The book challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, which contended that the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans.

Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction and framed the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.

[2] He wrote a more extensive essay on the topic entitled "Reconstruction and Its Benefits", which was first delivered to the American Historical Association in December 1909 in New York City.

After the publication of Claude Bowers' The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln, which promoted the Dunning school view, in 1929, Anna Julia Cooper wrote to Du Bois and asked him to write a response.

These groups often used terror to repress black organization and suffrage, frightened by the immense power that 4 million voters would have on the shape of the future.

Du Bois' extensive use of data and primary source material on the postwar political economy of the former Confederate States is notable, as is the literary style of this 750-page essay.

[7] He identifies this as a crucial turning point in the war, and an important cause in several outcomes: economic crisis in the Confederacy, a supply of laborers and soldiers for the Union Army, and a signal that countered slaveholder propaganda that slaves were satisfied with their conditions.

[18] However, the work was largely ignored by historians upon publication, when the views of the Dunning School associated with Columbia University prevailed in published histories of Reconstruction.

Du Bois thought that certain historians were maintaining the "southern white fairytale"[20] instead of accurately chronicling the events and key figures of Reconstruction.

This work emphasized black people's agency in their search for freedom and the era's radical policy changes that began to provide for general welfare, rather than the interests of the wealthy planter class.

[23] By the early twenty-first century, Du Bois' Black Reconstruction was widely perceived as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography.