Summary

Growing up in the 1870s and 1880s, W. E. B. Du Bois realized that "no matter what [he] and other young Blacks like him achieved in school and in life, they were not changing the minds of the discriminators" (264). In 1883, the US Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, marking the end of the Reconstruction Era. Around the same time, arguments in favor of racial segregation began to emerge more prominently. In addition, some argued that the end of slavery had created a post-racial society and blamed socioeconomic disparities between races on the inferior characters of Black people rather than on discriminatory policies. As Du Bois advanced to post-secondary education, he was influence by assimilationist writings such as George Washington Williams's "History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880." This book both...