Some historians have described Reconstruction as a “splendid failure.” Why do you think this is so and is it a completely fair description?

African-American sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, said:

The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense all a failure, but a splendid failure.

This point of view was quite radical for its period. Earlier historians had argued that the freed slaves were still oppressed and economically disadvantaged after Reconstruction. Much of the published research on the period emphasized the brutality of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, tensions between poor white sharecroppers and newly freed slaves, and the ways in which whites continued to oppress African Americans.
Du Bois, though, emphasizes more positive elements, such as the way in which black people turned out to vote and elected Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi and Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina to Congress in 1870. He emphasizes the successes as well as the failures of Reconstruction.
Although Reconstruction was obviously flawed, and racial prejudice, oppression, and inequality remain part of United States society even in the twenty-first century, Du Bois is correct in pointing out that it involved an effort to achieve massive social change in a very short period, and if it failed to reach its ambitious ideals, it was still an important step in righting the injustices of slavery.