What historians can bring to a discussion of society and social forces is a perspective on the deep structure of a political culture, and the complex relationship between personalities and ideas in motion with the social and economic forces that create the material foundations of social reality.
History is both an art and a science.
There are no permanent truths, only critical insights we may make along the way, which perhaps illuminate the contours of a particular society, the actual structure of political power, or the dynamics of social relations. In the context of black history, we gain some knowledge about the broad social forces and personalities that have defined the black sojourn in this country. Any discussion about the role of liberalism in the development of race relations in the United States must inevitably return to the demise of the period of Reconstruction, and the dawning of the era of Jim Crow segregation. In 1895, Booker T. Washington addressed a largely friendly crowd of white southerners at the Cotton States' International Exposition, in Atlanta, Georgia. Washington declared that Reconstruction had been a disaster, and that black southerners had no business exercising the electoral franchise.