Race, Reconstruction, and Class
Examine slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, racial ideology, labor, citizenship, and the material reproduction of hierarchy.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Estimated effort
- 7 weeks · 4–5 hours per week
- Prerequisite
- U.S. Civil War overview recommended
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What this pathway is for
American class formation cannot be understood apart from slavery, emancipation, land, citizenship, migration, and racial hierarchy. This pathway places Du Bois's account of the Civil War and Reconstruction at its center, then tests and extends it through constitutional, political, and social analysis.
What you should be able to explain
By the end, you should be able to analyze race as historically produced without treating it as unreal, explain Reconstruction as a conflict over labor and democratic power, and connect legal status, political institutions, property, and everyday practices in the reproduction of hierarchy.
- Explain the relationship between slavery, capitalism, war, and emancipation in competing historical accounts.
- Describe Reconstruction as a struggle over labor, land, citizenship, education, and state power.
- Distinguish racial categories from the institutions and practices that reproduce racial inequality.
- Evaluate how class solidarity is built, fractured, and reorganized under racial hierarchy.
Thinkers in this pathway
6 assigned readings
Check off each assignment as you complete it. The scope note tells you whether to read the full work or a defined selection.
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Read Chapters 1–7, 9, 14–17, and Du Bois's discussion of the public and psychological wage.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- How does Du Bois establish that the American Civil War was fundamentally a labor conflict rooted in chattel slavery as an integral component of world capitalism?
- How did Radical Reconstruction attempt to construct a genuine interracial democracy in the South, and why was it overthrown by capital and planter revanchism?
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Read selected chapters on emancipation, Radical Reconstruction, political economy, and counterrevolution.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- What was the relationship between legal emancipation, the unfulfilled struggle for land redistribution ("forty acres"), and the rise of the sharecropping system?
- How did Southern counterrevolution combine paramilitary terror with Northern industrial retreat to dismantle Reconstruction governments?
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Read the complete work on the Reconstruction Amendments and contested constitutional meaning.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- How did the Reconstruction Congress debate citizenship, civil rights, and political enfranchisement during the framing of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments?
- How did late-19th-century Supreme Court decisions invert the Fourteenth Amendment to shield corporate monopolies while nullifying civil rights protections for Black citizens?
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Focus on the historical construction and consolidation of the Jim Crow order.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- Why does Woodward argue that legalized segregation was not an immediate or inevitable consequence of slavery's defeat, but a deliberately constructed regime of the 1890s and 1900s?
- How was racial disenfranchisement weaponized by Southern elites to break the threat of biracial Populist political insurgency?
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Read the opening essays and track the difference between racism as practice and race as its explanation.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- What distinction do the authors make between racism as an objective social practice and "race" as an ideological mystification?
- How does the concept of "racecraft" explain the cognitive evasion where social inequality is mistakenly attributed to racial difference rather than to material practices?
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Read selected chapters on Southern power, the New Deal coalition, labor policy, and racial exclusion.
Guiding questions:Find in the full reading list- How did Southern segregationist Democrats in Congress exercise decisive leverage over New Deal welfare and labor legislation?
- Why were agricultural and domestic workers excluded from Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act, and what racialized structural consequences followed?
3 lecture guides
These outlines can be used for self-study, a reading group presentation, or the structure of a future recorded lecture.
Slavery, capital, and the general strike
A reconstruction of Du Bois's argument about enslaved labor, wartime withdrawal, emancipation, and the remaking of state power.
Lecture outline
- Slavery as property relation and labor system
- Self-emancipation and military conflict
- The meaning and limits of the general-strike thesis
Reconstruction and counterrevolution
Why formal emancipation opened struggles over land, schools, voting, public goods, and labor coercion—and why those struggles were defeated.
Lecture outline
- The Freedmen's Bureau, constitutional change, and state capacity
- Multiracial democracy and its social base
- Violence, political compromise, and the restoration of planter power
Racecraft and material social relations
A method for explaining racial categories through repeated practices and institutions without denying their real consequences.
Lecture outline
- Racism as action and race as retrospective explanation
- Law, housing, labor markets, and political institutions
- Avoiding both biological essentialism and empty class reductionism
Questions to test the argument
- What does Du Bois gain by interpreting the Civil War through labor rather than military leadership alone?
- Which institutions made Reconstruction's democratic possibilities material, and which weaknesses made them vulnerable?
- How does the concept of racecraft change the evidence we would gather to explain racial inequality?
- When can class-based political appeals overcome racial division, and when can they reproduce it?
6 terms to carry forward
- Racial capitalism
- A framework emphasizing that capitalist development has historically organized accumulation through differentiated and racialized labor, property, and political status.
- General strike of the enslaved
- Du Bois's interpretation of enslaved people withdrawing labor and joining Union lines as a decisive force in destroying slavery.
- Reconstruction
- The post-Civil War struggle to rebuild the Union and redefine freedom, citizenship, labor, land, and public authority.
- Public wage
- Du Bois's term for the material benefits white workers could receive through preferential access to public institutions and services.
- Psychological wage
- Social status and symbolic compensation attached to whiteness that could divide workers despite shared economic interests.
- Racecraft
- Practices that produce racial categories and then make those categories appear to be the natural cause of the practices.