A lifelong struggle with elite vanguardism.
Du Bois was responsible for so many key insights in so many fields it’s difficult to choose any one of his interventions as the most important. But if you forced to pick one defining intellectual legacy, a strong argument could be made for his revolutionary (in various senses) interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In the early 20th century, white historians of the Dunning School (like the execrable Woodrow Wilson) interpreted the Civil War and its aftermath as a failed experiment in multiracial democracy. According to the Dunning School, the North freed Black people out of an excess of nobility during the war.
After the war, in the Reconstruction period, Black people were enfranchised and were able to participate in voting and government as never before. The Dunning school argued that this participation was a disaster, and that multi-racial Reconstruction governments were hopelessly corrupt. In this interpretation, the KKK white surpremacists were a group of civic-minded heroes who used extra-judicial violence to overthrow unjust regimes and restore good (white) governance to all (white) people. (This narrative was the inspiration for the infamous film Birth of a Nation.)
In his groundbreaking 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois completely upended this argument. With meticulous scholarship, he showed that Reconstruction governments were not corrupt, but instead made important efforts to advance public health and public education initiatives which benefited both newly freed Black people and poor whites. The Reconstruction governments collapsed not because of their own failures, but because of sustained racist violence—and because most white working class Southerners chose racist solidarity over class interests.
