DU BOIS

W.E.B. DU BOIS:

I. INTRODUCTION

W.E.B. Du Bois had been born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He was an only child, raised by his mother Mary Burghardt. His grandfather, Alexander Du Bois, was the son of a French white planter (James Du Bois) in the Bahamas and a slave woman. Du Bois knew very little of his absentee father, Alfred Du Bois, who appears to have been a bigamist. The reality was, that for all intents and purposes, Du Bois was raised in a single parent household. It is critical to note that Du Bois was born in the North, in New England. He was a Yankee. Until 1900, 90% of African Americans still lived in the South. Du Bois's critics mocked him because he was so light. In time, Du Bois became famous as a critic and intellectual and philosophical opponent of Booker T. Washington. From 1903 until his death in 1963, Du Bois was a militant opponent of racial segregation that was required by law. Something required by law is called de jure, as opposed to informal custom or tradition, which is called de facto. Du Bois was an outspoken champion of the cause of equality for black people, and is one of the fathers and founders of the civil rights movement. He is a forerunner to later figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who was the first African American to serve on the US Supreme Court in 1967, and Martin Luther King. Du Bois was also one of the greatest intellectuals that Afro-America has ever produced.

II. CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENT

Du Bois grew up in an environment in New England where there were only three or four black families in the entire town. He attended high school from 1880-1884. He was the only black student in his class in school (he was the one African American in a class of thirteen students). From the very beginning, all his life, he was exceptional. Early on, he became accustomed to being "the only one." And as the only one, he felt that he became the representative or spokesperson for the entire race or ethnic group. Du Bois never learned an internalized sense of inferiority. He believed that each person should strive for excellence, and to be the best that they can be. He didn't feel that he was disqualified from competing or excelling just because he was black. He thought merit and achievement were supposed to be color-blind. Du Bois worked for a year as a timekeeper for a contractor, and in 1885 his mother died. Du Bois was only seventeen.

III. HIS EDUCATION: FISK

Because he was so bright, and indeed brilliant, liberal white patrons were impressed by him and desired to help him. Some of the Caucasians who helped him were Congregationalists. The term Congregationalists is used to refer to the people who were once called Puritans. The Puritans are Calvinists. Today were just call them Congregationalists. As David Levering Lewis indicates on p. 55, four white Congregational churches raised money to send him to college. The tuition and board was $100 a year, and each church pledged $25 a year for four years to send Du Bois to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Fisk was a Congregational college for Negroes, and we must remember that white liberals and churches put up much of the money that was used to create the historically black colleges after the Civil War. The freed slaves certainly didn't have any money to acquire and build colleges. Wilberforce College, in Xenia, Ohio, was built by the AME Church, and is an example of a college built by a black religious denomination.

Du Bois attended Fisk from 1885-1888. Fisk offered a liberal arts education, and Du Bois studied Germasn, Greek, Latin, philosophy, ethics, chemistry and physics. He graduated from Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. His experience at Fisk was the very first time he was exposed to an all or mostly black environment. Black people had been a mystery to Du Bois, but now he discovered these "vibrant people." In Tennessee, du Bois for the first time heard the Negro spirituals and folk songs. However the black or African American students at Fisk were from the African American elite. Their fathers were not sharecroppers or farmers, and the ones who did come from farming backgrounds had fathers who owned more than 100 acres. Instead, the fathers of the students at Fisk were preachers, barbers, undertakers, caterers, or the sole African American doctor or pharmacist in a small town (p. 61).

Although Fisk was a college FOR African Americans, almost all of the faculty was Caucasian. The president of Fisk at that time was a former abolitionist, and a Congregationalist, named Erasmus Milo Cravath. Of the 15 faculty members, 14 were Caucasian.

During the summers Du Bois taught at local schools in the small town of Alexandria, where he saw firsthand the misery and poverty of the sharecroppers and the poor. This experience helped to shape his realization that African American people were oppressed by segregation and white supremacy. What we call racism, by which people mean white racism, is white supremacy. This is the doctrine that European people or people of European descent are superior by virtue of the color of their skin. And African people, or black people, are intellectually inferior by virtue of their color and ancestry and genetics. Furthermore, the ideology of white supremacy historically has taught that white people have a God given right to rule over other people, even when Caucasians are in the minority: And Caucasians have a God-given right to run and control everything and exercise power; And a God-given right to take whatever they want from other people, because they can do no wrong. I prefer the term white supremacy to the term racism because white supremacy is clear as to who is the perpetrator and who is the victim, or who is the abuser and who is being abuse or being subjected to abuse.

The experience in the South also shaped Du Bois's commitment to the cause of the collective uplift of African American people. Du Bois saw that the African American masses were being exploited, taken advantage of, and abused.

IV. HARVARD

Du Bois aspired to attend Harvard, and applied for a scholarship and was accepted. He entered Harvard as a junior, in 1888. But his Caucasian classmates were at best civil. When he applied to the Glee Club, he was rejected. Nathaniel Shaler, professor of geology, expelled a Caucasian Southerner from his class when the student objected to having to sit next to Willie Du Bois (p. 80). Some Caucasian students were hostile. Others were civil but distant. Nevertheless Du Bois felt the rejection, and this rejection by the white world tended to push him toward the African American community. Du Bois rented a room from an African American woman in Cambridge rather than live in the Harvard dorms where he knew he was not wanted and his life would be hell. Du Bois received his B.A. from Harvard in 1890, and his M.A. in 1891 and went on to pursue his Ph.D in history. He would receive the Ph.D. in 1895, and his dissertation was entitled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Du Bois was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. While at Harvard there were only a few African Americans. One was Clement Morgan. In 1891 William Monroe Trotter entered Harvard. Du Bois was never entirely comfortable with his Caucasian classmates, in large part because of the snobbery and elitism of the rich, and their class pretensions. Du Bois was also only 5'6, at a time when the average height for men was 5'8''. A short man of Du Bois's towering intellect found the snobbery and condescending attitude of people who though that they were superior simply because of the color of their skin to be insufferable.

While enrolled at Harvard, Du Bois applied to the Slater fund for the Education of Negroes. He sought a scholarship that would allow him to study abroad in Europe. From fall 1892 to 1894 he studied abroad at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Germany. Du Bois was exposed to the ideas of German thinkers such as Johann Herder, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. They argued that there were differences between the races, with each making a separate but equal contribution to human development. Du Bois learned that history is not just the story of individuals, but of groups, as in ethnic groups and racial groups. Du Bois was one of the most brilliant minds of his time, and one of the best educated men in all of America, white or black. Du Bois married Nina Gomer in 1896. He was a researcher ("investigator") at the University of Pennsylvania, briefly, in 1896, and published The Phila. Negro in 1899. He was a professor of economics and history at Atlanta U. from 1897-1910. Atlanta University was established by the Congregationalists, but it did have an African American president named John Hope.

V. DU BOIS IN THE SOUTH, 1897-1910

In the South Du Bois encountered three horrible conditions; de jure segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching.

By 1897, when Du Bois went to Atlanta, the Supreme Court had ruled that states and localities can segregate people on the basis of race in places of public accommodation. So long as facilities are provided to both races, that is equal, and it is not discrimination; and it does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment which says that no state can deny any person the equal protection of the law. So long as both races have a facility, that is equal. Schools, trains, streetcars, waiting rooms, public hospitals, restrooms, water fountains, telephone booths, textbooks, theaters, almost everything that you can imagine were segregated.

Furthermore, by 1890 the Southern states were beginning to disenfranchise voters. The literacy test and poll tax, or voting tax, were used. More than 90% of African American men who might have been eligible to vote were denied the exercise of the theoretical right to vote because the registrar said they were illiterate and could not pass the literacy test; or they had not paid their poll tax. The double standard running through all of this, however, was that whites who were illiterate could be permitted to vote despite their inability to pass the literacy test if their father or grandfather had been eligible to vote before January 1867, which was before African Americans had been permitted to vote in the South. This loophole was called the grandfather clause.

Even worse, a reign of terror called lynching descended upon the South in the 1880s and 1890s. Between 1880 and 1930 more than 3,000 African Americans were lynched. This is to say that Caucasians thought an African American person had done something, or had committed some offense. There was a suspicion. And a group of people, or a mob, seized the person. No trial took place. In some cases no charges had even been filed. But the accused person was killed, usually by hanging. In some cases people were tortured, mutilated, castrated, burned alive. These atrocities--these crimes against humanity-- were often mass public spectacles, almost a sick form of entertainment. In some cases the newspapers would advertise days in advance, setting a time and location, inviting everyone to come and watch. Hundreds and thousands of people would attend. People took photographs and sent postcards. Some psychotic people cut of fingers, ears, penises** and other body parts as trophies to be preserved. Men brought their wives and children to see these events. Often the execution would take place at noon, and the crowd would eat lunch afterward. In the 1880s, almost 200 African Americans were lynched every year. The figure was almost as high in the 1890s. In the early 1900s the number declined into the double digits. In 1899 a poor African American man named Sam Hose was lynched near Atlanta. David Levering Lewis describes this on p. 226. Hose was accused of having shot and killed a Caucasian neighbor in a dispute over a debt. Sam Hose was tortured, and burned. In the horrific phrase of the time, Sam Hose was "barbecued". People attacked his body to get body parts, and someone cut off his knuckles. The knuckles were placed on display in the store of a Caucasian shopowner.** There were even AA women who were lynched. In the case of Martha Turner, who was pregnant, the fetus was cut out of the woman's belly and stomped to death. In 1906 a terrible race riot erupted in Atlanta, GA, and African Americans were attacked all over the city. Du Bois got his gun and sat outside his house, determined to defend his home. Terrorism is not new. African Americans lived with domestic racial terrorism and the threat of terrorism for decades, even AFTER the end of slavery. Lynching was the face of terrorism from 1880 to the 1950s.

VI. RACIAL PRIVILEGE

The lynching of Sam Hose in 1899 revealed to Du Bois that white supremacy was rabid, and pathological. It was a sickness, a form of psychosis. And the white supremacists did not segregate only those African Americans who were poor or who were sharecroppers or blue-collar workers. The white supremacists did not distinguish between the African Americans who were poor and illiterate on the one hand, and those who were intelligent or educated or white collar professionals on the other hand. To the white supremacists a brown or black or yellow face was still a nigger, and one's degrees or accomplishments or profession made no difference at all. Du Bois had imagined that the disability or stigma or color, or race, could be overcome by merit or achievement. It could be overcome by hard work, and intelligence, and talent, and ability. He now discovered that merit and achievement made absolutely no difference at all. The only thing that mattered was color, or so-called race. To be qualified one had to be white. To be allowed full participation in this society, one had to be white and one had to be male. And if you were not white, then you were not qualified no matter how qualified you were. Status was not based on achievement or accomplishment. It was not earned. In fact, it was a system of hereditary privilege based on color. It was a form of UNEARNED PRIVILEGE. It could not BE earned. Status was permanent, or immutable-it could not be changed. Whites were superior, even if they were retarded, and blacks were inferior, no matter how smart or capable or anything else. This was a system of racial CASTE. For a man of Du Bois's great intellect and ability, this was a bitter lesson. He saw that the idea of American merit, on which he had built his whole life, was a myth. And a person of Du Bois's great talent was outraged. He felt that the American proclamations about equality were a corrupt lie, just so much propaganda that Americans did not practice. And while the North did not always impose segregation by law, it permitted it and tolerated it, especially by the owners of private restaurants, hotels, theaters, etc. The North was guilty too.

If Du Bois had been an ignorant, illiterate, sharecropper, he might have been able to understand his exclusion. But HE had a Ph.D. from Harvard. HE had studied in Germany. HE was a college professor. He could not see why HE should be excluded, and why HE should be treated the same as people who happened to be the same color as he was, but who had not earned and accomplished what HE had earned and accomplished. This elite indignation made Du Bois an outspoken critic of segregation and the status quo that tolerated it. He fought against it so passionately because he was a victim of it too. If an exception had been made for him, maybe he would have been able to make peace with segregation. But white supremacy made no such exceptions. This is what drove Du Bois to become a militant, radical opponent of de jure segregation.

VII. CONTRAST FIGURE TO BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.

In contrast to Du Bois, Booker T. Washington had been born in slavery in 1856. He advocated vocational education for black people, at a time when the masses of black people were sharecroppers. That is to say, they were farm laborers who worked on the plantations of white landowners in the South. But the 3/4ths of black people who were sharecroppers in the South did not own the land on which they worked. And they were trapped in a never ending cycle of debt and poverty. Washington believed that jobs such as carpenters and masons were best for black people. Work with one's hands, in a skilled trade, was best for black people. He ridiculed the idea of a college education for black people, and mocked college-educated blacks who could speak French and Latin and conjugate a verb, but could not find a job to put a roof over their heads. Washington believed that black people should even submit to segregation, for at least a generation. He believed that you had to crawl before you could walk. He also believed that black businessmen would become the leadership class, as black capitalists and owners of property. He imagined that black businessmen would earn the respect of white Southerners. The historical record shows that more often, in the South, successful African American farmers and businessmen had their property vandalized and destroyed by the KKK, or burned down. Successful blacks in the South who were prospering became objects of jealousy and envy and resentment by poor Southern whites, rather than people who were respected or admired. In the culture of the South, upward mobility and economic opportunity had a sign written across it. It said "for whites only." Booker T. Washington was living in a make-believe world of illusion and self-deception. And the African American who publicly disagreed with Washington was W.E.B. Du Bois.

VIII. APOSTLE OF EQUAL RIGHTS

In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois publicly condemned the views of Washington in his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois was a militant agitator. He was an advocate of full, immediate civil, political, and social equality for black people. He absolutely denounced compulsory, state-sponsored Jim Crow segregation. He denounced the use of literacy tests and poll taxes to deny blacks in the South the exercise of their constitutional right to vote. Restricting or denying the right to vote is called disenfranchisement. He attacked the doctrine of white superiority and white supremacy on every occasion, no matter in what shape it might come. Du Bois argued that black people were American citizens, who had first arrived in 1619, and had lived in America for nearly 300 years, and had the same rights as Caucasian Americans. If Euro-Americans could sit anywhere they wanted to on the train, then Afro-Americans should have exactly the same right as long as they could afford the fare. If a restaurant served the public, black people were as much a part of the public as white people. If a theatre served the public, African American people should be able to sit anywhere in the theatre they wanted to sit, and not be confined to the balcony. If Caucasian men could vote, regardless of whether they were illiterate or not, African American men should be able to vote too. If college was good enough for Caucasian people, it should be good enough for African American people too. Du Bois absolutely rejected the idea that white people had some kind of monopoly on brains and intelligence, and black people had a monopoly on ignorance and mediocrity and stupidity. If Booker T. Washington was a gradualist who believed that one day our grandchildren might aspire to go to college, and if Washington was a man who believed you had to crawl before you could walk, Du Bois was a man who wanted to fly-- NOW. (repeat) Figuratively, he was a man who even dreamed of going onto the space shuttle. Du Bois was light years ahead of his time. Perhaps 100 years ahead of his time

In 1905 Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter and a number of other African American intellectuals formed the Niagara Movement, to advocate on behalf of equal treatment for African Americans. It was called the Niagara Movement because they met at Niagara Falls, and actually met in Canada because of segregation at the American hotels on the American side of the falls. However there were personality clashes and ego problems, and the Niagara Movement was ubale to make much headway.

IX. THE TALENTED TENTH

Du Bois also demanded the opportunity for a liberal arts college education for African Americans. Du Bois' ideal at this time was the Talented Tenth. The popular German theory was that one-tenth of any ethnic or racial group is exceptionally talented. They are the leadership class. Du Bois felt that the talented one-tenth of African Americans must be college-educated, so that they would be prepared and equipped to play their role as the leadership class in the African American community. But this also meant an ideal of service. For Du Bois the larger purpose of education was for the talented tenth to uplift the rest of the community, not merely a selfish pursuit of individual aggrandizement. Aggrandizement is the attitude "me for me: I got mine, now you get yours". Du Bois realized that the masses of Southern blacks were poor, illiterate sharecroppers who would never go to college. But did this mean that the only proper education for ALL black people in 1903 was vocational or industrial education? Did this mean that in 1903 NO blacks should be allowed the opportunity to achieve a college education, or become a lawyer or doctor? Du Bois wanted a college education for all who were smart enough to handle it, regardless of race. He did not think that race ought to disqualify a person from access to a college education. Du Bois articulated the ambitions of the white collar, professional, black middle class, or those persons aspiring to middle class status. In contrast, Washington was the voice of the masses of working-class black people, the average person who knew that he was never going to go to college, but who just wanted the same chance to make some money that white people had to make some money; and the same chance to have a decent life as white people had.

Du Bois asked, who helped the poor Irish people to advance? The Irish who became wealthy helped the other Irish by hiring them or helping them to get a job in the company or on the docks. The Jews who were doing well helped the ones who were arriving as new immigrants. His point was that it is the members of an ethnic group who are doing well who have the responsibility to help the members of the ethnic group who are struggling. That is what ethnic groups do. That is what a leadership class does. He insisted that the college-educated black middle class had to do the same thing for poor African Americans.

X. ENVIRONMENT, NOT BIOLOGY OR INBORN INFERIORITY

Pseudo-scientists at the end of the nineteenth century believed that different races possessed different degrees of intelligence, based on the size of their brains. Many Europeans believed that the Aryan race or various European groups were the most intelligent, based on blood or biology or evolution or genes. And the Africans were a kind of evolutionary missing link between humans and apes. They believed that blacks were inferior because of their biology. This inferiority was inborn and genetic. It was given in nature. In 1844 Josiah Nott had even argued that God had had a different creation for black people than the creation that Genesis describes in the Bible when He created Adam and Eve, whom Nott assumed to have been white. In the 1850s and 1860s Louis Agassiz argued that mixed or hybrid races become degenerate and infertile and die out. In 1896 Frederick Hoffman wrote Race Traits and the Tendencies of the American Negro. He believed mulattos to be so retarded and backward that they would eventually die out and become instinct.

Du Bois fundamentally disagreed with theories of biological determinism. Such theories argued for the superiority of one race on the basis of biology or genetics, and the inferiority of some other group on the basis of biology or genetics. Instead, Du Bois presented an argument based partly on environment and history. It was true, he said, that in 1890, in the South, 75% of blacks over the age of 20 could not write. And half over the age of 14 could not write. But why could they not write, he asked? He said, during slavery it was a crime to teach a slave to read or write. Slaves found reading were whipped and punished. And Du Bois said that the white South had kept the slave in a position of enforced ignorance.It had done everything in its power to keep him ignorant and illiterate and deny him access to education and then pointed to his illiteracy as proof of his innate, inborn inferiority. Du Bois agreed that there was degradation and depravity in the black ghettoes and in the rural areas, and too many children were born out-of-wedlock to unmarried mothers. He agreed; yes, some black people are degraded. But he asked, "By God, how did they get that way?" And he said to white America, they are degraded because you degraded them. He asked rhetorically, how can you abuse and exploit and enslave and segregate and degrade a people for 300 years, and expect them not to be degraded? He said, to white America, yes, some black people are degraded because you made them that way. He placed the blame for black ignorance and family disruption on the history of slavery, and the continuing conditions of racism. He blamed the social environment of discrimination, not inborn biology or genetics. Du Bois believed that if the social and political environment in which black people lived changed for the better, then black people could achieve just as much as whites and be just as intelligent as whites. But one could not erase the consequences of 300 years of oppression in a day or even a generation. And if the ghetto is a toxic environment, how can we expect people to come out of that environment not to be damaged by it? (not biological or chemically toxic, but socially toxic in the sense of crime and instability and lack of opportunity; deprived and disadvantaged)

XI. A FOUNDER OF THE NAACP

In 1906 there was a terrible race riot in Atlanta, in which white mobs attacked blacks and lynched them. In 1908 there was a race riot in Springfield, Illinois, the home town of Abraham Lincoln. Whites attacked blacks and lynched them, and burned the homes and businesses of blacks, because of a false report that a black man had raped a white woman. The Atlanta race riot surprised no one. But Northern white liberals were shocked and embarrassed to learn that racist white supremacist violence would occur in the North. White liberals believed it was time to revive the spirit of the abolitionists, who had opposed slavery and prejudice before the Civil war. In 1909 Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of the great white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, became the moving force behind the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. This word Colored meant all people of color, not just blacks. Another founder of the NAACP was the Jewish philanthropist Joel Spingarn. He was the founder of a publishing company called Harcourt, Brace (1914), and in 1913 Spingarn became chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP. Spingarn was an Austrian-born Jew. From day-one, the NAACP began as a biracial or interracial organization, not a black organization, In 1909 Du Bois joined with 52 other prominent liberal professionals, most of whom were white, to form the NAACP. In any event, back in 1910, Du Bois was the only African American elected to the executive committee of the NAACP (The executive committee initially was a committee of thirty people, see Lewis, p. 405-406). Once again, he found himself in an elite circle, as "the only one." But although he was exceptional, and the only one, he raised his voice endlessly on behalf of his people, on behalf of the illiterate, inarticulate, dispossessed masses. But in 1914 the annual budget of the NAACP was $11,000, and half of that came from 18 white philanthropists.

XII. EDITOR OF THE CRISIS

Du Bois is most famous as the editor of the monthly magazine of the NAACP. It was called The Crisis. In 1910 he moved from Atlanta to New York City, and he was the editor of The Crisis from 1910-1934. Du Bois achieved his greatest fame as a columnist, writer, editor. Du Bois was the great militant champion of desegregation and equality of rights for African-Americans. He was an activist scholar, and a cosmopolitan man who could speak French and German. In time he also became a Socialist. Du Bois was an elite intellectual who advocated on behalf of the masses, though he himself was not one of the masses. He was a man who fought with words and ideas. He appealed to public opinion, and sought to shape and mobilize public opinion on behalf of justice. He was not a rabble rouser, nor a politician, nor an elected official, nor did he lead his own organization. The crisis belonged to the NAACP. He was merely the editor, and a paid employee. From the safety of New York City, he could denounce Southern segregation and disenfranchisement and lynching and violence. Every month he hurled down his editorial thunderbolts, condemning the hypocrisy of American racism in a country that called itself free and equal. He criticized a country that called itself a democracy, but practiced segregation, and discriminated against its own citizens. I should add that had Du Bois continued to live in the South, he would have been fired from his job at Atlanta University and probably would have been killed by the KKK.

But what made the NAACP famous after 1910 was not its painstaking legal work, which would not produce significant results for many decades. Rather, what made the NAACP famous in the early decades was Du Bois and the thunder and lightning of his impassioned editorials. African Americans paid attention to the NAACP because of Du Bois. For better or for worse, in the early years the NAACP was perceived as Du Bois, and Du Bois was perceived as the NAACP. It was the Olympian writing of Du Bois that created the bond between African Americans and the NAACP. In fact, that was why the white liberals had wanted him. They knew that without the charisma and reputation of Du Bois, the NAACP would have very little credibility with African American people. In reality, however, Caucasians controlled the NAACP. And Du Bois held his position only as long as Caucasians found him useful, and indispensable. By 1934, Du Bois would be pushed out.

XIII. THE GOAL OF DE-SEGREGATION

Du Bois wanted the Federal Government to end segregation that was required by law. He also wanted the Federal Government to end the discriminatory practices of businesses and unions that refused to hire or admit blacks simply because they were black. These companies and unions did not even bother to argue that blacks were not qualified. To be qualified in America, before 1964, even in the North, was to be white. Qualification was the color of one's skin. And if you were not white then you were not qualified, no matter how skilled or capable you might have been, no matter what education or training you possessed. Equality of opportunity was a myth and a lie. Even if you were qualified, if you were black or Latino you still weren't qualified.

The goal of the NAACP and the civil rights movement, back in 1909, was to bring an end to segregation, disenfranchisement, and job discrimination. This was the cause to which Du Bois devoted his life_and he lived until 1963. That goal, called de-segregation, is what Martin Luther King was fighting for in Birmingham in 1963, and at the March on Washington in August 1963. It would not be achieved until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending de jure segregation in the U.S. Du Bois was the forerunner to the modern civil rights movement, and it was Martin Luther King who eventually succeeded in achieving what Du Bois spent a lifetime fighting for. In some ways it is Martin Luther king who becomes the heir and successor to the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois.

XIV. DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURAL PLURALISM

Du Bois rarely said explicitly what a race was. The term was used by so many different people in so many different ways that race, ethnic group and nationality all got tangled up together. But Du Bois drew upon the ideas of German thinkers such as Johann Herder, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. They argued for differences between the various "races," with each making a separate but equal contribution to humanity (see Lewis, p. 171). Du Bois said that each race possessed cultural traits that were "subtle, delicate, elusive." Du Bois did NOT advocate a hierarchical view of race, with some races being superior to others. Rather, he simply felt that there were differences in the human family. There was variety. By the 1890s Du Bois adopted the views of Thomas Huxley and Friedrich Ratzel that there had been three ancient or primordial "races," and they were white, Negro (black in color), and yellow (Lewis, p. 171). These three had then given rise to eight "historic" races. These eight were:

1. Teutons (Germanic, Nordic)
2. Slavs (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Serbs, Bulgarians)
3. English (Great Britain and North America)
4. Romance nations (France, Spain, Italy, Portugal)
5. Negroes [Africa and people of African ancestry in New World
6. Semites (Jews, Arabs)
7. Hindus (South Asia, India)
8. Mongolians (East Asians such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Siberians, Native Americans)

Du Bois agreed, in 1897, with the widely prevailing view that the English race possessed a special inborn capacity for parliamentary government and ordered liberty; the Romance nations (French and Italians) possessed a special gift for music, art, and literature; the German race was gifted in science and philosophy. But he also believed that the so-called Negro or African race possessed special sensibilities in music, humor and imagination (p. 173). The African folktales of the rabbit and the spider had survived the trans-Atlantic voyage to take form as the tales of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit.

In the 1897 essay "The Conservation of the Races," on p. 821, Du Bois asks this question about black or African American identity

What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? Is not my only practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American?

To our modern ear this seems like a strange question. Can I be both? Can I be BOTH black and American?

Du Bois answers the question by asserting the uniqueness of African American culture. He says, at the top of p. 822:

We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos [feeling] and humor amid its money-getting plutocracy. As such, it is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals.

Du Bois returns to this theme, and restates the question in a famous passage in The Souls of Black Folk.

In this passage Du Bois talks about "double-consciousness." He says that it is almost as if the African American cannot see himself or his own reflection in the mirror. He says at the bottom of p. 364 (Huggins edition) This American world "yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other or white world. He sees himself as the white world sees him--as a distorted image.

Du Bois says,"it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of another world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

He continues, "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."

The second paragraph is self-explanatory:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife--this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. 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 follows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Here Du Bois says that African Americans are bicultural. We have a history, an ethnic identity, a heritage of our own, that we are proud of. And we are also Americans by birth. This is our homeland. It has been since 1619. Du Bois does not seek assimilation or cultural absorption into whiteness, which elsewhere he called "servile imitation of the Anglo-Saxons" or British Americans. He does not advocate that African Americans become little brown imitations of Europeans. And he does not seek to "Africanize" America, either culturally or biologically. He does not seek separatism. Rather, he seeks cultural preservation or bi-culturalism. African Americans are bi-cultural because we have two cultures: One is our ethnic or African American culture, which is derived from Africa. And we are also aware of the dominant British American culture, and fluent in it, and participate in it. We know both. As African Americans we have a hybrid culture that is a mix of the African and the British American.

Cultural pluralism is neither assimilation into the dominant white, British American, European-centered culture, nor rejection of the United States. Cultural pluralism says that each ethnic group can preserve and be proud of its ethnic culture, whether it be Irish, Italian, Polish, German, Chinese, Japanese, or Puerto Rican, and also be part of America with its British American foundation We are all Americans. We can share BOTH our ethnic or cultural identity and our American identity. This idea of cultural pluralism or biculturalism prefigures the multicultural movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and flourishes today. It is the idea of America as banquet of different dishes rather than a melting pot trying to give us a homogenized soup. Du Bois was a prophet, and sixty to 100 years ahead of his time. Only now are we coming to appreciate him as the tortured genius that he was.

XV. WORLD WAR I

In August 1919 World War I erupted in Europe, and in April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson led the US into World War I. For Joel Spingarn, patriotism was an unmitigated good. Villa rd, whose father had benefited from German investment, favored neutrality. Mary White Ovington and the Socialists openly opposed American involvement in the "capitalist" war. Spingarn sought to persuade Du Bois to take a position in favor of Wilson, even if it meant embracing segregated training camps for African American soldiers and especially African American officers. Recall that the US military was segregated until President Truman issued an executive order desegregating the military in 1948. Du Bois allowed himself to be persuaded that a segregated officers camp in Iowa would "advance the race" (Lewis, p. 529). The leading African American in the military at the time was Major Charles Young, of the 10th US Cavalry. Du Bois imagined that one day a General Young would lead the Talented Tenth into battle (p. 517). Young was a graduate of West Point. Du Bois was in a difficult position. In a way, a segregated officers training camp was an insult. But on the other hand, if there were not segregated officer training there would probably be NO training and production of African American officers. In other words, white America in 1917 emphatically WAS NOT going to provide integrated officer training. The effective choice, then, was segregated officer training or NO OFFICER TRAINING FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS AT ALL. The result would be NO MORE African American officers; and African American regiments with white officers. Du Bois settled for the lesser of the evils. And Spingarn and the War Dept. held out the bogus and insincere suggestion that Du Bois would be given a commission as a captain.

Southern Caucasians hated the idea of African American officers, or the possibility that Caucasians might have to serve under the command of African Americans. Major Young was promoted to full colonel, and then retired from active duty.

Monroe Trotter warned that African Americans should not participate in World War I without first demanding concessions. A. Philip Randolph also opposed the war.

In Chapter 19, "The Wounded World," Lewis gives a painful account of how the military "rewarded" the loyalty of African Americans. African Americans in training camps in the South were taunted, humiliated and mistreated. Some 700,000 African Americans registered under the Selective Service Act (p. 535) and 200,000 were sent overseas (p 563). In May 1917 the East St. Louis race riot erupted (p. 536-537). To put pressure on president Wilson, Villard and Du Bois and the NAACP organized a silent protest march in Manhattan. On Juky 28, between 8,000 and 10,000 African Americans participated in the silent protest. In August African American members of the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry retaliated against Caucasians in Houston, Texas. Two African Americans had been arrested and thrown into jail after trying to stop the beating of an African American woman by a policeman. After months of verbal abuse and Jim crow trolleys, the African American soldiers reached their "breaking point." As Lewis describes on p. 541, the troops moved in assault formation on the police station, shot 16 Caucasians dead, including five policemen, and wounded eleven other Caucasians. In the disturbance two African American citizens were killed. And four members of the 3rd Battalion died. For the Caucasian South this was a nightmare come true: African American men with guns rising up and exacting retribution against so-called "whites."

As a result 63 African American soldiers were court martialed; Wilson was persuaded to reduce the number who were hanged from 24 to 19 (Lewis, p. 541). Sixty-seven others were given sentences ranging from a few years to life in prison. Du Bois made an impassioned protest, writing "Always WE pay; always WE die; always, whether right or wrong." He could not stop the executions. But he would not give the power structure the comfort of his silence. If nothing else, his criticism and accusation and denunciation would ring in the ears of Caucasian men with power.

The US military intended to use African Americans as labor units and transport workers, thereby preventing the majority of them from bearing arms. It would be too dangerous to have African American men with weapons. The Sedition Act of May 1918 made it a crime to print any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the US, or the Constitution, or the flag, or advocate curtailment of the production of anything necessary to the war. Therefore the NAACP had to watch its step and be careful as to what it wrote, or face fines of $10,000 and a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

Spingarn and the War Dept. held out to Du Bois the illusory promise of a commission as a captain (p. 555), but ultimately Du Bois failed his physical exam and was in any case 41 years old. But with this carrot dangling in front of him, Du Bois in July 1918 wrote his famous editorial "Close Ranks." He said "Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations fighting for democracy." (Lewis, p. 556). Rarely would he regret anything as much as he came to regret these words.

In contrast, Byron Gunner of the Niagara Movement wrote to Du Bois saying "now, while the war lasts, was the most opportune time to push and keep our special grievances." His point was that if the power structure would not make concessions when it WANTED and NEEDED something from African Americans, what hope was there that the power structure would make concessions when it no longer NEEDED something from them?

In August 1918 Du Bois wrote "this is our country, we have worked for it, we have suffered for it, we have fought for it" (p. 557). Du Bois hoped that if African Americans proved their loyalty to the country by serving in the war, they would sway Caucasian opinion to the view that African Americans had earned the right to full participation in American life and an end to segregation and disenfranchisement. Du Bois wanted to believe that his countrymen were honorable people. Du Bois also hoped that after the end of the war the European countries might give up their colonies in Africa. Du Bois dreamed of Africa for the Africans.

In October 1918 he proposed a Pan African Congress in Paris, where the treaty of Versailles would be negotiated to end the war. Du Bois departed before the State Dept. could deny his passport. The Americans and the British resisted his efforts, but Blaise Diagny, a deputy in the French Chamber of Deputies (parliament), from Senegal, West Africa, used his influence to arrange the Pan African Congress (p. 567). Clemenceau, the French statesman, went along with all of this in order to embarrass Wilson (p. 568) and use it as a bargaining chip against him (in exchange for concessions elsewhere perhaps). What the victors did at Versailles was to assign the German colonies to Britain and France. White supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism prevailed. But Du Bois had at least tried to raise his voice on behalf of self-government for the African colonies. Du Bois had an idea (independence and self-determination for Africa and Asia), but no power. Ideas are not always enough.

When African Americans returned from World War I, ten were lynched in their uniforms. They had been loyal to their country. Their country was not loyal to them. The economy headed into recession, and in 1919 some 25 race riots erupted across the country. Many Caucasians were determined to preserve the old order that existed before the war. African Americans discovered that there was little gratitude for their service during WW I.

Du Bois, and African Americans more generally, felt betrayed. In May 1919 Du Bois wrote the editorial "Returning Soldiers." It said

We are returning from war_it was right for us to fight again. But now that the war in Europe is over, African Americans now had to marshal every ounce to fight a sterner, longer, more enduring battle against the forces of hell in our own land.

We return.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

Du Bois now say that the white power structure, internationally, persisted in denying over half of the world of color, in Africa and Asia, the right to self-determination. Europe intended to hold on to its colonies as long as possible, or forced out at the point of a gun. America sought to hold on to segregation, disenfranchisement, ghettoization. The war had changed little. African Americans had been useful and convenient, and so once again they had been used, and had allowed themselves to be used. A. Philip Randolph and others could say to Du Bois "we told you so." World War I left African Americans feeling bitter and betrayed. In 1919 the forces of racism or white supremacy hardened, in their determination to keep African Americans at the bottom of society. Ironically, it was in this period of the retrenchment of white supremacy and the determination to keep things as they had been in the past, that the Harlem renaissance was born.

PAN-AFRICANISM

At the end of World War I, in February 1919, Du Bois went to Paris to a Pan African Conference. There he and African representatives demanded independence for the African and Asian countries which had been conquered and colonized by European imperialism. Du Bois was an early advocate and prophet of pan Africanism. He felt that people of African ancestry worldwide, whether on the continent of Africa or in the U.S. or in the West Indies must have solidarity with one another. He called upon people of African ancestry in the United States to realize that they are part of the world majority, which is consists of people of color. In the United States, in the twentieth century, Du Bois is the father of Pan-Africanism.

DU BOIS THE "RADICAL" (skip)

By 1934 Du Bois had become a "radical." Actually he had felt this way a long time, but by 1934 it was public. In 1934 he resigned from the NAACP because he felt it had become too conservative. During the McCarthy era of the Fifties he, like Paul Robeson, was persecuted by the State Department and accused of being an unregistered agent for the Soviet Union. Du Bois was unpopular with the U.S. government because he refused to allow the white power structure to dictate to him who his friends were, and some of his friends were communists. For several years in the Fifties he was denied his passport, so that he could not travel abroad. In 1958 he won his case before the Supreme Court, and his passport was restored. He was now free to travel abroad, and he met the Soviet (Russian) premier, Nikita Krushev in 1959, and traveled to Beijing, China, where he met the Chinese communist leaders Mao Zedung and Zhou Enlai. For those who say this proves that he was a communist, I remind you that in 1973 Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon went to Beijing to meet with Mao Zedung and Zhou Enlai. Does that make Nixon a communist? And if Nixon could go, why couldn't Du Bois. Du Bois was just smarter than Nixon, and figured it out sooner--24 years sooner, to be exact,--that's all. Of course Du Bois was also sympathetic to Castro's revolution in Cuba, and the cause of black African and Third World countries throwing off European colonialism and imperialism. Racism was not only in the United States: It was world wide. It was global.

GHANA

In 1961 Du Bois accepted the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to come to that country. Ghana had become the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to expel the British colonizers, and proclaim its independence. No longer would Ghana be a colony of Britain. As of 1957, Ghana became the first independent country in West Africa. At that time the only other independent nations in Africa were Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Liberia. In 1963, Du Bois, now more than 90 years old, renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana. By this point in his life Du Bois had given up all hope for a racist, white supremacist United States. Ironically, he died late on August 27, 1963, the day before King's historic March on Washington. In any event, at the end of his life, he went home to the motherland, to the ancestral mother continent of African Americans, because he just plain tired of putting up with white supremacy.

Sadly, Du Bois gave up on America. By 1960 he expected King to be killed. He joined the Communist Party, probably as an act of defiance, and left the United States to go and live in Ghana, in Africa. He died after midnight, on the morning of August 28, 1963, the day of the March on Washington. It was fate. Sadly, he did not live to see that day, or the passage of the Civil Rights Act he had advocated for more than 60 years.