[This post was delayed because it was too long. Hans re-formatted it
and forwarded it to the list.]
The Science of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois By Dr. Anthony Monteiro
W.E.B. DuBois was one of the twentieth century's great
scientifi minds. His intellect was impressive for its scope,
discipline, rigor, creative and heroic imagination . His
accomplishments in the battles to end racism and
colonialism, and to bring peace and socialism to the world's
peoples, are as impressive. Ultimately his scientific
discoveries and predictions concerning race, civilization,
world and African history have significantly altered world
ideological relationships. Extending, as it were, scientific
foundations for working class and peoples unity and
enhancing the ideological conditions for
socialism. Moreover, the modern civil rights and African
liberation movements owe more to him than any other single
person. As the leader of the Pan African Movement between
1919 and 1945 his impact upon African leaders like Jomo
Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Namdi Azikwe, Almicar Cabral,
Eduardo Mondlane and Sekou Toure, to name a few, was
considerable. He was a founder of the World ! Peace Council
and fighter against the Cold War. He fought in th early part
of this century for the rights of women, including the vote
for Black and white women.
DuBois was born three years after the end of the Civil War,
at the beginning of Reconstruction, on February 23, 1868 in
Great Barrington Massachusetts, to Alfred and Mary Burghardt
DuBois. He passed away gently in the West African nation of
Ghana on August 27, 1963 where he had gone at the invitation
of President Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah to start work on an
Encyclopedia Africana. Nkrumah speaking over Ghanaian radio
summed up DuBois's life with simplicity and
eloquence. "Dr. DuBois", he said, "is a phenomenon. May he
rest in peace." The world's democratic and revolutionary
forces over the next days would bid farewell to DuBois as a
comrade in arms. Gus Hall, General Secretary of the CPUSA,
Chief Awolo, leader of Nigeria's independence movement,
Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria's
National Liberation Front, President Kim Il Sung of The
People's Democratic Republic of Korea, and Walter Ulbricht
of the German Democratic Republic paid the highest tribute
to his life and work. Ulbricht wished that "the memory of
Dr. DuBois--an outstanding fighter for the liberation and
prosperity of Africans--continue to live in our hearts."
Chou En-lai, head of state of China, insisted that DuBois's
life was "one devoted to struggles and truth seeking for
which he finally took the road of thorough revolution."
Nikita Kruschev, General Secretary of the CPSU wrote to
DuBois's wife Shirley Graham DuBois that her husband's
"shining memory" would remain forever "in the hearts of the
Soviet people."
Paul Robeson said of him, "His is a rich life of complete
dedication to the advancement of his own people and all the
oppressed and injured." He continued, "... let us not forget
that he is one of the greatest masters of our language: the
language of Shakespeare and of Milton on the one hand; and
on the other, of the strange beauty of the folk speech-- the
people's speech-- of the American Negro...
"For Dr. DuBois gives us proof that the great art of the
Negro has come from the inner life of the Afro-American
people themselves....and that the roots stretch back to the
African land whence they came."
DuBois, however, wrote his own last will and testament some
years earlier. In his posthumously published Autobiography,
subtitled "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last
Decade of Its First Century" he wrote, "I have studied
communism long and carefully in lands where they are
practiced and in conversation with their adherents, and with
wide reading. I now state my conclusion frankly and clearly:
I believe in communism." He declared, "I shall therefore
hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way
that I can...I know well that the triumph of communism will
be a slow and difficult task, involving mistakes of every
sort. It will call for progressive change in human nature
and a better type of manhood than is common today. I believe
this possible, or otherwise we will continue to lie, steal
and kill as we are doing today." The path he traveled to
arrive at this conclusion was complex, often contradictory,
yet filled with profound meaning.
DuBois's scientific and scholarly work were organically
intertwined with his life and revolutionary activity. The
profound importance of his scientific achievements were that
they laid the materialist foundation for the study of race
and racial oppression. He established that racism and
colonialism were central organizing mechanisms of the modern
world. That they stood along side and were in dialectical
relationship to the system of capitalist exploitation. In
the end, the world could not be understood or changed
without grasping this central dynamic.
THE PATHS OF HIS SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT The ultimate form of
DuBois's scientific work is inseparable from his humble and
working class beginnings. His family was one of an estimated
thirty five African Americans families living in the
Berkshires at the time of his birth. While race prejudice
was not unknown to whites or Blacks in Great Barrington, it
in no way took on the violence and brutality of the South's
Jim Crow segregation. As he reached his teenage years he
knew he was racially different than most of his classmates,
however, he overcame the affects of prejudice through
becoming an academic overachiever. And he could in this
racially ambiguous environment fall back upon the fact that
while the blood of Africa flooded his veins, there was as he
said a "strain of French, a bit of Dutch". His racial
identity, however, would only achieve its permanent
anchorage when he began college in Nashville Tennessee at
the historically African American Fisk University. Still, it
was his humble roots and his experience with racial
prejudice, albeit considerably milder than the bulk of
African Americans were experiencing in the South, that
shaped within him a democratic sensibility early on. At the
age of fourteen in his first published articles appearing in
The New York Globe, an African American newspaper published
by the radical T. Thomas Fortune, DuBois evidenced a moral
rejection of racism. A moral sensibility which would assert
itself throughout his life, finding intellectual expression
in his greatest works.
At Fisk University his general democratic leanings were
deepened. As he would put it, it was during this period that
he "learned to be a Negro." The summer after his sophomore
year was spent in the poverty ridden Black Belt of rural
Tennessee. He later wrote, he "touched the very shadow of
slavery." DuBois biographer David Levering Lewis writes of
this period,
Wilson County, Tennessee, would remain in his memory bank
for a lifetime, influencing a prose to which he was
beginning to give a mythic spin, his conception of what he
would later call the black proletariat, and most profoundly,
his gestating, romantic idea about African American `racial
traits'."
This early experience with the Black Belt proletariat would
germinate throughout his life finding theoretical and social
scientific expression in among other works The Souls of
Black Folk(1903),"The African Roots of the War" (1914) and
eventually in his monumental Black Reconstruction (1935).
In the Fall of 1888 after graduating from Fisk he entered
Harvard to pursue an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He
found his Harvard professors no more qualified than those at
Fisk, only better known. He would at Harvard come in contact
with the new liberal racism and philosophical pragmatism, US
imperialism's emerging philosophical and ideological
paradigms.
The intellectual high point of DuBois' Harvard years was a
fifty-two page handwritten essay entitled "The Renaissance
of Ethics: A Critical Comparison of Scholastic and Modern
Ethics", prepared for a course taught by the American
pragmatist William James. Pragmatism as articulated by James
and later John Dewey held that human knowledge was severely
limited to immediate experience. As such the possibilities
for changing the world were restricted to the limitations of
human knowledge. Human beings had to, more or less, make due
with minor reforms in existing societies. Capitalism, racism
and colonialism, in this rendering, were, therefore,
immutable and even expressions of human nature. This was the
reactionary essence of pragmatism. There were, as a
consequence, no revolutionary alternatives to poverty,
exploitation and racism. Pragmatism's roots must be traced
to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of its
subjective idealist substance shares a similar philosophical
zone with logical positivism. Both positivism and pragmatism
were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to
dialectical and historical materialism. For the young DuBois
pragmatist's limitations on knowledge and transforming the
world were intellectually unacceptable, but more rang
untrue.
In his paper DuBois proposed an elemental materialist
alternative to pragmatism. In fact, he proposed answers to
pragmatism, which in their larger significance, were not
unlike the alternatives to idealist philosophy posited by
Marx in Capital and Engels in Anti-Duhring and The
Dialectics of Nature. What DuBois essentially argued was
that the ethical and moral imperative was determined on the
basis of what actions they led to. While it cannot be said
that DuBois at this stage of his intellectual development
had discovered a consistent philosophical position, his
instincts were certainly in the right direction. In this
regard, his term paper for William James was a harbinger of
his future intellectual and ideological materialism. At the
root of his argument was the idea that morality and ethics
rather than being issues of pure reflection, as Kant and
following him much of Western philosophy, were to the
contrary matters decided in life and through practice.
After receiving his undergraduate degree and being accepted
to Harvard's graduate program in the social sciences he
expressed the view that he would apply the principles of the
social sciences "to the social and economic rise of the
Negro people."
At the very moment when DuBois was deciding upon his life's
vocation the US ruling class was facing the specter of a
rising working class which was challenging the citadels of
capital. The Haymarket repression and the wave of railroad
strikes in 1886 was the beginning, followed by the Pinkerton
carnage at the Homestead Steelworks outside Pittsburgh and
the massacre of copper miners at Coeur d'Alene, Colorado in
1892. The assault upon the rights of labor in the late
1880's and throughout the 1890's coincided with the wave of
lynchings and KKK terrorism against Blacks in the South and
the Supreme Court's legalization of racism in its Plessey v
Ferguson decision in 1896.
As a graduate student DuBois was confronted by the new
economic doctrine which claimed to answer the Marxian
formulation that capitalist profits flow from the
exploitation of labor. In a 158 page critique and analysis
of this new economics entitled "A Constructive Critique of
Wage Theory" he argued, in social democratic fashion, for
restrictions upon the unfettered maximization of
profit. While this paper fails as a theoretical
reformulation, it proposed that from a ethical standpoint
society was obligated to moderate profits in the interests
of a fair distribution of incomes and wealth. The
significance of the paper in terms of DuBois's later
intellectual development is a two page examination of Marx's
labor theory of value. For the first time we have evidence
of DuBois' interest in Marxian economics.
Upon the completion of the course work for his Harvard
doctorate DuBois applied for and received a fellowship to do
graduate studies at the University of Berlin. His intention
was to study philosophy and economics. He studied German
philosophy, especially Hegel's Science of Logic and The
Phenomenology of Mind, as well as Marxian social theory. He
also studied the innovative historical research methods than
in vogue in the German academy. He, as well, attended
meetings in working class Pankow district of Berlin of the
German Social Democratic Party. He later said that his
interest in socialism at this time was exploratory and that
he did not grasp the differences between Marxism and the
revisionism of Lasalle, Bebel and Karl Kautsky. These
issues, he said, were "too complicated for a student like
myself to understand." He blamed his student status for
inhibiting "close personal acquaintanceship with workers,
which in his Autobiography he felt he needed for a full
understanding of socialism.
As at Harvard, while in Berlin DuBois spent much of his time
alone, reflecting upon the world and his possible
contribution to changing it. Many of these reflections were
entered in his diary. One particularly significant entry
made on his twenty fifth birthday. A stream of conscious
consideration upon his life tells us much about mental
processes, which combined imagination, poetic and courageous
leaps and intellectual rigor. he declared in his diary, "The
hot dark blood of a black forefather--born king of men-- is
beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a genius or
a fool. O I wonder what I am-- I wonder what the world is--
I wonder if live is worth striving...I do know: be the truth
what it may, I will seek it on the pure assumption that it
is worth seeking--and Heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall
turn me from my purpose till I die... there is a grandeur in
the very hopelessness of such a life--? and is life all?" He
then conclude, "These are my plans: to make a name in
science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my
race. " And then, "I wonder what will be the outcome? Who
knows?... and if I perish--I PERISH."
The historical methodology of both Marx and Hegel, and
contemporary German academicians, along with deepening
studies of the race question, helped to convince him that
racial oppression must be understood as part and parcel of
the world system of economic relations and thus its
elimination would have world historic meaning. He became
further convinced that only the most advanced scientific and
philosophical methods could advance understanding of this
system. In this regard he sought to do for the issue of
racial oppression what Marx had achieved for class
exploitation.
In respect to his intellectual development his work began to
combine social scientific data and analysis with historical
studies. He began what he hoped would be his doctoral
dissertation at the University of Berlin (which if
successful would have become the first of two Ph.D.'s), a
study of the land tenure system in the US south. We glimpse
what that dissertation might have looked like from a term
paper entitled "The Large and Small Scale System of
Agriculture in the Southern United States 1840--1890". It
presented his research, using the materialist methods than
popular among German historians from the bottom up. That is
form the standpoint of the peasantry and agricultural
workers. This was a further development of his philosophical
materialism and its application to historical, economic and
sociological inquiry. However, the world would never see
that dissertation, because the semester before he was to
complete his courses his fellowship was cut. David Levering
Lewis who looked into this situation suggests DuBois'
failure to win a German doctorate resulted from a
combination of circumstance and the sinister. DuBois'
German professors were effusive in their support of his
academic work. They were prepared to trim off a semester of
work so as to allow him to get started on writing his
thesis. Johns Hopkins President Daniel Gilman a trustee of
the Slater Fund, from which DuBois was receiving his
scholarship, however, expressed the view that `Negro
education' should be more practical and that DuBois' program
of study had become too rarefied for a Negro. This was an
expression in DuBois' life of white liberal racism which was
now throwing its support to Booker T. Washington and the
gospel that Blacks should "put your buckets down where you
are." Blacks with doctorates from prestigious German
universities were not a priority in the new racist
atmosphere.
Returning to Harvard he completed his dissertation in 1896,
entitled, "The Suppression of the Slave trade to the United
States of america 1638--1870", which a few years later was
published as the first volume in the prestigious Harvard
Historical Series. In spite of the achievement in the
Suppression six decades later when a new edition was being
prepared for publication DuBois included an "Apologia". He
criticized the book, asserting that what was needed was "to
add to my terribly conscientious search into the facts...the
clear concept of Marx on the class struggle for income and
power..."
After receiving his Ph.D. DuBois was offered a teaching
position at Wilberforce College a small African american
college in Ohio. After a year of teaching at Wilberforce he
was contacted by a group of upper class Philadelphia Quakers
to conduct a study of the African American community in
Philadelphia. They felt that such a study could embarrass
the corrupt city administration. DuBois was offered an
‘assistantship' at the University of Pennsylvania, which
meant the University would pay his salary, but he was
neither allowed to live on its racially segregated campus or
to teach in its all white classrooms. For two years DuBois
his and wife Nina Gomer Du Bois lived in the 7th Ward in the
heart of the Black ghetto at the corner of 7th and Lombard
(across from Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church founded by the anti-racist radical Richard Allen)
where he worked on what became the Philadelphia Negro
. While his sponsors had no idea that such a major study
would be produced, DuBois wrote a book that initiated the
field of urban sociology and advanced empirical sociology
itself.
What the Philadelphia Negro achieved, in spite of an
overdose of stern Victorian moralizing and a preaching to
poor African Americans to conduct themselves in acceptable
ways, was to empirically verify the social and class origins
of poverty and inequality. He substantially showed that the
Black ghetto was a creation of poverty and racism, rather
than the so-called innate inferiority and supposed criminal
tendencies of African Americans.
Upon the completion of his research in Philadelphia he took
a teaching position at Atlanta University, an historically
African American institution. For ten years he would not
only teach, but became the prime mover of annual conferences
which drew scholars from around the world to examine the
social, economic, historical and cultural roots of Black
inequality. He led researchers who produced a series of
monographs and papers known as the Atlanta Studies, one of
the most significant bodies of scientific research on Black
folk at the beginning of the twentieth century.
AFRICA ROOTS OF WAR AND BLACK RECONSTRUCTION Landmarks of
DuBois's scientific development are found in his Atlantic
Monthly article "The African Roots of the War" and the Black
Reconstruction. Together they demonstrate DuBois' full
intellectual powers and his development of Marxism. "The
African Roots of the War" parallels Lenin's Imperialism The
Highest Stage of Capitalism and in several formulations
anticipates it by two years. Like Lenin he viewed world
economic relationships as being now dominated by finance
capital--a new situation where banks controlled industrial
and merchant capital. The merger of industrial and bank
capital under the hegemony of big bank capital Lenin called
finance capital. The nation itself, as Lenin and DuBois saw
it, was now under the heal of the financier, who through the
export of capital were carving out economic spheres
throughout the world. DuBois makes his argument from the
standpoint that a new epoch in world history had
arrived. What Lenin would define as the imperialist stage of
capitalism, which made capitalism overripe for revolution.
But DuBois saw Africa as the weakest link in the imperialist
chain. It is worth commenting at this point upon DuBois'
alleged support of the US participation in WWI. To
understand what was a tactical maneuver on his part was the
attempt to play US against German imperialism in the
interest of gaining time for and strengthening the position
of the anti-colonial forces in Africa and the anti-racists
in the US. Furthermore, DuBois' stance after the war at the
Versailles Peace Conference is significant. Again his stance
was a consistently anti-colonial position, geared to use the
contradictions between European colonial powers and their
weakened position after the war to advance the cause of
African freedom. At this stage he indeed harbored illusions
about the possible role of the US as an ally of the African
struggle. And it should be remembered in evaluating DuBois'
position that right at the moment of the Versailles
Conference he called the First Pan African Congress,
dedicated to the joint struggle and liberation of Africans
and their descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean.
David Levering Lewis evaluates DuBois' "African Roots" as
"one of the analytical triumphs of the early twentieth
century." He goes on to contextualize the work in the
following manner:
DuBois poured into it his mature ideas about capitalism,
class and race...The essay opened with a novel
proposition--that, 'in a very real sense' Africa was the
prime cause of the World War. Using a quotation from Pliny
as his text--'Semper novi quid ex Africa' ('Africa is always
producing something new')--DuBois passed in kaleidoscopic
review the ravages of African history from earliest times to
the European Renaissance, Stanely's two-year charge from the
source of the Congo River to its mouth in 1879, the
partition five years later of the continent at the Berlin
Conference, and the miasma of Christianity and commerce
suffocating indigenous cultures and kingdoms. European
hegemony based on technological superiority had produced the
'color line', which became 'in the world's thought
synonymous with inferiority...Africa was another name for
bestiality and barbarism.' The color line paid huge
dividends, and DuBois described the 'lying treaties , rivers
of rum, murder, assassination, rape and torture' excused in
the name of racial superiority with his staple power and
imagery.
DuBois posited that finance capital had produced mutually
exclusive and competing economic spheres controlled by
differing imperialist nations for the sake of exploiting
peoples and natural resources. A situation which would
inevitably cause world war.
DuBois makes a crucial discovery concerning the nation, big
bourgeois nationalism and white chauvinism. He argued that
bourgeois democracy, big power nationalism and imperialism
went hand in glove. And that the democracy of the
imperialist bourgeoisie was but a mechanism for its
expansion and a cover for its barbarity. Bourgeois rhetoric
about democracy and the so-called common interests of
workers and capitalists was but a ploy DuBois argued, to win
labor to the so-called national interest as defined by
imperialism. DuBois put it bluntly, "it is the nation, a new
democratic nation composed of united capital and labor,"
where "[t]he white workingman has been asked to share the
spoils of exploiting 'chinks and niggers'." Even though
labor's percentage of the gross was minimal, its 'equity is
recognized.' What Lenin proposed, however, and which was
not present in DuBois's analysis, was the concept of the
labor aristocracy, a bought off section of labor leaders who
actually did share in the spoils, at the expense of the
interests of the labor movement as a whole. But more, the
nation, its political, economic and cultural resources were
transformed into a mechanism of imperialist expansion and
war. However, as a result the nation itself is spoiled,
corrupted and destroyed as monopolies become transnational
corporation. The working class is for the imperialist
bourgeoisie nothing by fodder for its wars to control the
world. In this sense Lenin's concept of capitalist social
relations being overripe for revolution carries with it
Marx's warning made with respect to the class struggle in
France, that when a revolutionary situation is in place and
neither of the major classes is able to win a circumstance
leading to the `destruction of all classes' is possible. It
is this ruing of nations and classes by imperialism that
DuBois saw. World Wars are but its most horrific expression.
The lasting strength of DuBois's analysis , however, was how
he understood the `scramble for Africa' as the central cause
of World War I. And how the `scramble for Africa' imparted
an irreversible and overriding racist nature to the colonial
system and imperialism in general. Therefore, World War I
had a racist imprint. DuBois' understanding of the
historical evolution of European bourgeois nationalism and
his recognition that it in substance had become a racist
nationalism is of lasting significance. This feature would
take on its most extreme forms with the rise of Nazism in
Germany.
Black Reconstruction which appeared almost twenty years
after "The African Roots of the War" in essence is an
extension of the DuBoisian development of the class-race
dialectic, and thus a fundamental contribution to the
development of Marxism. It was conceived not only as a
scholarly study, but as a theoretical justification of the
inevitability of socialism. The study is an examination of
the period after the Civil War when the forces of democracy
were hegemonic in the former states of the
Confederacy. DuBois suggests this was the most democratic
period not only in the history of the South, but of the
nation. He suggests that under the right conditions the
democratic remaking of the South could have possibly gone
over to the dictatorship of the proletariat, if not
throughout the South, at least in several states. He felt
that this could have sparked a socialist revolution
throughout the nation. He, thus, saw the Civil War, the
overturning of slavery and the period of Reconstruction as a
single revolutionary period, with Reconstruction
constituting a revolutionary democratic situation pregnant
with deeper revolutionary possibilities. A crucial feature
of his thesis was the centrality of the African American
question to democracy and the class struggle. While Black
Reconstruction focused upon the pre-imperialist stage of
capitalist development in the US, when combined with the
earlier "The African Roots of the War" a single logic is
apparent. That logic is based upon DuBois's notion of the
fundamental nature of the unity of the class struggle and
the struggles against racial oppression and colonialism.
The central conclusions that can be made from an examination
of these two basic works are the following: First, the unity
of the class struggle and the struggles against racism and
colonialism are central to the struggles for democracy and
socialism; secondly, the imperialist stage of capitalist
development ushers in a new epoch where the anti-colonial
struggle assumes a larger role in the fight for peace and
socialism; and thirdly, that Great Power nationalism leads
to the ruin of nations and peoples and to war. These ideas
would be further developed in Color And Democracy: Colonies
and Peace (1945) and The World and Africa (1947).
DuBois' scientific work, presents essentially a single line
of philosophical-theoretical-ideological development, albeit
with zig-zags and certain inconsistencies. Nonetheless,
DuBois's radicalism is congealed by the end of the second
decade of this century in a strong Marxist
theoretical-ideological stance. DuBois's Marxism, like his
radicalism, was creative, taking into account the specific
conditions of US capitalism. Perhaps more than any thinker
of this century he fully saw the profound significance of
racism and colonial oppression in the development of
capitalism and how the struggles against racism and
colonialism are central to the fight for democracy and
revolution.
THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT DuBois was an initiator and leader of
many mass movements. The Niagara Movement, the NAACP, Pan
Africanism, and the Council on African Affairs are high
points of his organizational activity. Besides which he
founded, published and edited any number of journals and
magazines, The Moon, The Horizon, Phylon, and the high point
of his publishing and editing careers The Crisis, the
magazine of the NAACP, which he founded and edited for over
twenty five years.
What is crucial in understanding DuBois as a leader of mass
movements is how his ideological positions animated and
interacted with his organizational activity. From this
standpoint the major debates and polemics he waged with
leaders within the African American struggle, such as the
ones with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, are
central.
The DuBois-Booker T. Washington debate which begins at the
start of the century and rages until Washington's death in
1915 defined the terms of the African American
struggle. Washington assumed the mantle of "leader of the
race" after the death of Frederick Douglass in
1895. Washington became known as the `Great Accommodator',
because of his willingness to accommodate the aspirations of
Black folk to the reemergence of racism. The terms of the
great compromise to racism as understood by Washington was
expressed in the equation "Duty without Rights". Rather than
fight for the right to vote and other civil rights, the
obligation of Blacks was to serve whites and subordinate
themselves to the white ruling class. and that eventually
whites would reward our service by granting us rights. In
the meantime, Washington urged Blacks to `put your buckets
down where you are'. Washington's deal was a Faustian
Bargain--an agreement with the devil. DuBois's Souls of
Black Folk answered the liberal and conservative racists and
Booker T. Washington's accommodation to them.. It is here
that DuBois proclaimed that `The Problem of the twentieth
century is the problem of the color line'.
To grasp the meaning of this statement in its historical
context those to whom it was addressed must be
understood. The two main targets were neo-racism, the
so-called liberal racism of monopoly capitalism, and Booker
T. Washington accomodationist line. The two were political
ideological bedfellows; each cross fertilized the other.
The Souls of Black Folk was for the struggle of the African
American people what the Communist Manifesto was for the
class struggle in Europe in the mid 19th century and the
Declaration of Independence was for the American
revolutionaries. It, however, suffered from a failure to
address the class question. A problem addressed head on by
DuBois a year after its publication. At a public speech on
Des Moines Iowa he insisted that the color line "was but the
sign of growing class privilege and caste distinction in
America, and not, as some fondly imagine, the cause of
it. (quote taken from Lewis: 313)" Having said this the
overriding question for DuBois remained the color line and
Booker T. Washington's accommodation to it.
The Souls of Black Folk and the color line as the problem of
the twentieth century can be illuminated by also placing
alongside them DuBois's John Brown. By the turn of the
century DuBois had certainly concluded that to overturn the
new system of segregation and racism would require a renewed
revolutionary struggle and certainly the loss of blood. In
this respect DuBois saw himself continuing the line of
struggle of Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Harriet Tubman,
Soujouner Truth and Frederick Douglass. The Souls his then a
call to arms, not a call to vote, even if Black folk had the
franchise. Its essence is revolutionary and democratic, not
as some contend cultural nationalism. As with the
anti-slavery struggle DuBois understood that Black people
would need white allies. Hence the example of John Brown. As
he put it in the opening of the book:
John Brown worked not simply for Black Men-- he worked with
them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their
faults and virtues and felt, as few white Americans have
felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot. The story of John
Brown , then , cannot be complete unless due emphasis is
given this. And then DuBois observed, "He came to them on a
plane of perfect equality.."
John Brown became an archetype of the white ally, the
anti-racist, the white revolutionary. It appears at the very
time the NAACP was being formed and can be considered a
guidepost for what the Blacks in the Niagara Movement would
expect of their white allies in the NAACP.
By the summer of 1905 a cadre of radical African American
democrats, many college educated and professionals, arrived
at the conclusion that it now rested upon their shoulders to
strike the first blow on behalf of the freedom of their
people. A Call for the convening of a conference to begin
"organized determination and aggressive action on the part
of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth", to open
July 10 in Ontario Canada (on the Canadian side of Niagara
Falls). The conference began what became known as the
Niagara Movement. Thirty nine men made up the first
conference. Monroe Trotter and DuBois drafted the
Declaration of Principles. It declared, "we refuse to allow
the impression to remain that the Negro American assents to
inferiority...that he is submissive under oppression and
apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may
submit, but the voice of protest of ten million Americans
must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so
long as America is unjust." They called for an all-sided
assault upon racism and inequality where ever it was to be
found, including the policies of the Samuel Gompers led AFL
for the practice of "proscribing and boycotting and
oppressing thousands of their fellow-toilers, simply because
they are black." Proclaiming the beginning of a new era of
protest they spoke in words that have resonated throughout
the century.
The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded,
struggling up through difficulties and oppression, needs
sympathy and receives criticism; needs help and is given
hinderance, needs protection and is given mob-violence,
needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership and is
given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a
stone. this nation will never stand justified before God
until these things are changed.
Symbolic of the identification of the Niagara Movement with
the nation's revolutionary and abolitionist past was the
holding of the second conference in Harper's Ferry West
Virginia to celebrate "the 100th anniversary of John Brown's
birth, and the 50th jubilee of the battle of Osawatomie."
The Niagara Movement and the sharpening repression against
African Americans which was dramatically demonstrated in the
Atlanta riots of 1906, sharpened DuBois's radicalism. In
1907 he assumed the editorship of a new magazine named The
Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line. In its second issue
DuBois declared his faith in socialism. He was, as he put
it, a "socialist-of -the-path". The natural allies of Black
folk were, he declared, not "the rich, but the poor, not the
great, but the masses, not the employer, but the employees."
He believed that America was approaching a time when
railroads, coal mines, and many factories can and ought be
run by the public for the public." And he asserted, "the one
great hope of the Negro American" is socialism. The Niagara
movement would convene annually until 1910, when it was
superseded by the more broadly based civil rights
organization the NAACP. Most of those in the Niagara
Movement joined the new organization, with DuBois becoming a
member of its executive board and editor of it monthly
journal The Crisis. The Niagara Movement is the predecessor
to the NAACP. The origins of the NAACP, therefore, are in
the 1905 Niagara Conference. Monroe Trotter and Ida Welles
Barnett, radicals from the Niagara Movement and socialist
like DuBois and Mary White Ovington joined with liberal
anti-racist like Joel A. Spingarn and Oswald Villard to form
a broader and larger organization. Nevertheless the Niagara
Movement left an indelible mark on future struggles. Its
most important achievement was that it gave an organized
form to the left and socialist forces within the African
community, who were prepared to take on Booker T. Washington
and his backers. By so doing they laid the basis for a new
level of left-center unity against racism. By rekindling the
fires of protest they established that freedom would only be
achieved through struggle; realizing in life the dictum of
the great Frederick Douglass, "Without struggle there is no
progress, there never has been and there never will be."
As the executive secretary of the Niagara Movement DuBois
proved himself an able organizer. Added to his proven skills
as a scholar, journalist, propagandist, editor and
publisher, he stood as a potent force and invaluable
resource in his peoples struggle and a force which would
have to be reckoned with by all sides.
THE NAACP As the first decade of the century moved to a
close DuBois's concept of the alliance between the African
American people and labor , between racism and class
exploitation deepened. In the interest of advancing this
strategic notion and while keeping heat on Booker
T. Washington he attacked the "color-blindness" of certain
left liberals and socialists. The philosopher John Dewey,
for instance, that racism deprived society of social
capital. This instrumental explanation made no mention of
the denial of the vote and other civil rights to
Blacks. Eugene V. Debs, the nation's leading socialist,
articulated the view that the Socialist Party could not
"make separate appeals to all races..." "There is," he
stated, "no `Negro problem' apart from the general labor
problem." After the 1912 presidential election, where Debs
got over 1 million votes, DuBois would declare, `the
magnificent Debs', as he called him, wrong. "The Negro
problem, then, is the great test of the American
socialists."
As Booker Washington became more reactionary DuBois became
more merciless in his attack upon his program. Washington,
he insisted, was the past, the Niagara Movement the
future. He tied the `Great Accommodator' to monopoly
capital. Accommodation DuBois argued was submission pure
and simple. "The vested interest", DuBois wrote in May 1910,
"who so largely support Mr. Washington's program are to a
large extent men who wish to raise in the South a body of
black laboring men who can be used as clubs to keep white
laborers from demanding too much."
With the founding of the NAACP DuBois for the first time
became a full time employee of an organization other than a
college or university. As Levering Lewis put it, "The
problem of the twentieth century impelled him from
mobilizing racial data to becoming the prime mobilizer of a
race.(408)" DuBois's imprint was considerable upon the
organization from its outset. The name itself bares the
imprint of DuBois's worldview. Rather than having Negro or
black in its name the new organization used the term
colored, because as DuBois saw things the Association should
fight the color line on a world scale and thus fight for the
rights of all peoples of color and all victims of racism and
colonialism. DuBois would become the editor of the NAACP's
journal, named (and once again reflecting his ideological
impact on the new organization) The Crisis: A Record of the
Darker Races. No one could have predicted the success and
impact of the journal. It eventually would reach over
150,000 African American households, become the main
instrument for forming Black opinion. It manifested DuBois's
militant brand of journalism. The Crisis, according to
Levering Lewis, traced its roots from Frederick Douglass's
North Star, and William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator back to
North America's first newspaper published by person's of
African descent, Samuel Eli Cornish and John Russwurm's
Freedom Journal.
However, while the terrain of struggle had shifted the
essence had not. The decline of Booker Washington had
shifted the terms of the fight. On the horizon was World
War, President Woodrow Wilson's drive to make the world safe
for imperialism with a human face, the rise of the
nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose aim was to extend the
program of Booker Washington to Africa and the Caribbean,
the appearance of the `New Negro'--a movement of militant
intellectuals-- and significantly for the development of
DuBois' world view,the Russian Revolution and the rise of
the world communist and national liberation forces. In the
face of these events, pregnant with danger and enormous
possibilities, DuBois' direction was clear--everything to
the front of struggle for African American freedom.
His greatest battles within the NAACP were with white and
Black liberals who preached caution and compromise. DuBois's
militant anti-imperialism and support for the Russian
Revolution made the liberals uncomfortable. He became after
1919 the central figure in the rise of the Pan African
Movement which linked the struggle for equality to the
struggle for African independence. This movement became
another way of fighting the `color line' on a world
scale. He used the The Crisis to assail lynchings, police
brutality, the rise of the KKK and pogroms against African
Americans. In one editorial he excoriated Jim Crow
mob`justice', where Black men were regularly lynched in the
North and South on trumped up charges of raping white
women. DuBois declared the crime of Black men was their
blackness. "Blackness" he said, "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." Reflecting the rising
spirit of resistance, DuBois would editorially declare in
The Crisis, "But let every black American gird his
loins. The great day is coming. We have crawled and pleaded
for justice and we have been cheerfully spit upon and
murdered and burned. We will not endure it forever." And
than the words that would inspire Claude McKay's
revolutionary poem, DuBois demanded, "If we must die, in
God's name let us perish like men and not like bales of
hay."
Going beyond what liberals, pro-capitalists and
`respectable' civil rights leaders could stomach, DuBois
linked his calls for militant, even armed, resistance, to
racist violence to anti-imperialism and
internationalism. His Pan Africanism was, therefore,
qualitatively different from Garvey's pro-imperialist big
business oriented version. Garvey was mainly interested in
business contacts and relationships with Africa and was at
best only inconsistently anti-colonial. Yet, for millions of
African Americans who faced the rise of racism in the late
teens, for whom the North, rather than the promised land,
was more of the same old Jim Crow, now occurring in large
city ghettos, Garvey's calls for self improvement and self
uplift through hard work were appealing. For DuBois after
the rhetoric was swept aside Garvey was proposing more
submission and acceptance of oppression here in the US and
in Africa.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND IMPERIALIST WAR The World War and
the Russian Revolution were united as part of a single cloth
in DuBois's world view. The War represented the fact that
the greed of the capitalist class had plunged Europe into
chaos, occasioning a profound European civilizational
crisis, with more long term meaning than the War itself or
the economic depression which followed it. As he put it,
Western civilization had met its Waterloo. He lectured the
US ruling class concerning its racist double standard. "
The civilization by which America insists on measuring us
and to which we must conform our natural tastes and
inclinations" he insisted, "is the daughter of that European
civilization which is now rushing furiously to its doom."
And he impatiently proclaimed that as soon as the stinking
edifices of racism and class exploitation crumble, the
sooner the world would be bathed "in a golden hue that harks
back to the heritage of Africa and the tropics."
Imperialism, he demanded, had consumed European civilization
transforming it into it opposite and emasculating it of its
humane qualities.
While Woodrow Wilson was proclaiming his `Fourteen Freedoms'
which under US tutelage was to make the `world safe for
democracy', African Americans were being lynched and
massacred from the Black Belt South, to East St. Louis and
the South Side of Chicago. Once again DuBois warned the
nation, and the ruling class in particular, "We are
perfectly well aware that the outlook for us is not
encouraging...We, the American Negroes, are the acid test
for occidental civilization. If we perish we perish." And in
the most stern language he warned, "But when we fall, we
shall fall like Samson, dragging inevitably with us the
pillars of a nation's democracy." Racism, thus, could not,
and he would not, view it as a `Negro problem', if not
solved it would destroy the nation.
DuBois increasingly viewed the Russian Revolution as the
opposite of racism, exploitation, war and the civilizational
crisis they propelled. He viewed the Russian Revolution as
creating the material bases to create a global emancipatory
alliance of Russia and the darker races. A position not that
far from the strategic thinking of Lenin who urged the
Communist to support the revolutions in the Third World
because here was imperialism's weak link. He especially
called for special attention to India and China and foresaw
an alliance of Soviet Russia, India and China as
constituting the majority of the planet's population and
thus main specific weight of the world revolutionary
process. DuBois would propose that a belief in humanity
"means a belief in colored men." and that "The future world
will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored make
it."
His position on the civilizational dimensions of racism
began to take form in an article published in 1910 in an
article entitled "The Souls of White Folk".He argued that
"Those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is
fraught with tremendous and eternal significance" had
foisted a unique racial perversion upon humankind. He went
on to insist, as he challenged the racist view of history,
that in the sweep of history the achievements of white folk
were as recent as yesterday. He condemned as tragicomic
arrogance, a joke were its consequences not so horrible, the
presumption that "whiteness alone is candy to the world
child." This tragicomic view of world history undergird both
liberal and conservative racists and was part of the
ideological arsenal of Presidents and KKKers.
The Russian Revolution for DuBois was contextualized within
broad civilizational terms. It embraced it from the
outset. Upon his return from his first trip to the Soviet
Union in 1927 he declared, "If what I have seen is
Bolshevism than I am a Bolshevik." The fate of humankind
rested with the success or failure of the Communist in
Russia to consolidate their revolution. In this endeavor
they deserved the support of all fighters against the color
line. This stance he maintained until his death.
DUBOIS AND THE CPUSA Gerald Horne indicates that DuBois's
relationships with the CPUSA was of long standing and
thoroughly principled. DuBois was friendly with James
W. Ford the African American Communist who ran for Vice
President in 1932 on the ticket with party chairman William
Z. Foster. He was also friendly with Foster whom he lent
books to, as Horne tells us, one on Haiti, for Foster's
'complex historical studies" which DuBois praised
highly. "But the comrade to whom DuBois probably had the
closest relationship was Foster's ideological compatriot,
the Amherst and Harvard-trained lawyer, Ben Davis. (306)" It
was this close relationship that naturally brought DuBois to
the forefront in the struggle to defend Communist during the
Cold War. In fact, there are few who did more than DuBois to
campaign against the imprisonment of Eugene Dennis , Ben
Davis, Gus Hall, Henry Winston, George Meyer, William
L. Patterson, James Jackson and others. The wife of George
Meyers, for example, was highly appreciative of how
positively DuBois's writings had affected her jailed husband
(Horne:302).
Thus, according to Horne, "DuBois' formal casting of his lot
with the Communist was not an aberration(296). Neither was
it an aberration or a radical departure from logic of his
ideological and political trajectories.
US imperialism's drive to turn the twentieth century into
the `American Century' did not cause DuBois to retreat, but
"to deepen his study of Marxism-Leninism"--even though he
was than in his eighties. (Horne:289) And while DuBois had
done a thorough study of Marx in the 1930's and produced one
of the great Marxist classics by 1935, by 1954 he was
"reading again Lenin's Imperialism" and searching for the
"best logical follow-up of his argument." (Horne:ibid)
In his letter to Gus Hall requesting membership in the
Communist Party of the USA, "on this first day of October"
1961, he openly acknowledged past differences with the Party
on "tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their
advocacy of a Negro state". That aside he declared:
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to
self-destruction...Communism...this is the only way of human
life. It is a difficult and hard end to reach--it has and
will make mistakes...On this first day of October 1961, I am
applying for admission to membership in the Communist Party
of the United States.
THE LEGACY AND MESSAGE Dr. James E. Jackson, close friend of
DuBois and former leader and theoretician of the Communist
Party, summarized the life of DuBois in the following words:
"W.E.B. DuBois, the scholar and scientist, was equally a man
of action. He chose to keep the banners and goals of full
equal rights flying from the halyard of principle, no matter
the difficulties and hardships." Of DuBois' "lasting
testament" Jackson asserts,
His last historic deed was to dramatize his firm conviction
that `capitalist society is altogether evil.' He concluded
that to finally solve the problem of racism, to really solve
the problem of poverty, and to secure peace to the world's
peoples, humankind must, sooner or later, come to the
conclusion that this old structure is beyond effective
reform... W.E.B DuBois was a great fighter for the people,
a true scientist, thinker and humanist. He held aloft a
bright torch of poetic inspiration that lightens the way and
illuminates the path of all who struggle for freedom. The
questions that DuBois posed and dealt with along the way of
a long and arduous life of unceasing service and dedication
to the cause of people's progress will find resolution on
the path that he chose, the route of the great humanists and
social scientists,the Marxists. (Political Affairs, July
,1989,5)
DuBois is our future. To understand his life and legacy is
to take hold of and understand our future. To be indifferent
to it is to considerably weaken our ability to fight for and
realize humanity's, and our nation's, democratic, peaceful
and socialist future. "History cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois,"
Martin Luther King insisted. In the end we are called on to
heed the words of Dr. Martin Luther King who in celebrating
the 100th anniversary of DuBois' birth declared,
We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was
a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore
the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is
worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the
support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded
with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking
world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O'Casey was
a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or
that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest
living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a
Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that
Dr. DuBois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our
obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires
to be retained as it were a mode of scientific thinking.
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