Black Reconstruction

This Week in Black History, Society, and Culture

In this episode, Dr. Hettie V. Williams in conversation with Dr. Chris DeRosa about Black Reconstruction and “reconstructions” in U.S. history. Dr. DeRosa is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 is the title of a book published in 1935 by W.E.B. Du Bois likely the foremost African intellectual of the twentieth century. In this study, Du Bois presents a more favorable view of Reconstruction while countering the racism that was written into much of the scholarship of this era illustrated with the work of Columbia University historian William A. Dunning or the “Dunning school.”