Overwhelming efforts in the South to rewrite history and take slavery out of the Civil War narrative lead to the proliferation of Confederate monuments (and thus, more than a century later, to pitched battles and murder in Charlottesville, Va.). The series’ second half will look beyond that hopeful decade, when the arc of history bent backwards. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy. Union organizing and strikes in the North cast doubt on the convenient conviction that workers would be satisfied with their new “free labor” status. All content © 2007-2020 Dissident Voice and respective authors | Subscribe to the DV RSS feed | Top. Du Bois compared black resistance to slavery as a “proletarian revolution within a bourgeois republic.” And when poor white men were successfully turned against their black brothers they “surrendered the hope of democracy in America for all men.” Even though only 7 percent of the total Southern population owned three million of the four million enslaved blacks, white workers came to accept their wage labor status because, in historian David Roediger’s felicitous phrase, they might lose everything “but not their whiteness.” These “wages of whiteness” or what Du Bois formulated as a “psychological wage” — differentiated from a material wage — set them apart from and against black workers and according to Frederick Douglas the slaveholders were then able to “divide both to conquer each” This formed part of the ideology perpetrated by the ruling class even as it reverberate in contemporary politics. As such, narratives about Reconstruction that neglect to portray slavery as a national institution and refer to it as a “Southern problem” are limited in their explanatory power. Du Bois knew that the “economic foundation” of the northern bourgeoisie would never allow them to follow through on Reconstruction. The Constitution was even amended to grant them citizenship, and protect their freedoms. That, in fact, “an active government redistributes wealth from hardworking white people to lazy African-Americans.”5 Again, the resonance of this liberal posture with our last forty years of neoliberalism is impossible to ignore.
(For a more detailed look at some of the stories in this period, seek out the invaluable documentaries of Stanley Nelson, like “The Black Press” and “Tell Them We Are Rising: Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” both streaming online.).
[, Heather Cox Richardson, “Killing Reconstruction,”. Theoretically, it is impossible for these two subsystems to coexist peacefully in an economy; so an ultimate conflict to determine the future of capitalist production was inevitable. Reconstruction| Extended Trailer Here is the extended first look at Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. This series tells the real story of Reconstruction, one of America's most overlooked, misunderstood, and misrepresented periods of history.
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation,” the Jim Crow system and, of course, the ubiquitous deployment of terroristic lynchings, massacres and the KKK. Viewers will have to come to grips with the massacre of 250 African-American men, women and children in Opelousas, Louisiana in 1868. During the short Reconstruction period from 1865-1877, the Federal state was empowered to act on behalf of freed black men and poor whites. The inclusion of the other two quotes is a response to the oft-asked question, “What if Reconstruction had succeeded?” The point here is that the question suggests an outcome that was never an option. What if they wanted to own the means of production? All remain vexing issues today. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy. The consolidation of capitalism in the US during the Reconstruction period required the radical curtailment of substantive popular power and democratic rights for the vast majority of producers… Put another way, the experience of Reconstruction provides yet another example of the incompatibility of substantive democratic power and capitalist class relations. “Fake news” campaigns alleging the rape of white women are used to incite and justify the indiscriminate killing and lynching of black men. Paramount among these expectations was the prospect of owning one’s own land gained by the political power realized from the right to vote. African Americans who had played a crucial role in the war now grapple with the terms and implications of Reconstruction and their hard-won freedom. reconstruction: america after the civil war Reconstruction | Part 2, Hour 2 Racist imagery saturated popular culture and Southern propaganda manipulated the story.
I’ve included Marx’s quote because the program failed to devote sufficient attention to the fact that slavery and capitalism were deeply enmeshed and the former was indispensable to the nation’s economic development.
Finally, as I mentioned above, we can glean helpful insights from sources like this PBS series but only by conjoining them with an analysis of the class dynamics of the period can we use this knowledge on behalf of our quest for a just society. “Reconstruction” chooses to tell its story soberly and quietly. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy. One thought, though: The series’s accounts of violence against African-Americans tend to have an abstract feeling, and some direct insight into the racist mind-set could help to communicate its full force.
Without hitting us over the head, the series continually brings out connections and correspondences between then and now. The shockingly violent, depressingly predictable backlash in the American South to the end of slavery, and to the attempt to make freed slaves equal members of society, is the central concern of “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War,” a four-hour PBS series written and narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (It shows in two-hour installments, on Tuesday and on April 16. ), Among the many lacunae in Americans’ knowledge of their own history, our hazy notions of Reconstruction and its overthrow — essential to an understanding of so much in our own times, from the civil rights movement to today’s mirror-like rise of white nationalism — may be the most damaging. He is shown with the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson. In any event, poor workers in the South could not be trusted with the vote because they were “fledging revolutionaries” and “given the chance, they would insist on wealth redistribution.” Northern elites, not Southerners, were firmly in control of national politics and their priority was to protect capital (property) from an aroused, potentially dangerous working class that was beginning to respond to worsening conditions. Reconstruction: America After the Civil War Renowned Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents a vital, new four-hour documentary series - Reconstruction: America After the Civil War.
From that he drew the lesson that blacks and poor whites in the South must unite against the ruling class. This new, four hour documentary series will tell the full story of this misrepresented and misunderstood chapter of American history. Two Years After Khashoggi’s Murder, Why is America Still an Accomplice to MBS’s Crimes? Du Bois, a ‘brief moment in the sun’ for African Americans, when they could advance, and achieve, education, exercise their right to vote, and run for and win public office. It’s a moot point because President Andrew Johnson, the southerner who succeeded Abraham Lincoln and hated African-Americans, quickly nullified the order and the land was returned to the wealthy plantation owners. In my opinion, this pledge was not entirely kept.
And it actually happened.
Producer: Julia Marchesi, Rob Rapley, Cyndee Readdean, Stacey HolmanExecutive Producer: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Dyllan McGeeProduction Company: McGee Media; Inkwell Films, IncProduction Year: 2019Copyright Year: 2019Director: Rob Rapley, Cyndee Readdean, Stacey Holman, Julia MarchesiHost: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Writers: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Discs: 2Subtitles: YSubtitle Language: English (SDH)Language track: EnglishAudio Format: StereoAspect Ratio: 16x9 Widescreen, Worricker Part 2: Turks & Caicos DVD & Blu-ray, Unity - The Latin Tribute to Michael Jackson DVD, American Masters: Bing Crosby Rediscovered DVD, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War Renowned Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents a vital, new four-hour documentary series - Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. It’s conceivable that “Reconstruction” could be criticized for being one-sided — for not finding someone to defend the romantic view of Confederate history, or to make the contemporary case that white Americans are economically and culturally victimized. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that in 1865, African-Americans experienced exhilaration, pride and virtually limitless enthusiasm after two hundred and fifty years of enslavement. We must work together as a community to ensure we no longer teach, or tolerate it. The Northern power elite gradually came to view Reconstruction as too ambitious, too dangerous, because it raised expectations, especially regarding land tenure and its implications for wealth redistribution.
While tracing the unraveling of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation in the closing years of the nineteenth century, we will look at the myriad ways in which black people continued to acquire land, build institutions, and strengthen communities amidst increasing racial violence and repression.