Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 21: Renewing the South Summary & Analysis

W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of Reconstruction and its aftermath is as follows: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again towards slavery.” Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, a small town in Massachusetts. After his Franco-Haitian father abandoned the family “Willie” was raised by a single mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt. He recalls becoming aware of his race for the first time at the age of 10, when another young girl refused to take his visiting-card. From this point forward, Du Bois became determined to prove that he was as worthy as (if not better than) his white peers.

The world within which Du Bois grows up is hostile to this mission. In 1883, the Supreme Court rules the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional; Du Bois’s first publication, at the age of 15, denounces his local community’s apathy to this ruling. Meanwhile, much “propaganda” is issued regarding the emergence of the so-called New South. White Southerners proclaim that in the antebellum era there existed a friendly, even loving, relationship between Black people and their enslavers, and that this positive relation is now returning. This is also the moment at which the segregationist fiction of “separate but equal” is born. The idea that Black people were aided and bettered by slavery helps justify intensified racist oppression in the post-Reconstruction South.

The teenage Du Bois’s dream is to attend Harvard; local white people in his town raise money for him to attend Fisk instead, the best Black college in the country. Fisk is run by white philanthropists and its students are taught by white teachers. Overall, the institution is a “factory” of assimilationist ideas, and Du Bois quickly begins churning these ideas out as editor of the student newspaper The Herald. One of his pieces for the newspaper is a glowing review of George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880.

Faced with centuries of racist scholarship, Williams encounters a conundrum that will plague Black scholars for centuries to come: let these false racist ideas go unquestioned in his work or revise them and be accused of lacking scholarly objectivity. Ultimately, Williams challenges some racist ideas but reproduces others. His book is also notable for its sexist portrayal of Black women. In 1888, Du Bois gives the graduation speech at Fisk, in which he describes the first chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, as the ideal leader Black people should model themselves on—despite von Bismarck’s participation in brutal colonialism in Africa. Leaving the South after graduating, Du Bois achieves his longstanding dream of attending Harvard.