Abolition Democracy.

BOOKS & the ARTS BY THE TIME HIS MAGNUM OPUS, BLACK RECONSTRUCTION, was published in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois was already a rara avis - a prominent Black activist-intellectual in the midst of Jim Crow. The defeat of Reconstruction and the twisted achievements of the "counterrevolution of 1876" directed the country away from "Abolition Democracy", Du Bois observed. That Du Bois didn't marks a missed opportunity: He could have performed an immense service if he had looked at Reconstruction through the lens of settler colonialism, as opposed to grouping the republic with the French Revolution or (perish the thought) the transformative Haitian Revolution. [Extracted from the article]