Neoabolitionism - Civil Rights Movement As "new Abolitionists"

Civil Rights Movement As "new Abolitionists"

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a major impact on historians. Howard Zinn identified the movement as a revival of the old in SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Zinn popularized the term as it applied to civil rights activists, but he does not refer to historians as "neoabolitionist."

Beginning in the 1960s and strongly influenced by the Civil Rights movement, historians writing about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, emphasized the human advancement achieved by the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of those who had been enslaved. Eric Foner dated his major survey of Reconstruction from 1863 to emphasize the success of abolition (via the Emancipation Proclamation). Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988) emphasized the "unfinished" theme in its subtitle, explicitly connecting the 1860s to the second half of the 20th century when the issues of civil rights gained passage of federal legislation to overturn state discrimination. At no point in his many books and articles does Foner refer to himself or other historians as "neoabolitionists."

Many 20th century historians admired the original abolitionists and wrote about them (as did James McPherson and Martin Duberman), echoing their moral values. Contemporary historians, including David W. Blight, Michael Les Benedict, James McPherson, John Hope Franklin, and Steven Hahn rejected the Dunning School notion that Reconstruction was overwhelmingly corrupt. They evaluated the postwar period as not more corrupt than many times of social change and turmoil in American history. They argued that Reconstruction had positive elements: most significantly, the enfranchisement of African Americans, both free men and former slaves; the extension of citizenship and civil rights to four million African Americans; and the introduction of public schools for both blacks and poor whites throughout the South where such schools generally had not existed. Franklin, for example, points to the founding of historically black universities Howard and Fisk as two major successes of Reconstruction.

Contemporary historians observed that depriving African Americans of suffrage and civil rights was a terrible form of corruption and violation of tenets of representative government.