"In the six years between 1935 and 1941, he (Dr. DuBois) produced the monumental seven hundred page volume on Black Reconstruction in America, and at the same time writing many articles and essays. Black Reconstruction was six years in writing but was thirty-three years in preparation. On its publication, one critic said: "It crowns the long, unselfish and brilliant career of Dr.DuBois. It is comparable in clarity, originality and importance to Beards' Rise of American Civilization. The New York Times said, "It is beyond question the most painstaking and thorough study ever made of the Negroes' part in Reconstruction;" and the New York Herald Tribune proclaimed it "a solid history of the period, an economic treatise, a philosophical discussion, a poem, a work of art all rolled into one."

To understand why his (DuBois') study of the Reconstruction was a monumental achievement, it is necessary to see it in context. White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro's role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high. The Reconstruction was a period in which black men had a small measure of freedom of action. If as white historians tell it, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton, evil and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings. One generation after another of Americans were assiduously taught these falsehoods and the collective mind of America became poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.

Dr. DuBois confronted this powerful structure of historical distortion and dismantled it. He virtually, before anyone else and more that anyone else, demolished the lies about Negroes in their most important and creative period of American history. The truths he revealed are not yet the property of all Americans but they have been recorded and arm us for our contemporary battles."