The South may have lost the Civil War, but they won the culture war. The South was able to convince many of the Lost Cause myth, that somehow the Southern causes was a noble cause, that the Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery, that the Civil War was fought over state’s rights, and that Southerners were benevolent masters whose slaves accepted their lot in life happily. Furthermore, the history of Reconstruction where blacks gained civil liberties and voting rights equal to whites was seen as a dark time in American history, that blacks showed themselves to be totally incapable of citizenship, utterly incapable to hold public office, manipulated by corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers and traitorous Southern scalawags. One of the first historians to challenge this view was WEB Dubois. His history, Black Reconstruction, argued that blacks were able to make great strides during Reconstruction, and that Reconstruction was a bright, promising era for democracy. Although Reconstruction faced daunting problems, great strides were made in race relations, education, public health, and in establishing fair and just governments across the South, in spite of the rising racial violence caused by the KKK and similar groups, often aided by Southern sheriffs. These gains were reversed by the Redemptionists after the end of Reconstruction, robbing the blacks of their voting rights, allowing the South to build the Jim Crow system of racial violence and discrimination and subjugation that would last until the Civil Rights era. Please view our blog on WEB Dubois: http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/refuting-the-lost-cause-black-reconstruction-by-web-dubois/ Please support our channel, purchase from Amazon, we receive affiliate commission: Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, by WEB Dubois https://amzn.to/3rZHpH0 Please support our efforts, be a patron, at: https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom Patrons can participate in online Zoom discussions of draft presentations we prepare for future YouTube videos.

2. Today we will learn and reflect on the classic history by WEB Dubois,
Black Reconstruction.
WEB Dubois belonged to the generation of civil rights activists born
during the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. Southern historians
championing the false Lost Cause narrative remembered the
Reconstruction Era where the South was forced to accept the civil
rights and equality for the freed black slaves, and their right to vote, as
a dark and corrupt era. WEB Dubois, who earned his PhD from
Harvard, countered with his history of the Civil War and Reconstruction
from 1860 to 1880, seeking to show that, in contrast, the years when
blacks were guaranteed their civil rights and suffrage as a bright era in
American history, an era of democracy and great achievement.

3. You may ask, what can we learn by pondering this history, Black
Reconstruction by WEB Dubois?
Although the South lost the Civil War, they won the peace, they won the
cultural wars of the Lost Cause and white supremacy. To counter this,
WEB Dubois describes both how the black soldiers helped win the Civil
War, and the many contributions they made during Reconstruction.
We can be more compassionate towards the legitimate fears of our
black brothers by studying this history. We can share this story with our
acquaintances so we can defeat both ignorance and prejudice.
And, most importantly, his struggles exemplify the Christian virtues of
patience, persistence and forgiveness that can inspire all Christians in
their struggle to live a truly godly life.

4. We always like to select quotes from the author himself.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss our source for this
video, and my blogs that also cover this topic. Please,
we welcome interesting questions in the comments,
sometimes these will generate short videos of their own.
Let us learn together!

5. YouTube Video:
Black Reconstruction
https://youtu.be/JeRCM4PAqPk
Blog:
https://wp.me/pachSU-qY
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/
NOTE: YouTube video corrections may not be
reflected on the slides, and the blog may differ
somewhat in content.
© Copyright 2021
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https://amzn.to/3rZHpH0

6. You could say that WEB Dubois belonged to the third
generation of black civil rights leaders. He lived a long
life, and although he died before the major Civil Rights
Act was passed in 1965, he helped to keep the civil rights
debates in the public consciousness.

7. Frederick Douglass, born 1818, died 1895 (78)
Runaway slave, prominent abolitionist orator
Booker T Washington, born 1856 died 1915 (95)
Former slave and black educator
Founder of Tuskegee Institute, promoted values
of trade education for blacks.
Known for Atlanta Compromise Speech
WEB Dubois, born 1868, died 1963 (95)
College professor, First black to earn PhD at
Harvard University, talented Tenth movement,
classical liberal education for black leaders
Founder of NAACP, civil rights activist
Three generations of Black Leaders

8. History is most often interpreted through the lens of current
events and current politics,
Lost Cause: The Dunning School, this was 1900 -1930’s during
the dark days of Jim Crow when the Southern Democrat
President Woodrow Wilson brought more Jim Crow hiring
practices in the federal government, he screened Birth of a
Nation in the White House, this movie sparked the
resurrection of the next iteration of the KKK
Narrative: Reconstruction, when North tried, and ultimately
failed, to force the South to accept the blacks as equals, voters,
and citizens, was a dark and backward period in American
history.

9. WEB Dubois viewed the Dunning School as promoting a
Southern white fairy tale, but more dangerously, a narrative
that encouraged racial discrimination and supported White
Supremacy. To combat this, WEB Dubois published the book
Black Reconstruction in 1935, and was preceded by several
articles in the Atlantic magazine. Back in the day, Black
Reconstruction earned excellent reviews from the New York
Times, but it was rejected and ridiculed by the segregationist
Southern historians of the Dunning School. The thought that a
black man could write a scholarly work was seen as ludicrous
by Southern historians, and this book was ignored until the
1960’s Civil Rights movement.

10. WEB Dubois was not born a slave, he was born as a
freeman in Massachusetts and attended an integrated
school where racist attitudes were under the surface, he
was rejected when he dared to give a valentine’s card to
a white girl, he did not experience full throated Jim Crow
KKK racism until he attended Fisk University in
Tennessee. Later he earned a scholarship to earn his PhD
at Harvard, and afterwards studied in Berlin for several
years.

11. The slave autobiographies like those of Frederick
Douglass and Booker T Washington are more personal
because they reveal the miseries of living as a slave, they
emphasize how slaves are not really treated as people
but more like talking livestock who have no last names.
WEB Dubois opening discussion of slavery is a bit more
detached but still poignant and personal.
Blog on Yale lectures on slavery and the years leading up
to the Civil war, link in description.

13. A Southerner wrote: “In the (upper states) as
much attention is paid to the breeding and
growth of Negroes as to that of horses and
mules. Further south, we raise them both for use
and for market. Planters command their slave
girls, married and unmarried, to have children;
and I have known a great many Negro girls to be
sold off because they did not have children. A
breeding woman is worth from one-sixth to one-
fourth more than one that does not breed.”
WORTH OF SLAVES:
Slaves, in today’s dollars, were worth
as much as a new economy car.

14. Slaves dominated America’s pre-war economy, before the war there
were four million slaves plus half a million black freedmen. The total
value of slaves surpassed even the total value of land, and far
surpassed the total value of the factories and other industries.
His theme throughout the book is the active role the black man played
both the Civil War and the Reconstruction eras, indeed, the Civil War
was first and foremost all about slavery. The victory of the North in the
Civil War may have been impossible without the black soldiers, and the
black freed slaves played a central role in the Reconstruction era after
the war, along with sympathetic Northerners, derisively called
carpetbaggers, and the enlightened Southerners, derisively called
scalawags. He devotes many pages to Frederick Douglass, the runaway
slave and orator who spoke so eloquently against the evils of slavery.

15. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th
of July? I answer, a day that reveals to
him the gross injustice and cruelty of
which he is the constant victim. To him
your celebration is a sham; your boasted
liberty, an unholy license; … your shouts
of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns, … all your
religious parade and solemnity, are, to
him, mere bombast, fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy, just a thin veil to
cover up the crimes (of slavery) which
would disgrace a nation of savages.”
Frederick Douglass,
July 4th speech

16. “You boast of your love of liberty, your
superior civilization, and your pure
Christianity, while the whole political power
of is solemnly pledged to support and
perpetuate the enslavement of three
millions of your countrymen.” “You glory in
your refinement and your universal
education, yet you maintain a system as
barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the
character of a nation, a system begun in
avarice, supported in pride, and
perpetuated in cruelty.”
Frederick Douglass,
July 4th speech

17. “You hurl your anathemas at the
crown-headed tyrants of Russia and
Austria and pride yourselves on your
democratic institutions,” “but
regarding to the ten thousand
wrongs of the American slave you
enforce the strictest silence, and
would hail him as an enemy of the
nation who dares to make those
wrongs the subject of public
discourse!”
Frederick Douglass,
July 4th speech

18. NOTES:
New York City: conflicts between the Irish
immigrants and free blacks
Mention Free Labor movement
The concept that whites were equal to blacks was
just not accepted by very many whites, North or
South, and intermarriage, forget it

19. Chapter 1: Black Worker
“How black men coming” over three centuries
became both a “challenge to its democracy and
always an important part of its economic history and
social development.”
Chapter 2: White Worker
“How America became the laborer’s Promised Land,
and flocking here from all the world the white
workers competed with black slaves” “and with
growing exploitation.”
Chapter 3: The Planter
“How seven percent of the nation ruled five million
white people and owned four million black people
and sought to make agriculture equal to industry
through the rule of property without yielding political
power or education to labor.

21. NOTES:
Growing respect for the bravery blacks showed as soldiers.
Flocked more and more to union lines as war progressed, eventually a
million blacks were included in Union ranks.
Black POWs were either brutally executed or re-enslaved. Since the
South refused to treat black soldiers as POWs, there was no POW
exchanges during the war.
Worked harder as laborers of seized plantations. Outer banks: given
farms of their own for the duration of the war.

22. April 12, 1861: Civil War starts, no policy, in the first
months of the war blacks fleeing to Union lines are
sometimes sent back to their masters.
August 1861: US Congress classifies former slaves as
contraband of war who work for the north, work as
servants, sometimes as spies.
Some generals have runaway slaves work as
freedmen in abandoned plantations.
1862: Former slaves can take arms as Union soldiers
Late 1862: President Lincoln issues under his war
powers the Emancipation Proclamation: ONLY slaves
in rebelling regions in January 1st, 1863 are freed.
May 9, 1865: Civil War ends.
December 1865: 13th Amendment abolishes slavery.
Phases of Black Participation in Civil War

23. Dubois subhead:
“How the Negro became free
because the North could not win the
Civil War if he remained in
slavery. How arms in his hands, and
the prospect of arms in a million
more black hands, brought peace
and emancipation to America.”
Chapter 5:
THE COMING OF THE LORD

24. The Civil War drug on for many more years than anyone had
anticipated. As the war progressed, the bravery shown by the black
soldiers in the Union army impressed many in the North, including
President Lincoln. When the war began Lincoln said the North was
fighting for the Union, but as the war deepened and so many soldiers,
white and black, died in the field of battle, then he said that the Civil
War was, somehow, about slavery.

25. Once Lincoln addressed the colored soldiers in
the field: “Let me say God has made you free.
Although you have been deprived of your God-
given rights by your so-called masters, you are
now as free as I am, and if those that claim to
be your superiors do not know that you are
free, take the sword and bayonet and teach
them that you are, for God created all men
free, giving to each the same rights of life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Lincoln Addresses Black Soldiers
Slaves Behind Union Lines

26. Presidential Reconstruction: 1864 – 1867
Although Southern states were required to abolish
slavery, they enacted harsh Black Codes which
practically re-enslaved their black workers.
Radical Reconstruction: 1866 – 1877
Southern states put under military occupation,
forced to grant blacks the right to vote and
guarantee their civil rights, including due process.
Redemption and Jim Crow: 1878 – 1960’s
Jim Crow statutes took away from blacks the right to
vote and many of their civil rights.
Lynchings and race riots were common in early
decades.
PHASES OF RECONSTRUCTION

28. Lincoln was assassinated soon after the end of the war.
Andrew Johnson, his VP, was picked for 1864 when the Republicans
thought they might lose, he was from a border state of Tennessee.
Andrew Johnson was both a rabid racist and incredibly tactless,
Totally clueless about Northern public opinion
He pardoned Confederate soldiers and officers, and plantation owners,
Returning to them their seized plantations, even where the land was
given to black farmers.
Sought to admit southern states under very lenient terms.

29. Dubois subhead:
“How the planters, having lost the
war for slavery, sought to being
again where they left off in 1860,
merely substituting for the individual
ownership of slaves, a new state
serfdom of black folk.”
Chapter 6:
LOOKING BACKWARD

30. The North could conquer the South by force of arms,
But northerners could never change the hearts of southerners, or their
own hearts either, deeply racist attitudes persisted.
The South was devastated and bankrupt, having enough money to pay
decent wages to black workers was difficult.
Not that they wanted to pay blacks a living wage, only wanted to pay
starvation wages, blacks continued to live in abject poverty.
Black codes: labor contracts were mandatory
Vagrancy laws threw blacks in jail for standing on the street corner
Blacks had no standing in court

31. WEB Dubois writes, “The Negro’s access to the land
was hindered and limited; his right to work was
curtailed; is right of self-defense was taken away,
when his right to bear arms was stopped; and his
employment was virtually reduced to contract labor
with penal servitude as a punishment for leaving his
job. And in all cases, the judges of the Negro’s guilt or
innocence, rights and obligations were men who
believed firmly, for the most part, that the Negro had
‘no rights which a white man was bound to respect.’”
BLACK CODES: LABOR CONTRACTS
AND VAGRANCY LAWS

32. A former Mississippi slaveholder wrote: “General
Chetlain of Mississippi tells us while he was in
command on nine counties there was an
average of one black man killed every day, and
that in moving out forty miles on an expedition
he found seven Negroes wantonly
butchered. General Thomas of the Freedmen’s
Bureau tells us that on average two or three
black men are killed daily in Mississippi; the
sable patriot in blue (black Union soldiers) as
they return, are the objects of especial spite.
BLACKS WERE OFTEN KILLED

33. Northern public opinion was outraged by continuing
hatefulness and bloodshed against the freed slaves in the
Southern states, and the southern state legislatures overplayed
their hands by enacting the harsh black codes.
Final straw: in the 1866 midterm elections very few blacks
voted, and many former Confederate officials were elected to
Congress.
Many newspapers and northern voters asked:
WHY DID WE FIGHT THE CIVIL WAR?
Realized that if these “freed” slaves counted as one person,
while slaves only counted as 3/5ths of a person, Southern
stranglehold over American politics could actually increase.

34. The Republican dominated Congress refused to seat the Southern
Confederate congressmen who had traveled to Washington DC.
They had to return home, the South was placed under military rule in
five military districts. However, most of the soldiers had been
furloughed at end of the war, so these military districts always
undermanned. These soldiers enforced civil rights and guaranteed the
right of blacks to vote, and the new Southern state legislatures elected
Republican state governments.
President Johnson was eventually impeached for obstructing Radical
Reconstruction.
One bright spot was the Freedman’s Bureau, started in the latter years
of the Civil War, although temporary, was the first federal welfare
agency that tried to ensure justice and fair wages for the blacks and all
poor people, plus it built many public schools and public hospitals.

35. WEB Dubois writes: “Twelve labors of
Hercules faced the Freemen’s Bureau: to
make as rapidly as possible a general survey
of conditions and needs in every state and
locality; to relieve immediate hunger and
distress; to appoint state commissioners and
upwards of 900 bureau officials; to put the
laborers to work at regular wage; to transport
laborers, teachers and officials; to furnish land
for the peasant; to open schools; to pay
bounties to black soldiers and their families;
to establish hospitals and guard health; to
administer justice between man and former
master; to answer continuous and persistent
criticism, North and South, black and white; to
find funds to pay for all this.”
FREEDMENS BUREAU:
FIRST WELFARE AGENCY IN
AMERICA

36. The Freedman’s Bureau faced many challenges in
ensuring that the civil rights of blacks would be
respected, that schools were built for them to attend,
that hospitals would admit them, that they could seek
justice with the police and judges just like any white
man. Often these challenges included risking the lives of
both the black freed slaves as well as those whites who
tried to help them.

37. A Congressional Report stated that the
Freedmen’s Bureau is “almost universally
opposed by the mass of the population, and
exists in an efficient condition only under military
protection, while the Union men of the south are
earnest in its defense, declaring with one voice
that without its protection the colored people
would not be permitted to labor at fair prices,
and could hardly live in safety. The also testify
that without the protection of the US troops
Union men, whether from the North or the South,
would need to abandon their homes. The feeling
of many towards the emancipated slaves,
especially among the uneducated and ignorant,
is one of vindictive and malicious hatred. This
deep-seated prejudice against color is
assiduously cultivated by the public journals, and
leads to acts of cruelty, oppression, and murder,
which the local authorities are at no pains to
prevent or punish.
SOUTHERNERS ARE
HOSTILE TOWARDS
FREEDMENS BUREAU

38. WEB Dubois includes this quote by Booker
T Washington: “Few people who were not”
there can really understand “the intense
desire which the people of my race
showed for education. It was a whole race
trying to go to school. Few were too
young, and none too old, to make the
attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of
teachers could be secured, not only were
day-schools filled, but night-schools as
well. The great ambition of the older
people was to try to learn to read the Bible
before they died.”
FREEDMENS BUREAU
PUBLIC EDUCATION
Class in Tuskegee Institute, Alabama

39. In response to the political violence of the South and to break the back
of the original KKK, Congress passed the KKK Act that enabled the
suspension of habeus corpus in areas in rebellion where justice for
black citizens proved impossible.
Under the authority of this act and the Civil Rights Act, General Grant
commanded the Army to put down the original version of the KKK,
which was successfully suppressed, or at least driven underground.
Southern states could be admitted to the Union after they passed first
the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and later the 14th and 15th
Amendment.

40. 13th Amendment: 1865: Slavery abolished
14th Amendment: 1868: Everyone born in
United States is a citizen, guaranteed due
process & equal protection under the law
15th Amendment: 1870: The right of
citizens to vote cannot be denied on basis
of race, color, or prior servitude.
This book will be subject of future blog
and video.
RECONSTRUCTION AMENDMENTS

41. Why were these three amendments passed over a period of three
years?
At the end of the Civil War, Northern public opinion would only support
abolishing slavery, but the intransience of the South guaranteed the
passage of the 14th Amendment also. In 1865 many northern states did
not permit blacks to vote.
And, some thought that the 14th Amendment implied the right to vote,
but then everyone realized that the 15th Amendment is necessary.

42. Public education system established in
South, many blacks were educated.
Black colleges and churches survived to
fight for Civil Rights and black suffrage.
Blacks were elected as sheriffs, judges,
and state legislators, Republican
governments in all Southern states.
1870 – 1887: Fifteen black Southern
Representatives and two black Southern
Senators were elected
1886 – 1929: Five black Southern
Representatives were elected
Political Accomplishments of Reconstruction

43. Northern public opinion would hold fast only so many
years against the Southern stubbornness and refusal to
treat the black man as his equal. Soon northern public
opinion would tire of the constant Southern agitation
against civil rights for the black, especially since many
Northerners themselves were prejudiced against the
black man.

44. Dubois subhead:
“How civil war in the South began
again, indeed had never ceased;
and how black Prometheus
bound to the Rock of Ages by
hate, hurt and humiliation, has his
vitals eaten out as they grow, yet
lives and fights.”
Chapter 16:
BACK TO SLAVERY

45. WEB Dubois is referring to Greek myth of Prometheus,
The immortal god who gave fire to man, punished by Zeus, every day
an eagle eats his liver, every night his liver grows back, forever.
Panic of 1873: Depression that lasted until 1877.
Causes: speculation, Great Chicago fire, and Great Boston Fire, banks
and railroads under stress, some went bankrupt, many factories laid off
workers, this was an age where there was no social safety net at all.
No northern enthusiasm to continue the military occupation of the still
recalcitrant Southern states, by this time most Southern states had
been readmitted into the Union.

46. Southern Democrats knew this was their chance, in Presidential
Elections of 1876, violent intimidation of the Negro voters.
The KKK and similar gangs became more active,
Many negros were lynched while they attempted to vote.
In some counties white terrorists seized the ballot boxes of majority
black counties and destroyed them.
Elections in FL, LA and SC disputed, dual sets of electors were sent.
The Republicans clearly won the election, but the South was once again
teetering on the edge of armed rebellion.
Congressional Electoral Commission: backroom deal, Republican
Rutherford B Hayes is elected President and the North pulls its troops
from the Southern states.

47. Jim Crow repression and KKK violence immediately comes roaring back,
over the next four years this reign of terror enables the Democratic
Party to wrest control over all Southern governments.
Also, the Supreme Court castrates the Reconstruction amendments,
refusing to apply them to black justice in state or private litigation, and
not in federal litigation either.

48. An eyewitness tells a Senate Committee: “Some
planters held back their former slaves on their
plantations by brute force. Armed bands of
white men patrolled the country roads to drive
back the Negroes wandering about. Dead
bodies of murdered Negroes were found on
and near the highways and byways. Gruesome
reports came from the hospitals, reports of
colored men and women whose ears had been
cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows,
whose bodies have been slashed by knives or
lacerated with scourges. A veritable reign of
terror prevailed in many parts of the South.”
REDEMPTION: BLACKS TERRORIZED

49. Dubois writes, “While all instruments of group
control, police, courts, government
appropriations, were in the hand of whites, no
power was left in Negro hands. If a white man is
assaulted by a white man or a Negro the police
are at hand. If a Negro is assaulted by a white
man, the police are more apt to arrest the victim
than the aggressor; if he is assaulted by another
Negro, he is in most cases without redress or
protection.”
REDEMPTION: BLACKS HAVE NO
REDRESS OR DUE PROCESS

50. WEB Dubois writes, “The civil war in the South
which overthrew Reconstruction was a
determined effort to reduce black labor as
nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited
exploitation and build a new class of capitalists
on this foundation. The wage of the Negro,
despite the war amendments, was to be
reduced to the level of bare subsistence by
taxation, peonage, caste, and every form of
discrimination, in open defiance of the clear
letter of the law.”
REDEMPTION: BLACK LABOR
SHAMELESSLY EXPLOITED

51. Often this terror had the full support of the local white community.
The Jim Crow system was enacted in all its ugly provisions in violation
of the original intent of the Reconstruction amendments:
First, barriers to black voting: polls taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy
tests.
Then, funding reduced or pulled from many public schools and public
hospitals.
Vagrancy statues were enacted, “loitering” blacks placed in chain gangs
and leased out to plantations and mines, many blacks died in abysmal
working conditions.
Blacks were denied access to justice through the judicial systems, if
blacks called the police often they were the ones arrested, and whites
could never be prosecuted for a crime committed against a black man.
HOW DID THE BLACKS SURVIVE THE TERRORS OF JIM CROW?

52. Dubois writes: “Had it not been for the Negro
school and college, the Negro would have been
driven back into slavery. His economic foothold in
land and capital was too slight in ten years of
turmoil His Reconstruction leadership had come
from Negroes educated in the North, and white
politicians, capitalists and philanthropic
teachers. But through establishing public schools
and private colleges, and by organizing the Negro
church, the Negro had acquired enough
leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst
designs of the new slave drivers. They avoided
the mistake of trying to meet force by force. They
bent to the storm of beating, lynching and murder,
and kept their souls in spite of public and private
insult of every description.”
BLACKS SURVIVED
THROUGH EDUCATION
Tuskegee Institute, Alabama

53. But then, as now, the brutality was not universal, and as the old white
men died off the younger generations were not quite as brutal.
Eric Foner: Although they lived in abject poverty that was a small step
above slavery, blacks were not forced to pick cotton in labor gangs on
plantations under the whip of overseers, the sharecropping system was
a small improvement. They were allowed the minimum privileges of
citizenship, the right to marry whom they choose, their families could
not broken up like they were under slavery.
So, Foner tells us that the dual pillars of the black family and the black
church helped them to survive and thrive, somewhat.
In a very real sense, Reconstruction was continued in the Civil Rights
era of the 1960s, and has never been finished.

55. SOURCES: My recommendation, read Black Reconstruction first before the
other fine histories of Reconstruction. WEB Dubois uses as his main source
are the Congressional Reports, which include riveting personal accounts of
the injustices the blacks suffered during Reconstruction period.
His accounts are more personal because as a black man this history is very
personal, but he is still an honest historian who does not twist history to fit
his view of the truth, and he does not have to, because his view hews
closely to the actual truth of the period. After all, SLAVERY did cause the
Civil War.
His organization is excellent, covers the history of Reconstruction region by
region. The project of WEB Dubois was to show that blacks were
instrumental in the civil rights successes of Reconstruction, but since these
achievements were rolled back, we have not reviewed this history in this
video. Also, we were looking for quotes and stories that bring this history
to life.

56. Many modern readers may find WEB Dubois to be a bit preachy and
flowery in his speech at times, but we must remember that in this
period liberal arts colleges, including Fisk and Harvard, based their
education on studying the Greek and Latin classics, often in the
original Greek and Latin. Although he is not so haughty to explicitly
make the comparison, he does sometimes write like he is a black
Homer recording the brave deeds of the brave black freedmen
during the Civil War and in the struggles of Reconstruction, and in
both struggles many blacks suffered and lost their lives.
Talk about Eric Foner’s books on Reconstruction.
We plan to have a blog and YouTube video on WEB Dubois’
autobiography in early 2021.

58. In the description we have links for our four blogs which are lecture
notes from Yale undergraduate class lectures, and these four blogs
also have links for the class reading lists and their transcripts.
We also have blogs and videos on other civil rights topics, including
blogs and videos on Frederick Douglass and Booker T Washington.
PLEASE click on the link in the description for our blog for WEB
Dubois’ work, Black Reconstruction,
And please click on the links on other interesting Youtube videos to
help broaden your knowledge and improve your soul.

59. To find the source of any direct
quotes in these blogs, please type
in the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
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