The Ground of Empowerment

THE GROUND OF EMPOWERMENT W. E. B. Du Bois and the Vision of Africa’s Past by Tracey Lynn Thompson A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Tracey Lynn Thompson 2011 The Ground of Empowerment W. E. B. Du Bois and the Vision of Africa’s Past Tracey Lynn Thompson Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto 2011 Abstract Scholars have examined many aspects of W. E. B. Du Bois’s project of empowering oppressed peoples in the United States and around the world. However they have treated in only a fragmentary way one of the principal strategies that he used to counter hegemonic ideologies of African and African American inferiority. That strategy was to turn to the evidence of history. Here I argue that Du Bois, alerted by Franz Boas to Africans’ historical attainments, confronted claims made by European Americans that Africans and a fortiori African Americans lacked any achievement independent of European or other foreign influence. Du Bois linked African Americans to Africa and laid out repeatedly and in detail a narrative of autonomous African historical accomplishment. I demonstrate that his approach to the history of Africa constituted a radical departure from the treatment of Africa presented by scholars located in the mainstream of contemporary anglophone academic thought. I argue that while his vision of Africa’s history did not effect any significant shift in scholarly orthodoxy, it played a crucial role, at a grave juncture in race relations in the United States, in helping to equip young African Americans with the psychological resources necessary to challenge white supremacist systems. I contend that his vision of African civilizational achievement situates him in a tradition of ideological struggle waged by African Americans from the 1800s through the twenty-first century and that in regard to utilizing Africa’s past as the ground of empowerment the relationship of his approach with that of Afrocentrist scholars is marked by both disjunctures and continuities. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank the members of my committee for their unstinting support of my dissertation project. They were Dr. Rick Halpern, Dr. Michael Wayne, and Dr. Dan Bender. I wish to extend a special thank you to Rick, who chaired my dissertation committee and who went far beyond the call of duty to assist me in reconciling the demands of completing my dissertation with the demands of family and professional responsibilities in The Bahamas. In that connection I wish to thank as well Ms. Fang Zhang. Several institutions and organizations deserve special mention for their support of my project. The College of The Bahamas and the University of Toronto provided me with financial assistance, for which I am grateful, as did the Delta Kappa Gamma Society. A special word of thanks is owed to the kind donor of the University of Toronto’s Carmen Brock Fellowship. The research and administrative staff of a number of institutions were unfailingly gracious to me and expedited my research. In that regard I wish to thank the staff of the Department of Archives of The Bahamas, the Library of the College of The Bahamas, the Special Collections Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Interlibrary Loan Department of the University of Toronto. Most of all I wish to thank my parents, who encouraged me by their high example and by their faith in me, and my sisters Camilla and Kristal, who, in season and out of season, gave me their unequivocal support. iii Dedication To my mother and my father, now ancestral spirits, who gave their whole lives that I and every child of our country might have that opportunity to study and think and speak which they had been denied. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii DEDICATION iv CHAPTER 1. Introduction………………………………………………….……..…..1 2. Why Empowerment? The Souls of Black Folk..………….………...22 3. Whence Empowerment? The Question of Africa’s Past..….............62 4. Empowerment: The Vision of Africa’s Past…….………………......102 5. Empowerment: Professing the Vision...…….…………….…….…..141 6. Empowerment: The Ground…..…………………………...………..183 7. Conclusion……………………………………………………..……...218 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY v CHAPTER ONE Introduction I met a little blue-eyed girl – She said she was five years old; “Your locket is very pretty, dear; And pray what may it hold?” And then – my heart grew chill and sick – The gay child did not flinch – “I found it – the tooth of a colored man – My father helped to lynch.” “And what had he done, my fair-haired child?” (Life and Death play a fearful game!) “Oh, he did nothing – they made a mistake – But they had their fun, just the same!”1 When I set off for college thirty-odd years ago, I took with me a question that had planted itself in my mind from my early teens. What did it mean to be black in the world? What exactly were those harsh realities hinted at in glossy photographs of Civil Rights marches and Martin Luther King’s face in coffee-table books? The question arose because I was curious about my blackness. I knew that it was problematic. Television and radio programs and toys and games from the United States and Britain as well as colonial and metropolitan school curricula told me plainly that my skin, unlike my height, or my nationality, was a world issue. I also felt that I did not know the rigors of the experience of being black. I felt deeply my need to know. Without that knowledge I could not settle on a political and moral philosophy that I could ground my choices in as 1 Bertha Johnston, “I Met A Little Blue-Eyed Girl,” The Crisis Vol. 4 No. 3 (July, 1912), p. 147 1 time carried me out of childhood towards having to function independently in the world. In the face of that need, I was keenly conscious, and frustrated, that I had been protected, by being born into a society whose political leadership had changed from white to black before I was ten years old and whose colonial status had changed to political independence only a few years thereafter. Severities challenging black people were being experienced by people in other societies but not by me. I fancied myself living in South Africa for a while. I fancied myself living in the Deep South in the United States for a while. I also knew that there was no chance whatever of my going to South Africa. My parents, having grown to adulthood in Nassau in The Bahamas before Majority Rule, knew full well what black people had to face, and they were entirely conversant with the politics of South Africa. They had celebrated the music of Miriam Makeba; they had entertained her in our home when she had visited The Bahamas in the mid-1960s; they had followed the trajectories of black peoples at various locales around the Atlantic basin. They would not let me live in South Africa. Time passed; college lay on the horizon; and my father expressed a preference that I should go to the United States. And so I did get there, although not to the Deep South. I did learn something about racial politics, although not what I had expected to learn; but I completed college, and further studies, still feeling as if I did not have the existential understanding that I was searching for of the full meaning of being black in the twentieth century. Much more time passed, and my question lay adrift. But about the year 2003, answers to my question began to find me. They did so in a way that I did not expect. They came to me through reading, not through living. They arrived through my studying for my comprehensive examinations in History. I chose for my three fields of study African history, Caribbean history, and 2 African American history. In making those choices I had no idea of the spiritual assault that awaited me. By then the scholarship in those fields had reached a volume, a level of detail, a consistency of theme, and a charity of perspective that gave me many of the answers that I had been searching for without my having to live them in my own flesh. I read; and the reading changed me. The window into the mind of an exploitative and oppressive caste that the literature afforded me first depressed me, then angered me, and charged me with reworking those emotions into a force for healing and wholeness first for the one who suffers on account of others’ hostility and then for the one who hates. That project continues. In the meantime the awareness that gave rise to it is one of two spiritual spaces out of which I wrote this manuscript. The other spiritual space out of which I wrote this manuscript was my struggle to break the metal chains and locks of a still and blanketing silence. In the literature that I read as a child, the community into which I was born, so full of simplicity and dignity and humility, seemed to be unnamed and unspoken to the world and to me. Where was Auntie who had ‘minded’ my sisters and cousins and me at nights on Nassau Street? Where were Aunt Naomi and Aunt Blanche who had also helped with watching over us? Where was my grandfather who had brought brown crocus sacks of crabs from Exuma which my mother had used to make boiled crab and crab soup? Where was my great- aunt, Aunt Aggie, whom we had gone to ‘hail’ from time to time off Soldier Road? Where was my other great-aunt, Aunt Evie, the headmistress at the St.

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