Black Reconstruction - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The work was not well received by critics and historians at the time. One major point of contention was Du Bois' critique of the way contemporary historians wrote about the role of former slaves during Reconstruction. Du Bois lists a number of books and writers that he felt were misrepresenting the Reconstruction period, and specifically highlights what he felt were particularly racist or ill informed works. Du Bois felt that certain historians were overly concerned with maintaining the "southern white fairytale" instead of accurately chronicling the events and key figures of Reconstruction.

The reception of Black Reconstruction changed dramatically in the 1960s, when numerous historians began to seriously examine it and contemporary works by Alrutheus A. Taylor, Francis Simkins, and Robert Woody. This re-examination ignited a "revisionist" trend in the historiography of Reconstruction, which emphasized black people's search for freedom and the era's radical policy changes. Post-revisionist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s tempered some of these claims by highlighting continuities in the political aims of white politicians before and during reconstruction. However, Du Bois' insistence on the revolutionary character of Reconstruction was reaffirmed by Eric Foner's landmark book on the subject, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. By the twenty-first century, Black Reconstruction was widely perceived as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography."