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 colored persons 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.
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 well, and he knew little discrimination. He attended the local public school and played with white schoolmates. 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]
Niagara Movement
Founders of the Niagara
Movement in 1905. Du Bois is in middle row, with white hat.
In 1905, Du Bois and several other African-American civil rights
activists – including Fredrick L. McGhee, Jesse
Max Barber and William Monroe Trotter – met in Canada,
near Niagara
Falls.[47]
There they wrote a declaration of principles opposing the Atlanta Compromise,
and incorporated as the Niagara Movement in 1906.[48]
Du Bois and the other "Niagarites" wanted to publicize their ideals
to other African Americans, but most black periodicals were owned by publishers
sympathetic to Washington, so Du Bois bought a printing press and started
publishing Moon Illustrated Weekly in December 1905.[48]
It was the first African-American illustrated weekly, and Du Bois used it to
attack Washington's positions, but the magazine only endured for about eight
months.[49]
Du Bois soon founded and edited another vehicle for his polemics, The Horizon: A Journal of the
Color Line, which debuted in 1907.[50]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]
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]
The Crisis
Du Bois c. 1911
NAACP leaders offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and
Research.[76]
He accepted the job in the summer of 1910, and moved to New York after
resigning from Atlanta University. His primary duty was editing the NAACP's monthly
magazine, which he named The Crisis.[77]
The first issue appeared in November 1910, and Du Bois pronounced that its aim
was to set out "those facts and arguments which show the danger of race
prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people."[78]
The journal was phenomenally successful, and its circulation would reach
100,000 in 1920.[79]
Typical articles in the early editions included one that inveighed against the
dishonesty and parochialism of black churches, and one that discussed the
Afrocentric origins of Egyptian civilization.[80]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]
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
Du Bois included photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington in the
June 1916 issue of The Crisis.[95]
Du Bois used his influential role in the NAACP to oppose a variety of racist
incidents. When the silent film The Birth of a Nation premiered
in 1915, Du Bois and the NAACP led the fight to ban the movie, because of its
racist portrayal of blacks as brutish and lustful.[96]
The fight was not successful, and possibly contributed to the film's fame, but
the publicity drew many new supporters to the NAACP.[97]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]
Du Bois organized the 1917 Silent
Parade in New York, to protest the East St. Louis Riot
After the East St. Louis Riot occurred in the summer of
1917, Du Bois traveled to St. Louis to report on the riots. Between 40 and 250
African Americans were massacred by whites, primarily due to resentment caused
by St. Louis industry hiring blacks to replace striking white workers.[110]
Du Bois' reporting resulted in an article "The Massacre of East St.
Louis", published in the September issue of The Crisis, which
contained photographs and interviews detailing the violence.[111]
Historian David Levering Lewis concluded that Du Bois
distorted some of the facts in order to increase the propaganda value of the
article.[112]
To publicly demonstrate the black community's outrage over the St Louis riot,
Du Bois organized the Silent Parade, a march of around 9,000 African
Americans down New York's Fifth avenue, the first parade of its kind in New
York, and the second instance of blacks publicly demonstrating for civil rights.[113]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]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]
Nine years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Du Bois extended a
trip to Europe to include a visit to the Soviet
Union.[159]
Du Bois was struck by the poverty and disorganization he encountered in the
Soviet Union, yet was impressed by the intense labors of the officials and by
the recognition given to workers.[159]
Although Du Bois was not yet familiar with the communist theories of Karl Marx
or Vladimir
Lenin, he concluded that socialism may be a better path towards racial
equality than capitalism.[160]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]
Later life
Du Bois in 1946, photo by Carl
Van Vechten
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]
Cold War
When the Cold War commenced in the mid 1940s, the NAACP distanced itself from Communists, lest its funding or reputation suffer.[209] 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.[210] 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).[211] Du Bois wrote "I am not a communist ... On the other hand, I ... believe ... that Karl Marx ... put his finger squarely upon our difficulties ...".[212] In 1946, Du Bois wrote articles giving his assessment of the Soviet Union; he did not embrace communism and he criticized its dictatorship.[210] However, he felt that capitalism was responsible for poverty and racism, and felt that socialism was an alternative that might ameliorate those problems.[210] The soviets explicitly rejected racial distinctions and class distinctions, leading Du Bois to conclude that the USSR was the "most hopeful country on earth."[213] 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.[214] After departing the NAACP, Du Bois started writing regularly for the leftist weekly newspaper the National Guardian, a relationship that would endure until 1961.[215]Peace activism
Du Bois was a lifelong anti-war activist, but his efforts became more pronounced after World War II.[216] 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!"[217]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."[218] 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.[219]
McCarthyism
Du Bois (center) and other defendants from the Peace Information Center prepare for their
trial in 1951.[220]
During the 1950s, the U.S. government's anti-communist McCarthyism
campaign targeted Du Bois because of his socialist leanings.[221]
Historian Manning Marable characterizes the government's
treatment of Du Bois as "ruthless repression" and a "political
assassination".[222]The FBI began to compile a file on Du Bois in 1942,[223] 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.[224] The primary purpose of the appeal was to gather signatures on a petition, asking governments around the world to ban all nuclear weapons.[225] 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.[216] Du Bois and other PIC leaders refused, and they were indicted for failure to register.[226] 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.[227] After a trial in 1951, with defense attorney Vito Marcantonio arguing the case, the case was dismissed.[228] Even though Du Bois was not convicted, the government confiscated Du Bois's passport and withheld it for eight years.[229]
Communism
Du Bois was bitterly disappointed that many of his colleagues – particularly the NAACP – did not support him during his 1951 PIC trial, whereas working class whites and blacks supported him enthusiastically.[230][231] After the trial, Du Bois lived in Manhattan, writing and speaking, and continuing to associate primarily with leftist acquaintances.[230] His primary concern was world peace, and he railed against military actions, such as the Korean War, which he viewed as efforts by imperialist whites to maintain colored people in a submissive state.[232]
Du Bois meets with Mao Zedong
in China in 1959.
In 1950, at the age of 82, Du Bois ran for U.S. Senator from New York on
the American Labor Party ticket and received about
200,000 votes, or 4% of the statewide total.[233]
Du Bois continued to believe that capitalism was the primary culprit
responsible for the subjugation of colored people around the world, and
therefore – although he recognized the faults of the Soviet Union –
he continued to uphold communism as a possible solution to racial problems.[234]
In the words of biographer David Lewis, Du Bois did not endorse communism for
its own sake, but did so because "the enemies of his enemies were his
friends."[234]
The same ambiguity characterized Du Bois's opinions of Joseph
Stalin: in 1940 he wrote disdainfully of the "Tyrant Stalin",[235]
but when Stalin died in 1953, Du Bois wrote a eulogy characterizing Stalin as
"simple, calm and courageous", and lauding him for being the
"first [to] set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one
nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality".[236]The U.S. government prevented Du Bois from attending the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia.[237] 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.[237] The conference celebrated their independence, as the nations began to assert their power as non-aligned nations during the cold war.[237] 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.[238] In both countries he was celebrated and given guided tours of the best aspects of communism.[238] 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.[239] 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.[240] To demonstrate his outrage, he joined the Communist party in October 1961, at the age of 93.[240] 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."[241]
Religion
Although Du Bois attended the New England Congregational church as a child, he abandoned organized religion while at Fisk college.[242] As an adult, he described himself as agnostic or a freethinker, and biographer David Lewis concluded that Du Bois was virtually an atheist.[243] When asked to lead public prayers, Du Bois would refuse.[244] 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."[245] Du Bois believed that churches in America were the most discriminatory of all institutions.[246] 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.[247] Although Du Bois was not personally religious, he infused his writings with religious symbology, and many of his contemporaries viewed him as a prophet.[248] His 1904 prose poem, "Credo", was written in the style of a religious creed and was widely read by the African-American community.[249]Death in Africa
Du Bois (center) at his 95th birthday party in 1963 in Ghana, with President
of the Republic of Ghana Osagyefo Dr. Kwame
Nkrumah (right) and First Lady Fathia
Nkrumah.
Ghana invited Du Bois to Africa to participate in their independence
celebration in 1957, but he was unable to attend because the U.S. government
had confiscated his passport in 1951.[250]
By 1960, Du Bois had recovered his passport, and was able to cross the Atlantic
and celebrate the creation of the Republic of Ghana.[250]
Du Bois returned to Africa in late 1960 to attend the inauguration of Nnamdi
Azikiwe as the first African governor of Nigeria.[251]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.[250] 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.[252] In early 1963, the United States refused to renew his passport, so he made the symbolic gesture of becoming a citizen of Ghana.[253] 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.[254] Du Bois was buried in Accra near his home, which is now the Du Bois Memorial Centre.[255] 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.[256] 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.[257]
No comments:
Post a Comment
Name
Form
School
Position