We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta Ta-Nehisi Coates

Notes from We Were Eight Years in Power

Introduction p. xiii

Regarding Good Negro Government p.xiii

In 1895 South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller appealed to the state’s constitutional convention:

“We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system.”

p.xiv Assessing Miller’s rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation…This was simply cover for the convention’s true aim – the restoration of a despotic white supremacy. “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government,” wrote Du Bois, “it was good Negro government.”

p.xv The central thread of this book is eight articles written during the eight years of the first black presidency – a period of Good Negro Government.

p. xvii Before each of these essays there is a kind of extended blog post, all eight of them (the articles ) were originally published in The Atlantic.

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