From The Ashes Of The Civil War:
Essay Preview: From The Ashes Of The Civil War:
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In this week of readings, we are introduced to writings of two seminal African American writers – Ida Wells, and WEB Dubois. Widely considered to be pivotal thinkers and influential activists, they combine this week to describe the conditions under which the African identity came to be formed out of the ashes of the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction. Moreover, unlike the distinctions of “white” and “other” such as those set forth in the court decisions of People v Hall, this week we now see that the Civil War and subsequent events have created a division between “black” and “other” – a division that perhaps the contemporary may find more meaningful.
Of course, this reader may not recognize the society that produced these readings. Ida Wells, for example, writes in her Red Record of a post-war South that features unimaginably gruesome racially-motivated violence. “Beginning with the emancipation of the Negro” she writes, “acts of conscienceless outlawry” swept over the South. Emancipation eliminated any economic incentive for humane treatment as the “vested interests of the white man in the negro were lost”. Reconstruction brought “fraud, violence, intimidation, and murder”, and citing bogus claims of inciting violence, rape, and plots of “Negro domination”, abhorrent violence became commonplace as thousands died in race-related violence that was all but legally sanctioned.
The events this reading condemns in some sense resulted from the failed rebuilding and racial reconciliation efforts after the devastation of the Civil War. In order to promote “equal protection”, “due process”, and citizenship rights for newly free African-Americans, the post-war administration attempted a Reconstruction program immediately following the surrender of Confederacy. Reconstruction widely failed in these initiatives, creating resentment and backlash among Southern states. This resentment and backlash, however, was called to light by journalists such as Wells – and social activist movements began to form to help protect and entrench the rights of African Americans.
WEB Dubois, an activist who joined Wells in the early 19th century in the realm of activism and social leadership, writes of this failure in Black Reconstruction in America. In the excerpt assigned, he echoes Wells in his enumeration of violent acts. Forcing the South into Reconstruction yielded “a crime-storm of devastating fury”