Bartow Black and the Heritage of Reconstruction

Reconstruction in the United States was a radical attempt to establish political equality between blacks and whites in the South.  Despite this transformative nature of the era, or maybe because of it, the period has been one of the most contested in American History.  The memory of Reconstruction was created by historians such as John Ford Rhodes and William Dunning; possibly more influential than Dunning and his school of thought, was Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and the subsequent film Birth of the Nation.  Scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp and his student Leon Litwack challenged the formula throughout the century.  But we must not forget the works of those such as William Sinclair and A. A. Taylor before these more noted scholars.  The revisionist line of formulation reached a climax with the publication Eric Foner’s masterful Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.  So powerful was his work that many wondered if there was anything more to say on the period.  I believe there is.   I believe that we need to think about how blacks viewed Reconstruction.  We need to examine how blacks reimagined themselves after emancipation and pay particular attention to the generational spilt that developed in the wake of Reconstruction.
What I am suggesting is that we begin to investigate the countermemories of the period and how those countermemories were sustained.  I am arguing that the emancipationist memory of Reconstruction, as historian David W. Blight has described it, survived in counterpublics created by African Americans even while the white supremacist vision had become entrenched in the nation’s consciousness.  In this presentation I will begin the process of looking at one of these locations of this countermemory, the black press, by examining the writings of T. Thomas Fortune and the way he treated Reconstruction from 1880-1900.