Postbellum historiography deliberately falsified Black history to justify the color bar.

Evidence

In order to paint the South as a martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work and government that today it is almost unknown… . It is not only part foundation of our present lawlessness and loss of democratic ideals it has, more than that, led the world to embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation and it is helping to range mankind in ranks of mutual hatred and contempt, at the summons of a cheap and false myth. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 882