Neoabolitionism (race relations)

Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term used in historiography to characterize historians of race relations motivated by the spirit of racial equality typified by the abolitionists who fought to abolish slavery in the mid-19th century. They write especially about African-American history, slavery in the United States, the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. As abolitionists had worked in the 19th century to end slavery and provide equal rights under the US Constitution to blacks, the new activists worked to enforce constitutional rights for all citizens and restore equality under the law for African Americans, including suffrage and civil rights. In the late 20th century some historians emphasized the worlds of African Americans in their own words, in their own communities, to recognize them as agents, not victims. Publishing in the mid-1960s and through the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to revise traditional accounts of slavery in the United States, reconstruction, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Some major historians began to apply the term "neoabolitionist" to such historians, and some of this group identified as such. Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era (United States) Many early 20th-century histories of the abolitionists and of the Reconstruction Era gave harsh assessments to the movement and the attempts by the federal government to force a transition in the South to a new social system. For instance, what was called the Dunning School, an influential group of white historians led by William Archibald Dunning at Columbia University, assessed Reconstruction as marred by African-American participation, saying that all the state legislatures were dominated by freedmen, that they were incompetent to govern; that they had been misled by northern carpetbaggers; and that these governments of the postwar decades were unusually corrupt. This was the view expressed in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and in Claude G. Bowers' best-selling The Tragic Era (1929).