Du Bois’s critique of labor hardened from warning into indictment

Evidence

More than twenty years before the appearance of Black Reconstruction, and while his experience with the Socialist Party was still fresh in his mind, Du Bois had recognized this as a contradiction in the labor movement. And during the intervening years, his anger had not dissipated. When it reappeared in Black Reconstruction, it was no longer simply a warning to a negligent labor movement, but an indictment. By then, the labor movement and capitalism were older and in deep crisis. By then, Du Bois spoke as a Black radical: Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 949