How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

The central narrative in the justification of the South’s refusal to grant blacks the vote is a false history of the period known as Reconstruction, immediately following the Civil War in 1865, when black men in the South were allowed the vote. Black Americans at that time comprised the majority in some Southern states, such as South Carolina, and for a dozen or so years their representatives had a powerful voice in many state legislatures and even occupied positions in the U.S. Congress. Reconstruction ended when Southern whites enacted laws that had the practical effect of banning black citizens from voting. White southerners propagated the myth that this was necessary because black citizens were unable to self-govern; in the histories advanced at the time, Reconstruction was represented as a time of unparalleled political corruption, with stability restored only when whites were again given full power. W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction, is a decisive refutation of the then official history of the Reconstruction era. As Du Bois shows, whites in the South, with the collusion of Northern elites, brought an end to the Reconstruction era because of the widespread fear among the wealthy classes that newly enfranchised black citizens would join with poor whites in developing a powerful labor movement to challenge the interests of capital. Du Bois shows how the Reconstruction era was a time of just governance, when black legislators not only did not govern ...