A biased Reconstruction narrative enabled Southern disfranchisement of blacks

Evidence

In 1939, Francis Simpkins would echo Du Bois’s judgment: “A biased interpretation of Reconstruction caused one of the most important political developments in the recent history of the South, the disfranchisement of the blacks. The fraud and violence by which this objective was first obtained was justified on a single ground: the memory of the alleged horrors of Reconstruction. Later, amid a flood of oratory concerned with this memory, the white rulers of the South, in constitutional conventions of the 1890s and 1900s, devised legal means to eliminate the Negro vote. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2155

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the Dunning school historiography discussed in location 2154 and to the broader arc of how racist ideology sustained white supremacy after Reconstruction.

Related

• Southern seminaries taught Reconstruction as white victimization into the late twentieth century (similarity 0.80)
• Academic historians led the reactionary assault on Reconstruction and Black history (similarity 0.80)
• Dunning and Burgess turned anti-Black contempt into institutionalized American historiography (similarity 0.80)
• Reconstruction-era racism was deliberately engineered by the weakened southern ruling class (similarity 0.80)
• Racist historiography, not ignorance alone, sealed off the African past (similarity 0.79)
• Black scholars challenged the lies of American historiography before the monuments were built (similarity 0.79)
• Reconstruction historiography erased Black agency and labor exploitation (similarity 0.78)
• Black rebelliousness to slavery was systematically suppressed by Eurocentric historiography. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Reconstruction historiography erased Black agency and labor exploitation #expands (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2159
• Academic historians led the reactionary assault on Reconstruction and Black history #contradicts (0.45)