Academic historians led the reactionary assault on Reconstruction and Black history

Evidence

In the midst of a country whose ideationists were desperately attempting to forge a historically grounded national identity, their lot was reduced to an identification with the horror with which slavery had been concluded. In an America that was now being reconstituted by its ideologues on the mantle of a Manifest Destiny presumably inherited from its European origins, the Black intelligentsia had a historical basis that was too shallow to support their demand to be included in the nation’s destinies. … They required a Black historiography that would challenge their exclusion from the nation’s racial parochialisms while settling for those very values. When their historiography did begin, it was not so much a bold initiative against the certainties of nationalist and racialist histories as a plea for sympathy. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 887 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The work of Herbert Aptheker, the leading Communist scholar on Negro Movements, began under this discipline. (See George Charney’s comments on Aptheker’s made-to-order work on the Hungarian Uprising, Charney, op. cit., p. 295.) The force of Du Bois’s work was more than the ideologues of American Marxism required and, on the other hand, more than American academic history could accept. More than two decades would pass before Black Reconstruction would again receive serious attention in either circle. By that time, Du Bois was nearing his nineties and the American Communist Party had been reduced to a sect. By the third decade, the shadow of Du Bois lay across American historiography. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2302 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Dunning and Burgess turned anti-Black contempt into institutionalized American historiography (similarity 0.86)
• Black Reconstruction marked Du Bois’s turn to Marxist-inflected theoretical history. (similarity 0.85)
• Black rebelliousness to slavery was systematically suppressed by Eurocentric historiography. (similarity 0.83)
• Racist historiography distorted and suppressed the record of Black rebelliousness. (similarity 0.83)
• Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction advanced a mass-action theory of history diverging from Marx. (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois deliberately adopted orthodox historical methods to overturn racist historiography from within. (similarity 0.82)
• Du Bois revised Marx’s theory by foregrounding mass action over class vanguard. (similarity 0.82)
• American Communists suppressed Du Bois’s theoretical revision of Marxism (similarity 0.81)
• Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction revised Marx’s theory of revolution around mass action (similarity 0.81)
• A biased Reconstruction narrative enabled Southern disfranchisement of blacks (similarity 0.80)
• Racist historiography, not ignorance alone, sealed off the African past (similarity 0.80)
• Repression of Black labor directly catalyzed Black historical writing after 1877. (similarity 0.80)
• Du Bois corrected racist Civil War historiography on forbidden intellectual terrain (similarity 0.79)
• Black scholars challenged the lies of American historiography before the monuments were built (similarity 0.79)
• Du Bois confronted Marx unmediated by Leninist doctrine, forging Black radical theory (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Early Black historiography challenged exclusion while accepting dominant values #corroborates (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 887
• Both Marxists and academics suppressed Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction for decades #corroborates (0.45) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2302