Abstract
This paper argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was far ahead of his time in understanding the deep connection between racial oppression and crime, and that his insights remain crucially important today. Three of those insights, or takeaways, are especially important: that racial oppression has consequences; that those consequences—though profound—are reversible through concerted social action; and that our failure to sustain and build on the successes of the Reconstruction era and beyond in addressing the roots of violence is the most fundamental cause of the persistence of endemic crime in Black communities. I trace Du Bois's views through three of his most compelling works—The Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folk, and Black Reconstruction in America—and highlight their special importance in an age in which, yet again, hard-won steps toward racial equality are being steadily and systematically rolled back through regressive social policy.
Much has changed since W. E. B. Du Bois set down his most important thoughts on what he called (1899/2007, p. 169) the “vast problem” of crime, but much, tragically, remains the same. Du Bois was well ahead of his time in grasping the roots of crime in Black America and in anticipating what could happen if we did not, as a nation, attack the problem with the bold and clearsighted commitment it required. We are now, I believe, at a historical turning point in which we confront many of the same destructive social forces that Du Bois first called out more than 125 years ago. That his work has so much to teach us today is testimony to the depth and acuity of his vision. It is also an indictment of an ongoing failure of social policy and the project of American democracy.
Du Bois's writing on crime was both wide ranging and complex—and it is scattered in several different places in his work. I won’t try to encompass all of that creativity and complexity here. Instead, I want to focus on three key themes—or takeaways—from his work, mainly drawn from The Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folk, and Black Reconstruction in America, published in a period spanning several decades from the close of the nineteenth century to the mid-1930s. I chose these three themes both because I think they reflect the core of his understanding of crime and its relationship to larger social forces, and because I believe that they have special and urgent relevance for us today. The problems Du Bois grappled with beginning roughly 13 decades ago are still very much with us in America today. And the failure—or, better, refusal—to heed his warnings about the consequences of racial oppression helps mightily to explain why.
Takeaway 1. Oppression has Consequences
Du Bois didn’t really develop a systematic theory of crime. But he did have a set of crucial insights, which rested on certain assumptions about human nature and about the conditions that could stimulate, or impede, the fulfillment of human potential. And central to his analysis, from The Philadelphia Negro onward, is the idea that the historical evolution of systemic racial oppression in America has predictably bred not only high levels of crime in Black communities, but also a larger plague of demoralization that helps to explain many aspects of the troubling condition of Blacks in the United States. His lens on crime is holistic: Crime, as he put in The Philadelphia Negro (1899/2007, p. 169), is a problem that “stands not alone, but rather as a symptom of countless wrong social conditions.” Some of those conditions, in his view, were not unique to the Black experience but were faced by people of all races buffeted by wrenching economic and social changes in late nineteenth century America, especially rapid immigration to the cities and the fierce and unforgiving competitiveness of American economic life after the Civil War. But other problems were more rightly described as specifically “Negro problems,” which arose from “the peculiar history and condition of the American Negro” (1899/2007, p. 202).
Du Bois focused particularly on the profound impact on personality and community of the “strange environment” (1899/2007, p. 202) produced by White racial prejudice in the cities—an environment that shaped every aspect of Black life and from which it was virtually impossible to escape, and that “must have immense effect on his thought and life, his work and crime, his wealth and pauperism” (p. 202). He listed a variety of ways in which it manifested itself—in housing segregation, restricted educational chances, the denial of access to “public conveniences and amusements” (1899/2007, p. 230), and perhaps most consequentially, exclusion from work in most parts of the economy other than those that offered the least chance for security, advancement or self-respect. “A great amount of crime,” he wrote, “can be without doubt traced to the discrimination against Negro boys and girls in the matter of employment.” (1899/2007, p. 242).
What made these discriminatory barriers so destructive to the hopes, determination, and aspirations of Blacks in the city was not just that they perpetuated a state of relative disadvantage but that they conveyed a powerful and consistent message that what Blacks actually did mattered little in determining their social and economic situation. The usual virtues that enabled others to advance to the fullest level of their capacity—hard work, thrift, planning for the future—got them essentially nowhere. “No matter how well trained a Negro boy may be, or how fitted for work of any kind, he cannot in the ordinary course of competition hope to be much more than a menial servant” (1899/2007, p. 229). For young Black men in particular, this reality struck at the heart of their identity: The outcome of that environment was to keep them from “being recognized as a man.”
Experienced individually, or only occasionally, these existential insults might not amount to much. But Black Philadelphians, Du Bois argued, encountered them at every turn: These were not isolated and irritating slights, but the inescapable reality of being Black in the city. And the result was both profound and predictable. “When one group of people suffer all these little differences of treatment and discriminations and insults continually,” he wrote, “the result is either discouragement, or bitterness, or over-sensitiveness, or recklessness. And a people feeling this way cannot do their best” (1899/2007, p. 231).
That, indeed, was putting it mildly. The “strange environment” created by White prejudice bred conditions that affected matters of “life and death”—threatening “their homes, their food, their children, their hopes.” It was not the only cause of the “vast problem” of Black crime, but it was a central one. It bred an “atmosphere of rebellion and discontent that unrewarded merit and reasonable but unsatisfied ambition make.” For Du Bois, there was nothing surprising about these outcomes; under the circumstances, it would have been hard to imagine different ones. An entire racial group could not be put in this position generation after generation without dire consequences. Racial oppression, in short, “costs the city something.” (1899/2007, pp. 242–243). And, in Du Bois's view, those costs would only worsen in the absence of social change. The present situation was simply unsustainable. How long can a city say to a part of its citizens, ‘it is useless to work: it is fruitless to deserve well of men: education will gain you nothing but disappointment and humiliation?’ How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face? How long can a city do this and escape the inevitable penalty? (1899/2007, p. 243)
The most fundamental lesson Du Bois drew from his observations in Philadelphia was that the practical inability to move beyond the color barrier unsurprisingly bred a pervasive despair, fatalism, and “listlessness” that itself became part of the problem and hindered Black advance. And it also generated a deep sense of unfairness, of injustice—an awareness among Blacks that their unequal conditions and restricted chances were an imposition, not simply a disadvantage: a theft of opportunity, not merely a consequence of Black deficiency. Those conclusions were affirmed, and amplified, when he turned his attention to the post-Civil War South.
Du Bois's analysis of the sources of the Southern crime problem shared much of the same underpinnings as his understanding of the situation in Philadelphia—especially his core principle that the “vast problem” of Black crime reflected the systematic thwarting of possibility—the ways in which racial barriers repeatedly stifled the natural aspiration to grow and develop: what he described in The Souls of Black Folk (1903/1965, p. 272) as “the mounting fury of shackled men.” But postwar South Carolina was not the same as Philadelphia for many reasons, notably because of the proximity of the legacy of slavery and the unresolved traumas accompanying its abolition. Most importantly, to the powerful incentives to crime that stemmed from pervasive and deeply resented discrimination throughout the country was added the thorny reality that in important respects, the people newly freed from bondage had been, in Du Bois's view, deeply disabled by it—or, as he put it bluntly in The Souls of Black Folk, “the brains of the race have been knocked out by 250 years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing.” (1965, p. 272)
After emancipation, Black workers were especially disadvantaged in their ability to compete in a new capitalist economic order that was extraordinarily harsh and unforgiving. They urgently needed systematic training, especially in what Du Bois called “foresight, carefulness and honesty,” in order to have a chance of flourishing in that world. It was accordingly the “duty of someone to see that these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without school, without economic organization, without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency”—and in the face of relentless and brutal competition “with the best of modern working men under an economic system where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor” (1903/1965, pp. 323–324).
Du Bois said he would not “stop to ask whose duty it was” (1903/1965, p. 323), but the plain fact was that no one had effectively taken it up. In The Souls of Black Folk, he lashed out in particular against the folly and mindlessness of White resistance to providing the necessary education and training to support the independence and prospects of Southern Blacks: What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard-pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common school facilities? What can we expect but crime and listlessness…? (1903/1965, p. 332) the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be Black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires: to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. (1903/1965, p. 272)
Indeed, Du Bois believed that under those brutally harsh conditions, and without anything approaching adequate preparation, the emergence of a certain amount of crime among the formerly enslaved was basically inevitable—“a phenomenon to be awaited” which, “while it causes anxiety…should not occasion surprise” (1903/1965, p. 330). But he argued that this inherent tendency toward increased crime as a result of the mismatch between the challenging imperatives of the Southern economic system and the woeful preparation of potential Black workers was greatly exacerbated by the failure, or refusal, of White Southerners to respond to it with mindfulness or decency. “The hope for the future,” he wrote, depended on “careful and delicate dealing with these criminals,” whose offenses at first were generally minor ones driven by “laziness, carelessness, and impulse, rather than of malignity or ungoverned viciousness. Such misdemeanors needed discriminating treatment, firm but reformatory, with no hint of injustice…[but] for such dealing with criminals, white or black, the South had no machinery” (1903/1965, p. 330).
What the South had instead was a longstanding “double system” of justice, which had blatantly provided undue leniency towards Whites and undue harshness toward Blacks, and which after emancipation had become a means of “re-enslaving the Blacks.” In that situation, “Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.” That meant, according to Du Bois, that even when more serious kinds of crime began to emerge, “the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.” Such a situation, he concluded, is “bound to increase crime and has increased it. To natural viciousness of vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic development often impossible” (1903/1965, pp. 330–331).
In short, the wellsprings of crime in the South were much more than economic—extending well beyond the impact of Blacks’ material situation, which in itself, in the especially harsh environment of Southern capitalism after the war, was almost unimaginably difficult. As in Philadelphia, Du Bois singled out the especially aggravating effects of a widespread and well-founded sense of injustice—of ill treatment—in explaining the growth of Black crime. The criminogenic effects of dire material conditions were particularly exacerbated by an overtly racist legal system whose effect was to generate alienation and “revolt” among the Black population while eroding an important deterrent against routine crime—and placing the burden of defending their security on impoverished Black people themselves.
Takeaway 2. Those Consequences, Though Profound, are Also Reversible
Du Bois's frustration at White people's refusal to take on the responsibility of changing the conditions that bred crime was grounded in his belief that since those conditions had been created by deliberate human decisions, they could be altered. His core understanding that the roots of Black crime and “inefficiency” were structural and not the result of inherent Black deficiency naturally led to some corresponding assumptions about how these problems could be mitigated. Again, these ideas didn’t amount to a systematic theory, and he had little to go on by way of empirical evidence on the potential impact of policies designed to alter the criminogenic forces that pervaded American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—for the obvious reason that a deeply racist society, unsurprisingly, rarely initiated those policies in the first place.
But Du Bois had something else to go on—the remarkable natural experiments in social regeneration that emerged during and before Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War that were designed to support formerly enslaved people who were released from bondage with the defeat of the Confederacy. Du Bois clearly saw at the time that Reconstruction represented a unique opportunity to study the real-world consequences of attempting a wholesale social uplifting of a formally oppressed and marginalized people. It's safe to say that his resulting work represents one of the most enduring, and certainly most original, efforts to draw conclusions about the effects of massive and rapid progressive social change on crime, poverty, and well-being from this compelling but ultimately doomed natural experiment. So it is well worth taking some time to explore what conclusions he took from it.
Du Bois's most compelling writing on this issue appears in his masterwork, Black Reconstruction in America, initially published in 1935. He meant the book to be an explicit attack on the prevailing academic and cultural depiction of Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster for the South, both Black and White—but especially White. That common assessment rested heavily on the argument that Blacks in the South had been mostly incapable of achieving much beyond the most menial labor under the benevolent tutelage of White landowners. So, critics continued, the effort to provide them with political representation and access to land, tools, and education after the war was a massive folly that was destined to fail, and did fail—causing untold damage not only to the economy but also to the very civilization of the Southern states.
Du Bois set out to challenge this dominant interpretation by undertaking an astonishingly broad and detailed examination of the impact of the work of Union army commanders, northern philanthropists, dedicated abolitionists, and above all freed people themselves, first in the experiments during the period immediately before the end of the Civil War and then through the sometimes remarkably creative and impactful policies that were deployed, in varying degrees, across the South after the war ended. His work not only challenged the conventional pejorative conception of the inherent inferiority and limited potential of Black people, but also sketched out a historical appreciation of one of the most remarkable experiments in egalitarian democracy that ever took place on American soil—and one that provided compelling insights into the potential effects of targeted policies of democratic engagement and social inclusion on many social problems, not least of them crime. More recent historical scholarship on this period, as we’ll see in a moment, often upholds much of Du Bois's original take on these issues, though perhaps with greater reservations about how much, in the end, the experiment accomplished (Brown, 2025; Sinha, 2024). But a close look at what Du Bois had to say about the promise—and sometimes the reality—of the transformative effects of policies to deploy large-scale public investment and expand opportunities for participation, self-sufficiency, and opportunities for education and training offers lessons for us that I believe are critically important today.
Some of Du Bois's most relevant writing on this appears in his discussion in Black Reconstruction in America (1935/1998) of the accomplishments of experiments undertaken by Union military forces to address the huge practical and moral problem posed by the sudden appearance of masses of unemployed formerly enslaved people newly freed by Union victories in key parts of the South, notably including parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. In particular, the coexistence of masses of newly freed, landless, mostly uneducated, and jobless people and the recently confiscated lands of defeated Southern planters created an unprecedented situation that was both daunting and rich with possibilities. It opened both the necessity and the opportunity for creative initiatives to transform the lives of newly freed people. Some military commanders, with the help of both Northern advocates and freed people eager for change, often took remarkably creative advantage of the opportunity. Some of these interventions went well beyond simple charity, sowing the seeds of what has been called a nascent American social democracy, or the seeds of what some commentators have called an “agrarian democracy” in some parts of the South. In that sense, these experiments were regarded both by Du Bois himself and by later commentators as fundamental alternatives to both slavery and to the rapacious racialized agrarian capitalism that ultimately dominated the South after the demise of Reconstruction.
This was especially true of work done by Union army commanders in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, coastal North Carolina, and lands along the Mississippi River. Du Bois based his own account heavily on the reports of some of the federal officials and Union army commanders who launched and sustained these experiments as well as journalists and volunteers who flocked down from the North to observe and contribute to the effort. He was well aware that these were basically what we would now call pilot projects and were by no means widespread across the post-Civil War South; and he had no illusion that they had been uniformly successful. They were often poorly organized, badly understaffed and underfunded, and sometimes themselves shot through with fundamentally racist ideologies that muddied and sometimes subverted their mission. But like the people who conceived and implemented them, he believed that the successes of some of these experiments provided a compelling refutation of the prevalent arguments about the impossibility of genuine racial equality and a powerful demonstration of the possibility for transformative social change.
Du Bois (1935/1998) showed that these bold interventions were largely the result of a process of trial and error. The initiatives put into place by the Union army in Georgia and South Carolina, for example, following Union victories fairly early in the course of the war, were put together without any past experience to guide them. A common lament at the time was that no one knew quite what to do with the masses of freedmen or the vast amounts of newly vacant and neglected land that the defeat of the planters’ regime had opened up. “At first,” Du Bois wrote, “the commanders were just supposed to drive them away, or to give them quasi-freedom and let them do as they pleased with the nothing that they possessed.” This, he said sardonically, “did not work.” But more intensive and targeted efforts to distribute land, tools, and critically needed education and housing did work, to a degree no one really expected. It turned out that “all the freedmen needed,” in Du Bois's view, was “honesty in treatment, and education”—along with, in some places, the right to lease or purchase land and significant Federal investment in adequate housing. “Wherever these conditions were fulfilled,” he wrote, “the result was little less than phenomenal” (1935/1998, p. 67).
Du Bois quoted at length, for example, a report by General Rufus Saxton, the Union officer supervising the so-called Port Royal experiment in South Carolina, describing the successes of freedman in becoming self-sufficient—producing large amounts of crops on plantations they managed on their own, as well as depositing nearly a quarter of a million dollars in a bank that Saxton had established to “test the question of their forethought.” And Du Bois highlighted Saxton's remarkable assessment that “I consider that the industrial problem has been satisfactory solved at Port Royal, and that, in common with other races, the Negro has industry, prudence, forethought, and abilities to calculate results,” that matched those of Whites. “Eventually,” Du Bois asserted, General Saxton “settled nearly 30,000 Negroes on the Sea Islands and adjacent plantations and 17,000 were self-supporting within a year” (1935/1998, p. 72).
Du Bois lists a number of similarly impressive accomplishments in Black Reconstruction in America. On Edisto Island in South Carolina, the federal government supported the construction of 21 houses for freed people, where “the carpenters were Negroes under a Negro foreman.” Near the town of New Bern in Eastern North Carolina “almost 2000 freedman were settled and 800 homes erected” (1935/1998, p. 72). In Davis Bend, Mississippi, the federal government supervised, beginning in 1864, what Du Bois called “an interesting socialistic effort made with all the property under the control of the government,” which divided the territory into special districts policed by Black Sheriffs and judges. Du Bois asserted that under these conditions “petty theft and idleness were soon reduced to a minimum.” The general conclusion was strongly positive: Du Bois approvingly quoted another observer to the effect that “the Community distinctly demonstrated the capacity of the Negro to take care of himself and exercise under honest and competent direction the functions of self-government” (1935/1998, p. 71).
Du Bois's interpretation of these experiments’ success (and that of some other policies after the war) struck a powerful blow against the dominant explanations—North and South—of the sources of Black crime and “idleness,” and laid the foundation for a very different and much more hopeful view. He quoted one observer, the journalist Whitelaw Reid, who on a visit to the South Carolina Sea Islands after the war reported that after the success of “the Cottonfields of Saint Helena” the supposed “dishonesty and indolence” of the enslaved had been clearly revealed as “the creation of slavery, not the necessary and constitutional faults of the Negro character” (1935/1998, p. 77).
For Du Bois, these experiments, though certainly uneven and still works in progress, offered a solid outline of the necessary foundations of a strategy against crime and what we would now call “concentrated poverty”—and provided evidence that, done right and with sufficient seriousness and resources, it could work. The damage wrought by slavery was real and tragically consequential. But it need not be permanent. The success of these remarkably creative and bold experiments in empowering some freed people—economically, politically, educationally—showed that transformative change could take place among formerly beaten down and shackled people even in the most forbidding of circumstances, and indeed could take place with remarkable speed. Clearly, the foundation had to include dismantling the political and legal obstacles to Black participation in economic and social life. But by itself that couldn’t be enough. Du Bois also drew from this history the conclusion that any enduringly effective strategy against the marginality, powerlessness, and consequent demoralization of Black Americans had to involve large-scale public investment—both in physical and human capital—in order to build the capacities and widen the opportunities of people whose capacities had been deliberately suppressed and whose opportunities had been deliberately narrowed.
That generally hopeful assessment applies to the much wider range of interventions that followed the final end of the Civil War. As Du Bois understood, and more recent historical scholarship affirms, the work of the Freedmen's Bureau in the South in particular during Reconstruction was much more than just a well-intended charitable effort. It was, for a while, a kind of emerging re-envisioning of the role of government—especially the federal government— itself, a “new and incipient conception of the federal government as the guardian of its citizens’ welfare,” as one recent historian puts it: the “forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States” (Sinha, 2024, p. 38).
In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois presented some of the statistics then available on the sheer magnitude of these interventions in parts of the South, and the extraordinary speed at which they were implemented. More recent research generally upholds his description. The Freedmen's Bureau, though drastically overextended and woefully underfunded, “evolved into a sort of proxy state for African Americans.” As one recent account sums up, while Reconstruction never managed to create a “welfare state of the scope that many freed people and abolitionists called for,” the Freedmen's Bureau constituted, nevertheless, “the first government social welfare agency in recent history” (Sinha, 2024, pp. 138–139).
In healthcare, for example, the Bureau operated more than 60 hospitals. Although “woefully inadequate for the medical needs of freed people,” they were a huge advance over what Black Southerners had before, which was virtually nothing. And not only were vast numbers of freed people served by this newborn public health system, but they were also centers of active engagement and participation by freed people themselves—“arenas of African-Americans’ post emancipation political action.” Black doctors worked in the Freedmen's Bureau hospitals, and “Mainly due to the Bureau's efforts, the disparity in mortality rates between black people and whites decreased substantially in the South” (Sinha, 2024, pp. 139–140).
The effect of these positive “social democratic” policies on education was even more widespread, and even more rapid. The Freedmen's Bureau “built schools, transported teachers from the north, provided supplies, and paid salaries.” Already by 1865, it operated 740 schools enrolling over 90,000 students (Sinha, 2024, p. 142)—again only a dent in the need in states that had basically never had a public school system, and where great masses of formerly enslaved people were clamoring for education. But it was a stunning achievement nevertheless.
Takeaway 3. The Repeated Failure to Sustain and Expand Those Efforts is the Most Fundamental Cause of the Persistence of Endemic Crime in Black Communities
For Du Bois, then, the dramatic if partial successes of reconstruction and its precursors in radically improving the conditions and prospects of Southern Blacks showed clearly that the widespread pejorative view of Black people as being incapable of independence, autonomy, and self-direction was not credible. And they sketched out at least the outlines of an enduring set of solutions to the complex and difficult problems born of generations of oppression. But by the same token, the fierce resistance to Reconstruction, and its ultimate dismantling, showed that the successes were reversible too. What was gained by the freeing of Blacks from legal restrictions and pouring significant public investment into programs to help the freed people thrive could be undone by the powerful forces of violent reaction and racial hierarchy. Du Bois had much to say about the profound impact of this historic reversal on crime, and what he said continues to have great relevance for us today.
The story of the ongoing “Civil War” that ultimately overturned the first shoots of something like a general American social democracy has often been told, and historians have learned much more about the details since Du Bois wrote in the 1930s (and sometimes corrected him). But some of his assessments haven’t been seriously challenged. The attempt to use the power of government to build a self-sustaining, politically engaged, and widely educated Black community out of the ruins of slavery was fought every step of the way, from the very beginning—through political chicanery, disenfranchisement, repressive legislation, and, as Du Bois emphasized, almost unbelievably brutal violence.
In terms of its impact on crime, this massive regressive shift in the Southern social order had many-layered and, for Du Bois, enduring consequences. It largely shattered the promising beginnings of a vibrant, prosperous, and sustaining Black community across the South, and instead deliberately strove to re-impose conditions on the freed people that directly attacked the avenues of opportunity, social support, and inclusion that might have helped Southern Black communities thrive. “It was the policy of the state,” Du Bois wrote, “to keep the Negro laborer poor, to confine him as far as possible to menial occupations, to make him a surplus labor reservoir and to force him into peonage and unpaid toil…. To make this policy effective it was necessary to keep the Negro ignorant and disorganized” (1935/1998, pp. 696–697).
The successful imposition of a newly forged “caste” system designed to subordinate Blacks in every realm of life unsurprisingly had internal consequences as well as external ones—effects on personality and “moral character.” Du Bois zeroed in especially on the ways in which it fostered a profound and deep demoralization—that crippling inner state of fatalism, despair, and anger whose effects he had charted in The Philadelphia Negro years before. “The effect of caste on the moral integrity of the Negro race in America,” he wrote, had been “widely disastrous.” The caste system had created a crippling environment in which the Southern Negro had become “a caged human being,” one who “did not believe himself a man like other men.” Since there was “no chance for the Black man,” there was accordingly “no use in striving.” The effect of the new caste system was, in short, to “beat a beaten man” (1935/1998, pp. 701–702). Here success is so curtailed and frustrated that guiding wisdom fails. Why should we save? What good does it do to be upstanding, with self-respect? Who gains by thrift, or rises by education?
Du Bois acknowledged that these outcomes were “not universal,” or else “the Negro long since would have dwindled and died in crime and disease.” But they had combined to create an inner conflict that worked to “hold back the moral grit and organized effort which is the only hope of survival” (1935/1998, p. 702).
Added to the catastrophic impact of a harsh and stifling set of caste restrictions was, as I’ve mentioned, the toxic blend of harshness, exploitation, and neglect that characterized the Southern criminal justice system as the decimation of Reconstruction efforts proceeded. In both Black Reconstruction in America and The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois singles out the exploitative convict leasing system in the post-Reconstruction South is not merely a moral scandal but also an institution that amplified already numerous economic and social pressures toward crime: “In no part of the modern world has there been so open and conscious a traffic in crime for deliberate social degradation and private profit as in the South since slavery” (1935/1998, p. 698).
Du Bois insisted that the Negro “is no natural criminal,” and he claimed—perhaps exaggeratedly—that “crime of the vicious type” was “rare in the slave South.” But the coarseness and brutality of the convict leasing system, among other things, had greatly exacerbated the problem of violent crime. How much of this was, in Du Bois's view, the result of the broader destructive impact of caste society, and how much could be attributed to the specifically demoralizing aspects of the “trade in crime” via the lease system is a little murky in his discussion. But the overall result was that “the normal amount of crime which an ignorant working population would have evolved has been tremendously increased” in the post-reconstruction South. Young criminals and vagrants, Du Bois asserted, had been “deliberately multiplied” in the new caste order (1935/1998, pp. 698–699).
To these structural pressures toward serious crimes was added the systematic retreat of any commitment to protect vulnerable or victimized Blacks—an often overlooked aspect of the legacy of the post-Reconstruction caste system, and another way in which the return of White supremacy to the South left Black communities not only exploited but abandoned. If a Black man was attacked by a White man, Du Bois noted, “the police were called more likely to arrest the victim than the aggressor.” If he were attacked by another Negro, the Black man was most often “without redress or protection.” Black women, he said, were seen as “the legitimate prey of white men,” and “protection for them even against colored men was seldom furnished” (1935/1998, p. 699). In the newly sprung “ghettos” of “nearly all” Southern cities, “white vice and crime might find shelter and Negro delinquency go unpoliced” (1935/1998, p. 695). In this situation, the newly disenfranchised and dispossessed Southern Blacks were left basically on their own when it came to personal safety.
More generally, Du Bois believed, a pervasive climate of endemic violence born of race hatred and the shockingly widespread deployment of violence in the service of the overturn of Reconstruction had become the norm in the post-emancipation South. “Probably in no country in the civilized world,” he wrote, “did human life become so cheap.” That state of routinized violence “prevails among both white and black and characterizes the South even to our day.” In the midst of that widespread “spirit of lawlessness,” White men, Du Bois wrote, “became a law under themselves, and black men, so far as their aggressions were confined to their own people, need not fear intervention of white police.” Adding fuel to the fire, moreover, during that long internal “civil war” to overthrow the principle of racial democracy, nearly all men in the former slave South were armed (1935/1998, p. 700).
On the whole, Du Bois's assessment of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau and its allies during its relatively short time active during Reconstruction was positive. Perhaps even more importantly, even its failures pointed toward what could have been done and, hence, what now urgently needed doing. “The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense all a failure,” he wrote at the end of his groundbreaking study, but it was “a splendid failure” (1935/1998, p. 708). Like many observers at the time, Du Bois regarded the demise of Reconstruction as the loss of a magnificent opportunity—a devastatingly successful act of social theft that contributed mightily to an ongoing emergency in America. “The passing of a great human institution before its work is done,” he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation.… Despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf states, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth: in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are poor, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste…both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis.… And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not. (1903/1965, p. 239)
Conclusion
It can be argued that the most important cause of the persistence of America's racialized and outsized problem of violence is the repeated failure to act on Du Bois's prescient insights about the consequences of oppression when we have had the chance. “Failure,” indeed, is probably the wrong word here: It implies that those with the power to make the necessary changes tried, but were unable, for one reason another. But in fact this history is much darker. It is not so much a story of the failure of well-intentioned people but of the willful and often violent imposition of a social and economic order inimical to the vision of a supportive and inclusive American democracy.
Du Bois summed up the result simply and eloquently at the very end of Black Reconstruction in America: If the reconstruction of the southern states from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living today in a different world. (1935/1998, p. 708)
As I write, it seems troublingly clear that we’re now in the midst of another of those periods of fateful retrenchment—a period of growing opportunity increasingly subverted by the forces of social and racial regression. The Biden administration successfully launched some of the most creative and serious policies for pubic investment in historically neglected and dispossessed communities that America had seen since the New Deal, using impressive levels of federal funding wrangled out of hard-won bipartisan commitment. They also used executive power to make the first significant moves toward essential—if very limited—gun regulation, and invested unprecedented amounts of federal funds in community-based violence prevention.
What has happened more recently may not be on the scale of what happened to Reconstruction, and it takes different forms. But there are important and disturbing similarities. Most obvious is the widespread and highly conscious effort to reshape the racial balance in America—a concerted effort not only to dismantle most of what the last administration put into place, but to roll back many decades of social policy that was designed at least in part to redress enduring racial inequality. As in the past, that effort cuts across a broad swarth of American institutions.
As a recent news report puts it, public school systems across America, particularly those with large Black student populations, have become targets of federal attacks that are aimed at a “reversal of the federal government's traditional role on race and schools” (Goldstein, 2025). “Through executive orders, investigations, and threats to cut funding,” Dana Goldstein writes, “the government has put what was once a bipartisan movement to address the legacy of slavery and racism on the defensive.” Those attacks aim not only to eliminate school programs designed to support students of color and to reduce racial disparities in school success, but to wipe away all traces of America's racial past from public school curricula—in effect, solving America's unresolved racial problems by simply making them disappear from public view.
Such systematic attacks on programs and policies that smack of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are among the most visible aspects of the newly energized push to deepen racial inequality, but arguably even more consequential is the potential impact of the most significant and virulent assault on public employment we’ve ever seen—at least since the defeat of Reconstruction. In their recent article highlighting the “decimation” of pathways to stability and upward mobility for the Black middle class, Roberts and Rashad (2025) remind us that historically public sector employment, and especially federal employment, was one of the most reliable routes into the middle class for Black Americans who had never been able to fully or enduringly crack the racial barriers to good jobs in the private sector of the economy. They note that Black employment in federal agencies has always been disproportionate to their share of overall employment, and especially so for Black women. And it is especially prominent in some major federal agencies which, not coincidentally, are among those most impacted by recent political attacks undertaken in the spirit of “shrinking” government—including the Department of Education. The Black presence in federal employment has been even greater and more consequential for Black economic well-being in some Southern states—they are 44% of total federal employment in Georgia, 38% in Louisiana, and 35% in Mississippi (Roberts & Rashad, 2025, p. 3).
Like the dismantling of Reconstruction, the current demolition of federal resources and public investment to enhance the well-being of Black communities moves well beyond economic institutions and works its way across every realm of social investment and social policy—all in ways that can be reliably expected to undermine their capacity to thrive. As I write, the federal government has canceled more than $150 million in grants for community-based violence prevention programs in impacted communities (Flowers, 2025). It has proposed slashing resources for an already “woefully understaffed” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms by a third, which some argue would “effectively end” that agency's role as a serious regulator of gun sales (Thrush, 2025), while simultaneously rolling back federal enforcement of consent decrees designed to reduce racism and police violence in jurisdictions across the country (Fortin et al., 2025). All of this represents what is surely the most concentrated and pervasive attack on Black well-being since the fateful dismantling of Reconstruction. And it is an attack that targets with special ferocity some of the core institutions, policies, and agencies that have for years helped to stabilize and secure Black communities—taking a jackhammer to real opportunities for meaningful work, access to quality education and health care, and community safety.
It also directly targets Black political participation—one of the core moral and strategic goals of Reconstruction—through concerted methods to make it difficult for Black potential voters to cast ballots in many states across the country, and a long and disturbingly effective legal campaign resulting in what one recent editorial calls the “imminent death of the Voting Rights Act,” one of the signal accomplishments of the civil rights movement in the 1960s (Greenhouse, 2025).
And this is why Du Bois's insights are so critically important to us now. Ninety years after he published Black Reconstruction in America, we can see unfolding before our eyes a systematic backward regression that would appall—though probably not surprise—him if he were here to witness it. And he would not only be among the first to sound the alarm, but also to insist that the needed course of action is not hard to discern. Then as now, it's clear that only a systematic, dedicated, and well-resourced national effort will be enough to overcome the legacy of stubbornly enduring structures of Black subjugation that have existed since long before W. E. B. Du Bois ever began to study them. Then and now, it's distressingly clear that there are longstanding forces in America that stand ready to fight that kind of democratic and inclusive vision with every ounce of their being. Then as now, it's clear that the problem is not that we haven’t known what to do—but that those forces of obstruction and regression have won this battle more often than not.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.