W.E.B. DU BOIS: ABBREVIATED VERSION: ALSO USED FOR INTELLECTUAL HERITAGE

1. 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. His grandfather, Alexander Du Bois, was the son of a French white planter in Haiti and a slave woman. 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.
 

2. CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENT

III. HIS EDUCATION

Because he was so bright, and indeed brilliant, white patrons were impressed and desired to help him. Four white Congregational churches raised money to send him to college. 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. He received a scholarship to attend Harvard, and became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. He also studied abroad at Berlin, where he was exposed to the great German sociologist Max Weber. 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. 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.

IV. 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, and work with one's hands, 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 record shows that more often, in the South, successful black 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 fantasy world of illusion and self-deception.

V. APOSTLE OF EQUAL RIGHTS

In 1903 W.E.B. DuBois 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 white Americans. If white Americans could sit anywhere they wanted to on the train, then blacks 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, black people should be able to sit anywhere in the theatre they wanted to sit, and not be confined to the balcony. If white men could vote, black men should be able to vote too. If college was good enough for white people, it should be good enough for black 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. 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

VI. THE TALENTED TENTH

Du Bois also demanded the opportunity for a liberal arts college education for African Americans. DuBois' 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 black community. But this also meant an ideal of service. For Du Bois the purpose of education was for the talented tenth to uplift the rest of the community, not 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. We might also say that Du Bois was the voice that articulated the ambitions of the black middle class, especially the white collar, professional 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 or common man, who just wanted the same chance to make money that white people had.
 
 

VII. 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. Supposedly, 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. 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 mulattoes to be so retarded and backward that they would eventually die out and become extinct.

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 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? And he said, it was because 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 not expect them to be degraded? He said, to white America, yes, black people are degraded--because the oppression of the white power structure had 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 a degraded and discriminatory environment would undermine achievement by whites, and an equal opportunity to learn and gain employment would result in improved achievement by blacks. He was, to some extent, an environmentalist or a social determinist. He believed that, in general, people are the product of their social environment. And 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 we fast forward for a moment, segregation in this country did not end until 1964. The ghettoes still exist. How can we expect to overcome the results of centuries-of-oppression in a few decades? You who are sitting here in this room are the first generation born since the end of segregation. And the first generation to be born since the end of the ghetto still hasn't been born yet. If the ghetto is a toxic environment, how can we expect the people who come out of that environment not to be damaged by it?
 
 

VIII. 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 violence would occur in the North. Liberals believed it was time to revive the spirit of the abolitionists, who had opposed slavery and prejudice before the Civil war. The Socialist William English Walling criticized the spread of the contagion of racism to the North, and denounced the persecution of African Americans. 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. Other founders of the NAACP included the Jewish philanthropists Joel and Arthur Spingarn, and Rabbi Stephen Wise. Another was the Socialist and feminist Mary White Ovington.

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. Ida B. Wells and William Monroe Trotter were among the other black leaders also present at the founding conference. In any event, back in 1909, Du Bois was the only African American elected to the executive committee of the NAACP ( which was initially a group of 30). 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.

IX. 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. 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 politician, or an elected official. Nor did he lead his own organization or own a newspaper or magazine. 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.

X. 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 a white man. 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.
 
 

XI. DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURAL PLURALISM

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 (1903)

In this passage DuBois 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.

DuBois 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 DuBois 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. Cultural pluralism is neither assimilation into the dominant white Anglo-Saxon 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. 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.
 
 

PAN-AFRICANISM

At the end of World War I, in February 1919, DuBois 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, DuBois is the father of Pan-Africanism.

DU BOIS THE "RADICAL"

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. In 1935 Du Bois wrote an essay arguing that blacks needed black schools and colleges. He said that when black children are sent to all-white schools, they are not educated or nurtured or treated with respect as human beings. Instead, they are ignored or ostracized, ridiculed, mocked, tormented and, in a word, crucified. He said that if this is what is going to happen to black children in "integrated" predominately white schools, then black children would be better off at black schools. Du Bois warned that black parents in the North send their children to mostly white schools so that their children will get a "better" education--especially the black middle class. But if the children are abused and tormented and humilaited in white or "integrated" schools, the human price that they are forced to pay will either main them psychologically, or teach them self-hatred, or teach them to feel bitterness toward white people.

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. DuBois 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 Kruschev 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 DuBois. DuBois was just smarter than Nixon, and figured it out sooner--24 years sooner, to be exact,--that's all. Of course DuBois 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 DuBois 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, DuBois, 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.
 
 

Time permitting: 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. He did not live to see that day, or the passage of the Civil Rights Act he had advocated for more than 60 years. Du Bois was confident that eventually segregation must end, because it was so backward and so stupid. But as fate would have it, he died on the morning of the day on which Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, and delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. On that day, the date of the historic March on Washington, King and others paid homage to the memory of Du bois, and American symbolically committed itself to the passage of the civil rights act. In dying on that day, Du Bois passed the torch to King, who would succeed in pricking the conscience of the nation, and induce the Congress of the United States to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King would reap the harvest that the words of the prophet Du Bois had sown in 1903. Du Bois died and went to a better place, where there would be no black and white. And though the struggle to end compulsory segregation literally took a hundred years, from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1883 and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Du Bois knew, as King said "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."