Bois’s Historical
Imagination in Black Reconstruction. South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(3), 419-435.
Parfait, C. (2009). Rewriting History: The Publication of WEB Du Bois's Black Reconstruction
in America (1935). Book History, 12(1), 266-294.
Stein, D. P. (2016). “This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime
Economy”: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s.
Souls, 18(1), 80-105.