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Book: Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
Quotes of Book: Black Reconstruction in
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  1. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    How is it that men who want certain things done by brutal force can so often depend upon the mob? Total depravity, human hate and Schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment. It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus. Around this nucleus, to be sure, gather snowball-wise all manner of flotsam, filth and human garbage, and every lewdness of alcohol and current fashion. But all this is the horrible covering of this inner nucleus of Fear.
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  2. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    V. THE COMING OF THE LORDHow the Negro became free because the North could not win the Civil War if he remained in slavery. And how arms in his hands, and the prospect of arms in a million more black hands, brought peace and emancipation to America.
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  3. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    IV. THE GENERAL STRIKEHow the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.
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  4. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    I. THE BLACK WORKERHow black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteen and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.
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  5. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    XIV. COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF PROPERTYHow, After the war, triumphant industry in the North coupled with privilege and monopoly led an orgy of death that engulfed the nation and was the natural child of war; and how revolt against this anarchy became reaction against democracy, North and South, and delivered the lands into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South.
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  6. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    III. THE PLANTERHow seven per cent of a section within a nation ruled five million white people and 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.
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  7. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    II. THE WHITE WORKERHow America became a laborer's Promised Land; and flocking here from all the world the white workers competed with black slaves, with the new floods of foreigners, and with growing exploitation, until they fought to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.
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  8. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    XVII. THE PROPAGANDA OF HISTORYHow the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.
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  9. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    XVI. BACK TOWARD SLAVERYHow 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.
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  10. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    XV. FOUNDING THE PUBLIC SCHOOLHow the freedman yearned to learn and know, and with the guiding hand of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Northern school-marm, helped establish the Public School in the South and taught his own teachers in the New England college transplanted to the black South.
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  11. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    VII. LOOKING FORWARDHow two theories of the future of America clashed and blended just after the Civil War: the one was abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private profit directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power. The uncomprehending resistance of the South, and the pressure of black folk, made these two thoughts uneasy and temporary allies.
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  12. W.E.B. Du Bois _ Black Reconstruction in

    ...with growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.
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