Du Bois William Edward Burghardt - W.E.B. Du Bois: a biography

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Contents

To Allegra

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them: and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

Frederick Douglass, West Indian Emancipation, August 4, 1857

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order into which I was born. But just that part of this order which seemed to most of my fellows nearest perfection seemed to me most inequitable and wrong; and starting from that critique, I gradually, as the years went by, found other things to question in my environment.

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

PREFACE

Two decades ago, I embarked on a biography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in the conceit that everything could be said in a single volume. By midstream, after hundreds of pages written and numerous manuscript collections and personal interviews still undone, I was properly deflated. Fifty years old at the end of World War I, Du Bois had four lucid decades of militant progressivism and pioneering scholarship remaining. He and I had yet to experience World War I, the cold war, the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, and West African self-exile. His was a larger-than-life story too large, I decided, to be compressed into a single volume of reasonable girth. Necessity served as mother of inspired convenience, therefore, and W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 18681919 served up the first half of the life in 1993. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 19191963 finished the life and times of this extraordinary personality in 2000, several years later than anticipated.

William Edward Burghardt was not easy to live with, but he was one of the twentieth centurys most prescient thinkers and an American social reformer who, irrespective of race, had few contemporary peers. Much of what he wrote and exemplified politicallyhis informed critique of American exceptionalism, his global perspective on racial justicehas perdurable significance that urgently merits critical appreciation today. Simply put, notwithstanding a putatively postracial United States with its projected nonwhite majority and presidency, Du Boiss famous prophecy about the problem of the color line remains relevant. Although I believe I was right that Du Boisian timelessness and timeliness demanded the pace and scope offered by two volumes, I now worry that these very attributes may become both less familiar and more distorted in the new culture of electronic literacy, depleted attention spans, and a penchant for handily packaged information.

The challenge of reducing a two-volume life and times to a single volume, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, 18681963 , presented all the old dilemmas that the biographer believed he had resolved between two covers. Cutting away prose and jettisoning pages is a process akin to self-mutilation, an agony unwisely borne without the help of an empathetic skeptic and skillful surgeon. The indefatigable Kendra Taira Field of New York Universitys graduate history department performed her surgical tasks with consummate professionalism and judicious enthusiasm. There is a minimum of new matter. Errors of fact are corrected. This pared-down Du Bois is faithful to the interpretations of its parent. Its objective is to deliver more with less.

David Levering Lewis

Stanfordville, N.Y., October 15, 2008

POSTLUDE TO THE FUTURE

The announcement of W.E.B. Du Boiss death came just after Odetta finished singing, a mighty trumpet of a voice that had accompanied the nonviolent civil rights movement from early days. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), broke the news in his precise midwestern voice that always reminded you of a proper Protestant pastor or one of the older men behind the counter at Brooks Brothers. From late morning into mid-afternoon, the scalding sun and suffocating clamminess had exacted their toll from more than 250,000 men, women, and young people who crowded the length of the Reflecting Pool of the nations capital in extraordinary response to the charge of Asa Philip Randolph, grand old man of civil rights and the moving force behind the March on Washington. Tall, white-maned, and as ebony as an African chiefs walking stick, Randolph had summoned Americans to Washington that twenty-eighth day of August, 1963, in all their professional, social, and ethnic variety to act, as he said in his cathedral baritone, as the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.

Before Wilkinss brief, epochal announcement, speaker after speaker had stepped up to the altar of microphones to music and song by Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Pete Seeger; Marian Anderson; and Mahalia Jackson. As the sun blazed down, the marchers witnessed a whos who of Americas civil rights, religious, and labor leadership. Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches, with a speech too dry for this evangelical occasion, was followed by young John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose speech in its original draft, threatening to lay waste to the white South, had brought down upon his militant head the collective wrath of the civil rights elders and Cardinal Patrick OBoyle of the Washington archdiocese. Lewis finally agreed to soften his words, but not by much, and the crowd cheered when he intoned, Listen, Mr. Kennedy, listen, Mr. Congressman, listen, fellow citizensthe black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there wont be a cooling-off period. The United Automobile Workers ebullient Walter Reuther almost matched Lewiss cautionary rhetoric, telling a nation on guard against Soviet imperialism that it could not defend freedom in Berlin, so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham. Then came Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to read James Farmers powerful speech. Had Farmer not insisted on staying in jail in Plaquemine, Louisiana, his baritone delivery would surely have made eyes water and pulses rise even more than the intense McKissick succeeded in doing. Whitney Young Jr., the handsome, gregarious new head of the National Urban League (NUL), was more at home in the boardrooms of corporate donors than in trying to stir crowds, and his too rapidly read message showed it. When Matthew Ahmann of the National Conference for Interracial Justice (NCIJ) used up his ten minutes in moral generalities, the thermometer stood at eighty-two humid degrees and attention spans evaporated.

Now Roy Wilkins was at the microphone, to be followed by Rabbi Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress. But instead of beginning his prepared address straightaway, Wilkins opened by saying that he was the bearer of news of solemn and great significance. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois was dead. He had died in his sleep around midnight, on the twenty-seventh, in Ghana, the country of his adopted citizenship. Regardless of the fact that in his later years, Dr. Du Bois chose another path, Wilkins told the suddenly still crowd, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause. The NAACP head asked for silence, and a moment almost cinematic in its poignancy passed over the marchers. Saddened, though unsurprised by Wilkinss announcement, Rachel Davis DuBois (the mother of intercultural education) wondered aloud at that moment if Du Boiss spirit, now free from his body, in some mysterious way might have hovered in our midst. Unrelated by ties of blood or marriage to the legendary old icon, she had known and loved him deeply much of her life. Jim Aronson, another white Du Bois stalwart, would write in the Socialist weekly, the Guardian, of an aged, black woman in the crowd weeping, Its like Moses. God had written that he should never enter the promised land. Aronson left unsaid what all who had known him at the end understood, that Du Bois had finally concluded that this weeping womans promised land was a cruel, receding mirage for people of color. And so he had chosen to live out his last days in West Africa.