In 1935, in the midst of the global depression, W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America. The purpose of the book was to challenge the dominant narrative on the failures of the post-Civil War reconstruction in the American South. But the book was concerned with a failure on a larger scale – of democracy in America. At an even larger scale, the arguments of the book foreshadowed the challenges for the not-yet-born democracies in the still colonized peripheries. For Du Bois, the end of the Civil War and the initial years of the Reconstruction offered a singular chance for the realization of democracy in America. The first step towards this was franchise for the formerly enslaved (male) black workers. The next step, Du Bois argued, had to be a proper redistribution of land to those workers. After all, he noted, ‘their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified’. Ownership of some property that ensured their subsistence was the only thing that could prevent the formerly enslaved from being forced back into a relationship of dependence on and subservience to the very plantations they had been emancipated from. It was not only just, but also necessary. Universal franchise could not survive, Du Bois wrote, ‘without personal freedom, land, and education’. Thus arose the demand for 40 acres of land for emancipated black workers.