W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868. He spent his childhood and earned distinction in his early education as one of the perhaps fifty black residents in this small New England town. By his own account he encountered little racial hostility there (Moore 20) – he attended the same schools and church as the town’s white citizens – and indeed both white and black friends offered him necessary financial support when, as an “exceptionally bright” and precocious young scholar of 17, he left home to attend Nashville, Tennessee’s all-black Fisk University (21).* W. E. B. Du Bois died in 1963, at the age of 95, in Accra, Ghana. He died with a double B.A., an M.A. and a PhD from Harvard, and several honourary degrees, having written eighteen books and “volumes” of journalism (107), as an internationally renowned spokesman for world-wide black civil rights and a self-proclaimed communist, under suspicion of treachery and in self-imposed exile from the nation whose black people he had worked so long and so tirelessly to uplift.
Between those two remarkable bookends spans a long life, dedicated primarily to education: his own – he spent some of his student years on scholarship in Europe, and returned there repeatedly throughout his life, absorbing socialist political and economic thought and gaining international comparative perspectives on black people’s living conditions – but also and even more energetically that of others: his fellow Americans, black and white, especially. His life’s work was motivated, his biographers explain, by two engines. On one hand was his belief in the humanist ideal of rational argument, his sense that if he could collect all the historical facts and statistics, if he could present them clearly, thoroughly, and persuasively, his white readers would simply have to admit that America’s slave-trading history and persistently racist culture was “unnecessary” (29), “vicious and socially inexpedient” (26). This hand governed his work in his earliest books, the first of which, The Supression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, became a classic among histories of the slave trade. On the other hand was his polemical fire, his anger and bitterness at “white arrogance and the ‘cruelty, barbarism, and murder done to men and women of Negro descent’ by the supposedly superior white society” (Du Bois qtd. in Moore 103). This hand crafted several of his books, and most notably the “hot, raking editorials” he wrote for The Crisis (Hynes), a publication he edited for twenty years; Crisis was associated with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), an organization of which he was a founding member, and during his editorship sometimes achieved sales of over 100 000 copies per issue. Perhaps both hands were at work in Souls of Black Folk, the book which “more than any other single factor made Du Bois famous in and outside America,” according to one biographer. In it, writes Jack B. Moore,
Du Bois transformed himself into a race leader who with both passion and scholarship revealed with shrewdness, honesty, and artistic sophistication a level of black existence that had never been shown before. Further, the book demonstrated for all time that black invisibility resulted from white disregard or blindness and not from black insubstantiality. (64)
Passion and cool scholarly clarity balanced themselves in Du Bois’s work; so did his other paradoxical characteristics: he was by Moore’s account not only “passionate and icy” but “haughty, warm, and friendly, compassionate and filled with hate” (11). These traits may have drawn from an early series of shocks as, growing up, he moved from the quietness and relative peace of his Great Barrington boyhood, which was marked by an intimate friendship with his single mother (19); to the liveliness of his community of black students at Fisk which included, for him, startling initiation into sexual life (22-3) and suddenly “close and dangerous contact with a violently racist” Southern society (22); and then to Harvard, where he carefully withdrew from his white classmates and the racism he encountered there (23). But these traits must also have deepened during his life of scholarship, activism, and diplomacy. During his career he contended not only with the historical and the enduring oppression of black Americans (he famously editorialized against the treatment of black American soldiers during and after WWI, for example), but also with the different perspectives of other black activists, such as the meeker segregationism of Booker T. Washington and the popular radicalism of Marcus Garvey (Harvey; Moore 55, 60).
His eventual emigration to Ghana – the first West African nation to declare independence of colonial rule, but also the place from which many Africans were originally taken as slaves to the New World – befits one facet of his career. Over the course of his study and travels, Du Bois’s interests had gradually broadened from the plight of black Americans to that of people of African descent the world over. He was an influential participant in and organizer of Pan-African Conferences in 1900, 1921, 1923, and 1927, and if his understanding of the culture and political realities of life in Africa itself was vague and romanticized (Moore 57) – especially in comparison to the kinds of factual knowledge about black American life which he ceaselessly drove to collect, during his years of work at the University of Atlanta (52, 119-20) – his commitment to black people worldwide made him “the most prominent American Negro to advance [Pan-Africanism’s] cause and to give it intellectual and political legitimacy” (54). At the end of his life, having been indicted for association with the socialist-sympathizing Council of African Affairs (and subsequently let off, when the government’s “charges collapsed of their own shoddy insupportability” [144]) by the Justice department during America’s Cold War panic, he chose to leave, and was welcomed into Ghanaian citizenship. (SB)
*All references are to Moore unless otherwise noted.
Works Cited
Hynes, Gerald C. “A Biographical Sketch of W. E. B. Du Bois.” W. E. B. Du Bois Learning Centre. March 1 2006. http://www.duboislc.org/html/DuBoisBio.html.
Moore, Jack B. W. E. B. Du Bois. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.