  In Black Reconstruction, no less than in “Of the Ruling of Men,” Du Bois characterizes democracy in economic as well as political terms; that is, as the legitimate transfer of political and economic power from the ruling classes to the working masses. Cornel West interprets Black Reconstruction as promoting a Deweyan notion of creative democracy (West, 1988).  Gooding-Williams (1991) disputes that interpretation, arguing that it obscures the connotations of class struggle that attach to Du Bois’s account of black workers’ efforts to reconstruct democracy. In Color and Democracy, which Du Bois published just more than a decade after Black Reconstruction, he writes that “[m]ore important than political democracy is industrial democracy; that is, the voice which the actual worker, whether his work be manual or mental, has in the organization and conduct of industry” (1946,  300).[38] 