W. E. B. Du Bois
TYPICALLY, while racists in the United States denounced DuBois for being a Communist, the Communist party in the U.S.A. and its flunkies , lackeys and toadies denounced DuBois for being " a Liberal Elitist." Even today, he goes without due credit for all he did in the battle against racism in the United States.
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| W. E. B. Du Bois | |
|---|---|
W. E. B. Du Bois in 1918
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| Born | William Edward Burghardt Du Bois February 23, 1868 Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | August 27, 1963 (aged 95) Accra, Ghana |
| Residence | Atlanta, Georgia; New York City |
| Fields | Civil rights, sociology, history |
| Institutions | Atlanta University, NAACP |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | |
| Influences | Alexander Crummell, William James |
| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | Nina Gomer Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois |
Signature |
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Du Bois rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the talented tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.
Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in their struggles against colonialism and imperialism. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread bigotry in the United States military.
Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era. He wrote the first scientific treatise in the field of sociology; and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains insightful essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.
Contents
Early life
William Du Bois's paternal great-grandfather was an ethnic French-American, James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, who fathered several children with slave mistresses.[5] One of James' mixed-race sons was Alexander, who traveled to Haiti, and fathered a son, Alfred, with a mistress there. Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother.[6] Alfred moved to the United States sometime before 1860, and married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic, Massachusetts.[6] Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after William was born.[7] William's mother worked to support her family (receiving some assistance from her brother and neighbors), until she experienced a stroke in the early 1880s. She died in 1885.[8]
Great Barrington's primarily European American community treated Du Bois generally well. He attended the local integrated public school and played with white schoolmates, though the racism he experienced even in this context would be one of the subjects of his later adult writing. Teachers encouraged his intellectual pursuits, and his rewarding experience with academic studies led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans.[9] When Du Bois decided to attend college, the congregation of his childhood church, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, donated money for his tuition.[10]
University education
In 1892, Du Bois received a fellowship from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen to attend the University of Berlin for graduate work.[17] While a student in Berlin, he traveled extensively throughout Europe. He came of age intellectually in the German capital, while studying with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists, including Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner and Heinrich von Treitschke.[18] After returning from Europe, Du Bois completed his graduate studies; in 1895 he was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.[19]
Wilberforce and University of Pennsylvania
"Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
... How does it feel to be a problem? ... One ever feels his
two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder ... He would not
Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and
Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an
American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without
having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face."
—Du Bois, "Strivings of the Negro People", 1897[20]
effect social change.[22] While at Wilberforce, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, one of his students, on May 12, 1896.[23]
After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in the summer of 1896.[24] He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, which formed the foundation for his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, published two years later while he was teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a black community.[25]
While attending the Negro Academy in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass' plea for black Americans to integrate into white society. He wrote: "we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland".[26] In the August 1897 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Du Bois published "Strivings of the Negro People", his first work aimed at the general public, in which he enlarged on his thesis that African Americans should embrace their African heritage.[27]
Atlanta University
In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University.[28] His first major academic accomplishment was the 1899 publication of The Philadelphia Negro, a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on the field work he did in 1896–1897. The work was a breakthrough in scholarship, because it was the first scientific sociological study in the U.S., and the first scientific study of African Americans.[29] In the study, Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass, anticipating the "talented tenth" term he would popularize in 1903 to describe society's elite class.[30] Du Bois's terminology reflected his opinion that the elite of a nation, black and white, was the critical portion of society that was responsible for culture and progress.[30] Du Bois's writings of this era were often dismissive of the underclass, employing characterizations such as "lazy" or "unreliable", but he – in contrast to other scholars – attributed many societal problems to the ravages of slavery.[31]Du Bois's output at Atlanta University was prodigious, in spite of a limited budget: He produced numerous social science papers and annually hosted the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems.[32] Du Bois also received grants from the U.S. government to prepare reports about African-American workforce and culture.[33] His students considered him to be a brilliant, but aloof and strict, teacher.[34]
Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise
Many African Americans opposed Washington's plan, including DuBois, Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar – representatives of the class of educated blacks that Du Bois would later call the "talented tenth".[38] Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise.[39]
Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred near Atlanta in 1899.[40] Hose was tortured, burned and hung by a mob of two thousand whites.[40] When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with a newspaper editor, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display.[40] The episode numbed Du Bois, and he resolved that "one could not be a calm cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved."[41] Du Bois realized that "the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth."[42]
In 1901, Du Bois wrote a review critical of Washington's book Up from Slavery,[43] which he later expanded and published to a wider audience as the essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" in The Souls of Black Folk.[44] One of the major contrasts between the two leaders was their approach to education: Washington felt that African-American schools should limit themselves to industrial education topics such as agricultural and mechanical skills.[45] However, Du Bois felt that black schools should also offer a liberal arts curriculum (including the classics, arts, and humanities), because liberal arts were required to develop a leadership elite.[46]
Niagara Movement
The Niagarites held a second conference in August 1906, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of John Brown's birth, at the site of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.[49] Reverdy Cassius Ransom spoke and addressed the fact that Washington's primary goal was to provide employment to blacks: "Today, two classes of Negroes, ... are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations; ... The other class believe that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place ... it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain."[51]
The Souls of Black Folk
Main article: The Souls of Black Folk
Racial violence
Two calamities in the autumn of 1906 shocked African Americans, and helped Du Bois's struggle for civil rights to prevail over Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. First, President Teddy Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 black soldiers because they were accused of crimes as a result of the Brownsville Affair. Many of the discharged soldiers had served for 20 years and were near retirement.[57] Second, in September, riots broke out in Atlanta, precipitated by unfounded allegations of black men assaulting white women, which compounded interracial tensions created by a job shortage and employers playing black workers against white workers.[58] Ten thousand whites rampaged through Atlanta, beating every black person they could find, resulting in over 25 deaths.[59] In the aftermath of the 1906 violence, Du Bois urged blacks to withdraw their support from the Republican party, because Republicans Roosevelt and William Howard Taft did not support blacks. Most African Americans had been loyal to the Republican party since the time of Abraham Lincoln.[60]Du Bois wrote the essay, "A Litany at Atlanta", which asserted that the riot demonstrated that the Atlanta Compromise was a failure because, despite upholding their end of the bargain, blacks had failed to receive legal justice.[61] The Compromise was no longer effective because, according to historian David Lewis, white patrician plantation owners that originally agreed to the compromise had been replaced by aggressive businessmen who were willing to pit blacks against whites.[61] These two calamities were watershed events for the African-American community, and marked the downfall of Washington's Atlanta Compromise and the ascendancy of Du Bois' vision of equal rights.[62]
Academic work
In addition to writing editorials, Du Bois continued to produce scholarly work at Atlanta University. In 1909, after five years of effort, he published a biography of John Brown. It contained many insights, but also contained some factual errors.[63] The work was strongly criticized by The Nation, which was owned by Oswald Villard, an author who was writing a competing biography of John Brown.[64] Du Bois' work was largely ignored by white scholars.[64] After he published a piece in Collier's magazine warning of the end of "white supremacy", he had difficulty getting pieces accepted by major periodicals; however, he continued to publish columns regularly in The Horizon magazine.[65]
"Once we were told: Be worthy and fit and the ways are open. Today
the avenues of advancement in the army, navy, and civil service, and
even in business and professional life, are continually closed to black
applicants of proven fitness, simply on the bald excuse of race and
color."
—Du Bois, Address at Fourth Niagara conference", 1908[66]
NAACP era
In May 1909, Du Bois attended the National Negro Conference in New York.[71] The meeting led to the creation of the National Negro Committee, chaired by Oswald Villard, and dedicated to campaigning for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities.[72] The following spring, in 1910, at the second National Negro Conference, the attendees created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[73] At Du Bois's suggestion, the word "colored", rather than "black", was used to include "dark skinned people everywhere."[74] Dozens of civil rights supporters, black and white, participated in the founding, but most executive officers were white, including Mary Ovington, Charles Edward Russell, William English Walling, and its first president Moorfield Storey.[75]The Crisis
An important Du Bois editorial from 1911 helped initiate a nationwide push to induce the Federal government to outlaw lynching. Du Bois, employing the sarcasm he frequently used, commented on a lynching in Pennsylvania: "The point is he was black. Blackness must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes ... It is therefore necessary, as every white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this crime of crimes. Of course if possible, the pretext should be great and overwhelming – some awful stunning crime, made even more horrible by the reporters' imagination. Failing this, mere murder, arson, barn burning or impudence may do."[81]
The Crisis carried editorials by Du Bois that supported the ideals of unionized labor but excoriated the racism demonstrated by its leaders, who systematically excluded blacks from membership.[82] Du Bois also supported the principles of the Socialist party (he was briefly a member of the party from 1910–12), but he denounced the racism demonstrated by some socialist leaders.[83] Frustrated by Republican president Taft's failure to address widespread lynching, Du Bois endorsed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential race, in exchange for Wilson's promise to support black causes.[84]
Throughout his writings, Du Bois supported women's rights,[85] but he found it difficult to publicly endorse the women's right-to-vote movement because leaders of the suffragism movement refused to support his fight against racial injustice.[86] A Crisis editorial from 1913 broached the taboo subject of interracial marriage: Although Du Bois generally expected persons to marry within their race, he viewed the problem as a women's rights issue, because laws prohibited white men from marrying black women. Du Bois wrote "[anti-miscegenation] laws leave the colored girls absolutely helpless for the lust of white men. It reduces colored women in the eyes of the law to the position of dogs. As low as the white girl falls, she can compel her seducer to marry her ... We must kill [anti-miscegenation laws] not because we are anxious to marry the white men's sisters, but because we are determined that white men will leave our sisters alone."[87]
During the years 1915 and 1916, some leaders of the NAACP – disturbed by financial losses at The Crisis, and worried about the inflammatory rhetoric of some of its essays – attempted to oust Du Bois from his editorial position. Du Bois and his supporters prevailed, and he continued in his role as editor.[88]
Historian and author
The 1910s were a productive time for Du Bois. In 1911 he attended the First Universal Races Congress in London[89] and he published his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece.[90] Two years later, Du Bois wrote, produced, and directed a pageant for the stage, The Star of Ethiopia.[91] In 1915, Du Bois published The Negro, a general history of black Africans, and the first of its kind in English.[92] The book rebutted claims of African inferiority, and would come to serve as the basis of much Afrocentric historiography in the 20th century.[92] The Negro predicted unity and solidarity for colored people around the world, and it influenced many who supported the Pan-African movement.[92]In 1915, Atlantic Monthly carried an essay by Du Bois, "The African Roots of the War", which consolidated Du Bois' ideas on capitalism and race.[93] In it, he argued that the scramble for Africa was at the root of World War I. He also anticipated later Communist doctrine, by suggesting that wealthy capitalists had pacified white workers by giving them just enough wealth to prevent them from revolting, and by threatening them with competition by the lower-cost labor of colored workers.[94]
Combating racism
The private sector was not the only source of racism: under President Wilson, the plight of African Americans in government jobs suffered. Many federal agencies adopted whites-only employment practices, the Army excluded blacks from officer ranks, and the immigration service prohibited the immigration of persons of African ancestry.[98] Du Bois wrote an editorial in 1914 deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts, and he supported William Monroe Trotter when Trotter brusquely confronted Wilson about Wilson's failure to fulfill his campaign promise of justice for blacks.[99]
The Crisis continued to wage a campaign against lynching. In 1915, it published an article with a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914.[100] The April 1916 edition covered the group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia.[95] Later in 1916, the "Waco Horror" article covered the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American.[95] The article broke new ground by utilizing undercover reporting to expose the conduct of local whites in Waco, Texas.[101]
The early 20th century was the era of the Great Migration of blacks from the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest and West. Du Bois wrote an editorial supporting the Great Migration, because he felt it would help blacks escape Southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society.[102]
Also in the 1910s the American eugenics movement was in its infancy, and many leading eugenicists were openly racist, defining Blacks as "a lower race". Du Bois opposed this view as an unscientific aberration, but still maintained the basic principle of eugenics: That different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the "stocks" of humanity.[103][104]
World War I
As the United States prepared to enter World War I in 1917, Du Bois' colleague in the NAACP, Joel Spingarn, established a camp to train African Americans to serve as officers in the United States military.[105] The camp was controversial, because some whites felt that blacks were not qualified to be officers, and some blacks felt that African Americans should not participate in what they considered a white man's war.[106] Du Bois supported Spingarn's training camp, but was disappointed when the Army forcibly retired one of its few black officers, Charles Young, on a pretense of ill health.[107] The Army agreed to create 1,000 officer positions for blacks, but insisted that 250 come from enlisted men, conditioned to taking orders from whites, rather than from independent-minded blacks that came from the camp.[108] Over 700,000 blacks enlisted on the first day of the draft, but were subject to discriminatory conditions which prompted vocal protests from Du Bois.[109]
The Houston Riot of 1917 disturbed Du Bois and was a major setback to efforts to permit African Americans to become military officers. The riot began after Houston police arrested and beat two black soldiers; in response, over 100 black soldiers took to the streets of Houston and killed 16 whites. A military court martial was held, and 19 of the soldiers were hung, and 67 others were imprisoned.[114] In spite of the Houston Riot, Du Bois and others successfully pressed the Army to accept the officers trained at Spingarn's camp, resulting in over 600 black officers joining the Army in October 1917.[115]
Federal officials, concerned about subversive viewpoints expressed by NAACP leaders, attempted to frighten the NAACP by threatening it with investigations.[116] Du Bois was not intimidated, and in 1918 he predicted that World War I would lead to an overthrow of the European colonial system and to the liberation of colored people world-wide – in China, in India, and especially in America.[116] NAACP chairman Joel Spingarn was enthusiastic about the war, and he persuaded Du Bois to consider an officer's commission in the Army, contingent on Du Bois writing an editorial repudiating his anti-war stance.[117] Du Bois accepted this bargain and wrote the pro-war "Close Ranks" editorial in June 1918[118] and soon thereafter he received a commission in the Army.[119] Many black leaders, who wanted to leverage the war to gain civil rights for African Americans, criticized Du Bois for his sudden reversal.[120] Southern officers in Du Bois' unit objected to his presence, and his commission was withdrawn.[121]
After the war
When the war ended, Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1919 to attend the first Pan-African Congress and to interview African-American soldiers for a planned book on their experiences in World War I.[122] He was trailed by U.S. agents who were searching for evidence of treasonous activities.[123] Du Bois discovered that the vast majority of black American soldiers were relegated to menial labor as stevedores and laborers.[124] Some units were armed, and one in particular, the 92nd Division (the Buffalo soldiers), engaged in combat.[125] Du Bois discovered widespread racism in the Army, and concluded that the Army command discouraged African Americans from joining the Army, discredited the accomplishments of black soldiers, and promoted bigotry.[126]
The most egregious episode during the Red Summer was a vicious attack on blacks in Elaine, Arkansas, in which nearly 200 blacks were murdered.[131] Reports coming out of the South blamed the blacks, alleging that they were conspiring to take over the government. Infuriated with the distortions, Du Bois published a letter in the New York World, claiming that the only crime the black sharecroppers had committed was daring to challenge their white landlords by hiring an attorney to investigate contractual irregularities.[132] Over 60 of the surviving blacks were arrested and tried for conspiracy, in the case known as Moore v. Dempsey.[133] Du Bois rallied blacks across America to raise funds for the legal defense, which, six years later, resulted in a Supreme Court victory authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[91] Although the victory had little immediate impact on justice for blacks in the South, it marked the first time the Federal government used the 14th amendment guarantee of due process to prevent states from shielding mob violence.[134]
Concerned that textbooks used by African-American children ignored black history and culture, Du Bois created a monthly children's magazine, The Brownies' Book. Initially published in 1920, it was aimed at black children, who Du Bois called "the children of the sun."[138]
Pan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey
Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1921 to attend the second Pan-African Congress.[139] The assembled black leaders from around the world issued the London Resolutions and established a Pan-African Association headquarters in Paris.[140] Under Du Bois's guidance, the resolutions insisted on racial equality, and that Africa be ruled by Africans (not, as in the 1919 congress, with the consent of Africans).[140] Du Bois restated the resolutions of the congress in his Manifesto To the League of Nations, which implored the newly formed League of Nations to address labor issues and to appoint Africans to key posts. The League took little action on the requests.[141]Another important African American leader of the 1920s was Marcus Garvey, promoter of the Back-to-Africa movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).[142] Garvey denounced Du Bois's efforts to achieve equality through integration, and instead endorsed racial separatism.[143] Du Bois initially supported the concept of Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping company that was intended to facilitate commerce within the African diaspora.[144] But Du Bois later became concerned that Garvey was threatening the NAACP's efforts, leading Du Bois to describe him as fraudulent and reckless.[145] Responding to Garvey's slogan "Africa for the Africans" slogan, Du Bois said that he supported that concept, but denounced Garvey's intention that Africa be ruled by African Americans.[146]
Du Bois wrote a series of articles in The Crisis between 1922 and 1924, attacking Garvey's movement, calling him the "most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world."[147] Du Bois and Garvey never made a serious attempt to collaborate, and their dispute was partly rooted in the desire of their respective organizations (NAACP and UNIA) to capture a larger portion of the available philanthropic funding.[148]
Harvard's decision to ban blacks from its dormitories in 1921 was decried by Du Bois as an instance of a broad effort in the U.S. to renew "the Anglo-Saxon cult; the worship of the Nordic totem, the disfranchisement of the Negro, Jews, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiate, and South Sea islander – the world rule of Nordic white through brute force."[149] When Du Bois sailed for Europe in 1923 for the third Pan-African Congress, the circulation of The Crisis had declined to 60,000 from its World War I high of 100,000, but it remained the preeminent periodical of the civil rights movement.[150] President Coolidge designated Du Bois an "Envoy Extraordinary" to Liberia[151] and – after the third congress concluded – Du Bois rode a German freighter from the Canary Islands to Africa, visiting Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal.[152]
Harlem Renaissance
Du Bois frequently promoted African-American artistic creativity in his writings, and when the Harlem Renaissance emerged in the mid-1920s, his article "A Negro Art Renaissance" celebrated the end of the long hiatus of blacks from creative endeavors.[153] His enthusiasm for the Harlem Renaissance waned as he came to believe that many whites visited Harlem for voyeurism, not for genuine appreciation of black art.[154] Du Bois insisted that artists recognize their moral responsibilities, writing that "a black artist is first of all a black artist."[155] He was also concerned that black artists were not using their art to promote black causes, saying "I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda."[156] By the end of 1926, he stopped employing The Crisis to support the arts.[157]Socialism
"And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor – all
men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked – who is good?
Not that men are ignorant – what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so
little of men."
—Du Bois, "Of Alexander Crummell", in The Souls of Black Folk, 1903[158]
Although Du Bois generally endorsed socialist principles, his politics were strictly pragmatic: In 1929, Du Bois endorsed Democrat Jimmy Walker for mayor of New York, rather than the socialist Norman Thomas, believing that Walker could do more immediate good for blacks, even though Thomas' platform was more consistent with Du Bois's views.[161] Throughout the 1920s, Du Bois and the NAACP shifted support back and forth between the Republican party and the Democratic party, induced by promises from the candidates to fight lynchings, improve working conditions, or support voting rights in the South; invariably, the candidates failed to deliver on their promises.[162]
A rivalry emerged in 1931 between the NAACP and the Communist party, when the Communist party responded quickly and effectively to support the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American youth arrested in 1931 in Alabama for rape.[163] Du Bois and the NAACP felt that the case would not be beneficial to their cause, so they chose to let the Communist party organize the defense efforts.[164]
Du Bois was impressed with the vast amount of publicity and funds the Communists devoted to the partially successful defense effort, and he came to suspect that the Communists were attempting to present their party to African Americans as a better solution than the NAACP.[165] Responding to criticisms of the NAACP from the Communist party, Du Bois wrote articles condemning the party, claiming that it unfairly attacked the NAACP, and that it failed to fully appreciate racism in the United States.[166] The Communist leaders, in turn, accused Du Bois of being a "class enemy", and claimed that the NAACP leadership was an isolated elite, disconnected from the working-class blacks they ostensibly fought for.[166]
Return to Atlanta
Du Bois did not have a good working relationship with Walter Francis White, president of the NAACP since 1931.[167] That conflict, combined with the financial stresses of the Great Depression, precipitated a power struggle over The Crisis.[168] Du Bois, concerned that his position as editor would be eliminated, resigned his job at The Crisis and accepted an academic position at Atlanta University in early 1933.[169] The rift with the NAACP grew larger in 1934 when Du Bois reversed his stance on segregation, stating that separate but equal was an acceptable goal for African Americans.[170] The NAACP leadership was stunned, and asked Du Bois to retract his statement, but he refused, and the dispute led to Du Bois's resignation from the NAACP.[171]After arriving at his new professorship in Atlanta, Du Bois wrote a series of articles generally supportive of Marxism. He was not a strong proponent of labor unions or the Communist party, but he felt that Marx's scientific explanation of society and the economy were useful for explaining the situation of African Americans in the United States.[172] Marx's atheism also struck a chord with Du Bois, who routinely criticized black churches for dulling blacks' sensitivity to racism.[173] In his 1933 writings, Du Bois embraced socialism, but asserted that "[c]olored labor has no common ground with white labor", a controversial position that was rooted in Du Bois's dislike of American labor unions, which had systematically excluded blacks for decades.[174] Du Bois did not support the Communist party in the U.S. and did not vote for their candidate in the 1932 presidential election, in spite of an African American on their ticket.[175]
Black Reconstruction in America
Main article: Black Reconstruction in America
Back in the world of academia, Du Bois was able to resume his study
of Reconstruction, the topic of the 1910 paper that he presented to the
American Historical Association.[176] In 1935, he published his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America.[177]
The book presented the thesis, in the words of the historian David
Levering Lewis, that "black people, suddenly admitted to citizenship in
an environment of feral hostility, displayed admirable volition and
intelligence as well as the indolence and ignorance inherent in three
centuries of bondage."[178] Du Bois documented how black people were central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction,
and also showed how they made alliances with white politicians. He
provided evidence to show that the coalition governments established
public education in the South, as well as many needed social service
programs. The book also demonstrated the ways in which black emancipation –
the crux of Reconstruction – promoted a radical restructuring of United
States society, as well as how and why the country failed to continue
support for civil rights for blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction.[179]The book's thesis ran counter to the orthodox interpretation of Reconstruction maintained by white historians, and the book was virtually ignored by mainstream historians until the 1960s.[180] Thereafter, however, it ignited a "revisionist" trend in the historiography of Reconstruction, which emphasized black people's search for freedom and the era's radical policy changes.[181][182] By the twenty-first century, Black Reconstruction was widely perceived as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography."[183]
In 1932, Du Bois was selected by several philanthropies – including the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the General Education Board – to be the managing editor for a proposed Encyclopedia of the Negro, a work Du Bois had been contemplating for 30 years.[184] After several years of planning and organizing, the philanthropies cancelled the project in 1938, because some board members believed that Du Bois was too biased to produce an objective encyclopedia.[185]
Trip around the world
Du Bois took a trip around the world in 1936, which included visits to Nazi Germany, China and Japan.[186] While in Germany, Du Bois remarked that he was treated with warmth and respect,[187] but on his return to the United States, he voiced his ambivalence about the Nazi regime.[188] He admired how the Nazis had improved the German economy, but he was horrified by their treatment of the Jewish people, which he described as "an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade."[189]Following the 1905 Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Du Bois became impressed by the growing strength of Imperial Japan. He saw the victory of Japan over Tsarist Russia as an example of colored peoples defeating white peoples.[190] A representative of Japan's "Negro Propaganda Operations" traveled to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, meeting with Du Bois and giving him a positive impression of Imperial Japan's racial policies. In 1936, the Japanese ambassador arranged a trip to Japan for Du Bois and a small group of academics.[191]
World War II
Du Bois opposed the U.S. intervention in World War II, particularly in the Pacific, because he believed that China and Japan were emerging from the clutches of white imperialists, and he felt that waging war against Japan was an opportunity for whites to reestablish their influence in Asia.[192] The government's plan for African Americans in the armed forces was a major blow to Du Bois: Blacks were limited to 5.8 percent of the force, and there were to be no African-American combat units – virtually the same restrictions as in World War I.[193] Blacks threatened to shift their support to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's opponent in the 1940 election, so Roosevelt appointed a few blacks to leadership posts in the military.[194] Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois's second autobiography, was published in 1940.[195] The title refers to Du Bois's hope that African Americans were passing out of the darkness of racism into an era of greater equality.[196] The work is part autobiography, part history, and part sociological treatise.[197] Du Bois described the book as "the autobiography of a concept of race ... elucidated and magnified and doubtless distorted in the thoughts and deeds which were mine ... Thus for all time my life is significant for all lives of men."[198]In 1943, at the age of 76, Du Bois's employment at Atlanta University was abruptly terminated by college president Rufus Clement.[199] Many scholars expressed outrage, prompting Atlanta University to provide Du Bois with a lifelong pension and the title of professor emeritus.[200] Arthur Spingarn remarked that Du Bois spent his time in Atlanta "battering his life out against ignorance, bigotry, intolerance and slothfulness, projecting ideas nobody but he understands, and raising hopes for change which may be comprehended in a hundred years."[201] Turning down job offers from Fisk and Howard, Du Bois re-joined the NAACP as director of the Department of Special Research. Surprising many NAACP leaders, Du Bois jumped into the job with vigor and determination.[202] During the ten years while Du Bois was away from the NAACP, its income had increased fourfold, and its membership had soared to 325,000 members.[203]
Later life
United Nations
Du Bois was a member of the three-person delegation from the NAACP that attended the 1945 conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established.[204] The NAACP delegation wanted the United Nations to endorse racial equality and to bring an end to the colonial era.[205] To push the United Nations in that direction, Du Bois drafted a proposal that pronounced "[t]he colonial system of government ... is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars."[205] The NAACP proposal received support from China, Russia and India, but it was virtually ignored by the other major powers, and the NAACP proposals were not included in the United Nations charter.[206]After the United Nations conference, Du Bois published Color and Democracy, a book that attacked colonial empires and, in the words of one reviewer, "contains enough dynamite to blow up the whole vicious system whereby we have comforted our white souls and lined the pockets of generations of free-booting capitalists."[207]
In late 1945, Du Bois attended the fifth, and final, Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, England.[208] The congress was the most productive of the five congresses, and there Du Bois met Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana who would later invite Du Bois to Africa.[208]
Du Bois helped to submit petitions to the UN concerning discrimination against African Americans. These culminated in the report and petition called "We Charge Genocide", submitted in 1951 with the Civil Rights Congress. "We Charge Genocide" accuses the US of systematically sanctioning murders and inflicting harm against African Americans and therefore committing genocide.[209]
Cold War
When the Cold War commenced in the mid-1940s, the NAACP distanced itself from Communists, lest its funding or reputation suffer.[210] The NAACP redoubled their efforts in 1947 after Life magazine published a piece by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. claiming that the NAACP was heavily influenced by Communists.[211] Ignoring the NAACP's desires, Du Bois continued to fraternize with communist sympathizers such as Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Shirley Graham (his future second wife).[212] Du Bois wrote "I am not a communist ... On the other hand, I ... believe ... that Karl Marx ... put his finger squarely upon our difficulties ...".[213] In 1946, Du Bois wrote articles giving his assessment of the Soviet Union; he did not embrace communism and he criticized its dictatorship.[211] However, he felt that capitalism was responsible for poverty and racism, and felt that socialism was an alternative that might ameliorate those problems.[211] The soviets explicitly rejected racial distinctions and class distinctions, leading Du Bois to conclude that the USSR was the "most hopeful country on earth."[214] Du Bois's association with prominent communists made him a liability for the NAACP, especially since the FBI was starting to aggressively investigate communist sympathizers; so – by mutual agreement – he resigned from the NAACP for the second time in late 1948.[215] After departing the NAACP, Du Bois started writing regularly for the leftist weekly newspaper the National Guardian, a relationship that would endure until 1961.[216]Peace activism
Du Bois was a lifelong anti-war activist, but his efforts became more pronounced after World War II.[217] In 1949, Du Bois spoke at the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in New York: "I tell you, people of America, the dark world is on the move! It wants and will have Freedom, Autonomy and Equality. It will not be diverted in these fundamental rights by dialectical splitting of political hairs ... Whites may, if they will, arm themselves for suicide. But the vast majority of the world's peoples will march on over them to freedom!"[218]In the spring of 1949, he spoke at World Congress of the Partisans of Peace in Paris, saying to the large crowd: "Leading this new colonial imperialism comes my own native land built by my father's toil and blood, the United States. The United States is a great nation; rich by grace of God and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens ... Drunk with power we are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us; and to a third World War which will ruin the world."[219] Du Bois affiliated himself with a leftist organization, the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions, and he traveled to Moscow as its representative to speak at the All-Soviet Peace Conference in late 1949.[220]
McCarthyism
The FBI began to compile a file on Du Bois in 1942,[224] but the most aggressive government attack against Du Bois occurred in the early 1950s, as a consequence of Du Bois's opposition to nuclear weapons. In 1950 Du Bois became chairman of the newly created Peace Information Center (PIC), which worked to publicize the Stockholm Peace Appeal in the United States.[225] The primary purpose of the appeal was to gather signatures on a petition, asking governments around the world to ban all nuclear weapons.[226] The U.S. Justice department alleged that the PIC was acting as an agent of a foreign state, and thus required the PIC to register with the federal government.[217] Du Bois and other PIC leaders refused, and they were indicted for failure to register.[227] After the indictment, some of Du Bois's associates distanced themselves from him, and the NAACP refused to issue a statement of support; but many labor figures and leftists – including Langston Hughes – supported Du Bois.[228] After a trial in 1951, with defense attorney Vito Marcantonio arguing the case, the case was dismissed.[229] Even though Du Bois was not convicted, the government confiscated Du Bois's passport and withheld it for eight years.[230]
Communism
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The U.S. government prevented Du Bois from attending the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia.[238] The conference was the culmination of 40 years of Du Bois's dreams – a meeting of 29 nations from Africa and Asia, many recently independent, representing most of the world's colored peoples.[238] The conference celebrated their independence, as the nations began to assert their power as non-aligned nations during the cold war.[238] In 1958, Du Bois regained his passport, and with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, he traveled around the world, visiting Russia and China.[239] In both countries he was celebrated and given guided tours of the best aspects of communism.[239] Du Bois was blind to the defects of his host nations – even though he toured China during the tragic Great Leap Forward – and he later wrote approvingly of the conditions in both countries.[240] He was 90 years old.
Du Bois became incensed in 1961 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1950 McCarran Act, a key piece of McCarthyism legislation which required communists to register with the government.[241] To demonstrate his outrage, he joined the Communist party in October 1961, at the age of 93.[241] Around that time, he wrote: "I believe in communism. I mean by communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part."[242]
Religion
Although Du Bois attended the New England Congregational church as a child, he abandoned organized religion while at Fisk college.[243] As an adult, he described himself as agnostic or a freethinker, and biographer David Lewis concluded that Du Bois was virtually an atheist.[244] When asked to lead public prayers, Du Bois would refuse.[245] In his autobiography, he wrote: "When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer ... I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. ... I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools."[246] Du Bois believed that churches in America were the most discriminatory of all institutions.[247] Du Bois occasionally acknowledged the beneficial role religion played in African-America life – as the "basic rock" which served as an anchor for African-American communities – but in general he disparaged African-American churches and clergy because he felt they did not support the goals of racial equality and they hindered the efforts of activists.[248] Although Du Bois was not personally religious, he infused his writings with religious symbology, and many of his contemporaries viewed him as a prophet.[249] His 1904 prose poem, "Credo", was written in the style of a religious creed and was widely read by the African-American community.[250]Death in Africa
While visiting Ghana in 1960, Du Bois spoke with its president about the creation of a new encyclopedia of the African diaspora, the Encyclopedia Africana.[251] In early 1961, Ghana notified Du Bois that they had appropriated funds to support the encyclopedia project, and they invited Du Bois to come to Ghana and manage the project there. In October 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to take up residence and commence work on the encyclopedia.[253] In early 1963, the United States refused to renew his passport, so he made the symbolic gesture of becoming a citizen of Ghana.[254] His health declined during the two years he was in Ghana, and he died on August 27, 1963, in the town of Accra at the age of 95.[255] Du Bois was buried in Accra near his home, which is now the Du Bois Memorial Centre.[256] A day after his death, at the March on Washington, speaker Roy Wilkins asked the hundreds of thousands of marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence.[257] The Civil Rights Act of 1964, embodying many of the reforms Du Bois had campaigned for his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.[258]
Personal life
Du Bois was organized and disciplined: His lifelong regimen was to rise at 7:15, work until 5, eat dinner and read a newspaper until 7, then read or socialize until he was in bed, invariably before 10.[259] He was a meticulous planner, and frequently mapped out his schedules and goals on large pieces of graph paper.[260] Many acquaintances found him to be distant and aloof, and he insisted on being addressed as "Dr. Du Bois".[261] Although he was not gregarious, he formed several close friendships with associates such as Charles Young, Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Hope and Mary Ovington.[262] His closest friend was Joel Spingarn – a white man – but Du Bois never accepted Spingarn's offer to be on a first name basis.[263] Du Bois was something of a dandy – he dressed formally, carried a walking stick, and walked with an air of confidence and dignity.[264] He was relatively short 5 feet 5.5 inches (166 cm) and always maintained a well-groomed mustache and goatee.[265] He was a good singer and enjoyed playing tennis.[266]Du Bois was married twice, first to Nina Gomer (m. 1896, d. 1950), with whom he had two children, a son Burghardt (who died as an infant) and a daughter Yolande, who married Countee Cullen. As a widower, he married Shirley Graham (m. 1951, d. 1977), an author, playwright, composer and activist. She brought her son David Graham to the marriage. David grew close to Du Bois and took his stepfather's name; he also worked for African-American causes.[267] The historian David Levering Lewis wrote that Du Bois engaged in several extramarital relationships.[268] But the historian Raymond Wolters cast doubt on this, based on the lack of corroboration from Du Bois's alleged lovers.[269]
Honors
- The NAACP awarded the Spingarn Medal to Du Bois in 1920.[270]
- Du Bois was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize by the USSR in 1959.[271]
- The site of the house where Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.[272]
- In 1992 the United States Postal Service honored Du Bois with his portrait on a postage stamp.[273] A second stamp of face value 32¢ was issued on 3 February 1998 as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.
- In 1994, the main library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was named after Du Bois.[274]
- The Du Bois center at Northern Arizona University is named in his honor.[275]
- A dormitory was named after Du Bois at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted field research for his sociological study "The Philadelphia Negro".[276]
- Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience was inspired by and dedicated to Du Bois by its editors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.[277]
- Humboldt University in Berlin hosts a series of lectures named in Du Bois's honor.[278]
- Scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Du Bois in his 2002 list of the 100 Greatest African Americans.[279]
- In 2005, Du Bois was honored with a medallion in The Extra Mile, Washington DC's memorial to important American volunteers.[280]
- Du Bois is honored with a feast day, August 3, on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church.[281]
- Du Bois was appointed Honorary Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.[282]
Selected works
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See also
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