William Archibald Dunning - Hostile Critics

Hostile Critics

Dunning's views were disputed by black historians W. E. B. Du Bois beginning in 1901, and John Hope Franklin in a number of his books, including, Militant South and Reconstruction: after the Civil War. The viewpoint of Dunning and his students was sympathetic to the white Southerners. who they saw as being stripped of their rights by a vengeful North after 1865. They criticized the control over the black vote by Carpetbaggers. "Dunning admits that "The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discriminations against the freedmen in all the common civil rights."

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois characterized Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic as a "standard, anti-Negro" text. In turn Dunning and his students generally rejected Du Bois and his Marxist interpretation of the history of Reconstruction which called for a biracial uprising of the poor against the rich.