Today in History: Anna Julia Cooper Writes to W.E.B. Du Bois 12/31/1929

Sara Kugler, @sarakug December 31, 2012 The day before the new year of 1930, Anna Julia Cooper wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois in response to the newly published book The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, written by journalist Claude Bowers. Historian David Levering Lewis writes that The Tragic Era “congealed racist interpretations of Reconstruction in the popular mind as solidly as had D. W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of the Nation, fourteen years earlier.” Cooper and Du Bois were contemporaries and colleagues; they attended the 1900 Pan American Congress in London together and were both members of the American Negro Academy. On December 31st, 1929, Cooper wrote to Du Bois: “It seems to me that the Tragic Era should …

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