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[[File:dubois.jpg|thumbnail|left|250px|W.E.B. Du Bois, author of Black Reconstruction in America (1935)]]__NOTOC__
The Reconstruction era of United States history has spawned renewed interest. It has become a critical period to study because it helps us understand the nature of political representation and the nature of democracy in moments of crisis. Coming after the Civil War, Reconstruction was the period that attempted to settle the question of the Confederate states’ re-entry into the union while also dealing with the question of the citizenship of four million Black freedpeople.
The story of Reconstruction had either been neglected or distorted for several generations after it concluded. Much of the neglect and distortion continues, but it was to the credit of W.E.B. Du Bois and his monumental effort, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), that the record of Black politicians became clear. Against the trend of looking at their political service as disastrous and “rightfully” diminished by what Southerners called Redemption, Du Bois argues forcefully that they helped establish some of the most egalitarian political initiatives in American history. For they were ushered in during a period where democracy was expanded in ways that was as transformative as any other period for it enfranchised those who had been enslaved less than a decade earlier. For Du Bois, it would stand to reason, then, that when given the opportunity to occupy political office that they would do something different, that they would try to create a political environment that was grounded in equality instead of repression.
In challenging this hierarchy, these politicians also managed to inspire a negative tradition of “Lost Cause” historiography, which saw Black political ideas as necessarily antagonistic to a Southern way of life. This framing has created much confusion around what actually happened during the period, even inspiring perhaps the most important blockbuster in the history of American cinema, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The story that Du Bois told, then, was scarcely told, though there were some rare exceptions—a notable one being John R. Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction (1913)—that detailed the role that Black politicians played in developing a new vision of democracy in the United States. In more recent years, scholars like Lerone Bennett, Jr., Vincent Harding, Thomas Holt, Eric Foner, and many others have taken Du Bois as a direct inspiration in their own narrations of what truly happened during Reconstruction.
====The Emergence of the Black Politician====
====Service in the State Legislatures====
[[File:robertsmalls.jpeg|thumbnail|left|250px|Robert Smalls, state legislator and Congressman from South Carolina]]
Our first glimpse of what these political figures accomplished can be seen in the various state constitutions that they had a hand in developing. In South Carolina, Black politicians argued for civil rights protections as well as educational provisions as responsibilities of the state. After being elected to the state legislature, Robert Smalls was one of many Black officeholders who championed the need for education of the newly emancipated Blacks. For Smalls, and others, education was a necessity to forestall any return to a nominal form of slavery that many saw as possible. He had rose to fame after commandeering a Confederate ship, The Planter, in 1962 and steering it directly to the Union navy. With that act of heroism, Smalls began a long career as a Black political leader and education was an issue never far from his agenda as he helped in the establishment of South Carolina State University, the state’s only public historically Black college.
These are but three examples of the complex roles that Black politicians played in the era of Reconstruction at the state level. While Smalls, Gibbs, and Pinchback were all involved in educational policy, others on the state level sought to redistribute land and wealth, develop fairer policies around labor contracts, forestall the convict leasing system, create state-level civil rights protections, and ensure voting rights. In each state, however, their work was undermined through mob violence, the duplicity of the Republican party (their erstwhile allies), and a failing economy exacerbated by the monopolistic system of the railroad companies. In the histories prior to the work of Du Bois, Blacks are blamed for these failures, but we know now that the picture is varied and complicated.
====Political Work on the Federal Level====
[[File:hiramrevels.jpg|thumbnail|left|250px|Hiram Revels, the first Black Senator, representing Mississippi]]
A number of Black politicians made their way to service in Congress. According to Du Bois, the main issue on their agenda revolved around securing “themselves civil rights, to aid education, and to settle the question of the political disabilities of their former masters.” They “advocated local improvements, including the distribution of public lands, public buildings, and appropriations for rivers and harbors…” <ref> W.E.B. Du Bois, ''Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880'' (New York: Free Press, 2000), 628-29. </ref> A lot of this work sought to use the power of the federal government to aid in the transformation of the country through redistributive policies. As such, the legacy of the politicians who served in Congress was one of imaginative economic reform. Members of that group include the first Black senator from Mississippi, Hiram Revels, as well as the aforementioned Robert Smalls and John R. Lynch, and finally, important figures such as Blanche K. Bruce, Joseph H. Rainey, and Robert C. DeLarge.
Quarles, Benjamin. ''The Negro in the Civil War''. New York: Russell and Russell, 1953.
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