The Making of a Radical:

W.E.B. Du Bois's Turn to the Left

by

J.D. Vivian

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

May 1997 The Making of a Radical:

W.E.B. Du Bois's Turn to the Left

by

J.D. Vivian

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Lewis, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

Supervisory Committee: /(Y/S~ r4J,5

Chairman, Department of English ~,.~~, n Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities

Studies

ii Abstract

Author: J.D. Vivian

Title: The Making of a Radical:

W.E.B. Du Bois's Turn to the Left

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis advisor: Dr. K. Lewis

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 1997

During his lifetime, W.E.B. Du Bois grew increasingly leftist. His early writings showed his optimism; his later works showed no such upbeat tone. Several developments fueled this metamorphosis: his controversies with Booker T.

Washington; his two acrimonious departures from the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People; his arrest and trial as an unregistered foreign agent.

In his early writings, Du Bois frequently mentions being "above the veil." In later works, the metaphorical garment--when mentioned at all--has become a prison. His early belief that the advancement of Negroes would depend on science and rational discourse was eventually replaced with a conviction that only economic reconstruction would allow his people to rend the veil keeping them in check and permit the working class--black and white--to cast off its chains.

iii Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Toward a More Perfect Union 9

Chapter Two: The Demise of Optimism 24

Chapter Three: Workers of the World, Unite 40

Conclusion 53

Notes 56

Works Cited 59

iv Introduction

While attending Fisk University in the 1880s, William

Edward Burghardt Du Bois was fired with optimism for his own future and that of his fellow Negroes. He wrote,

"Through the leadership of men like myself and my fellows

we were going to have these enslaved Israelites out of the still enduring bondage in short order" (qtd. in Lewis

A Reader 3). He knew the road to equality would prove tortuous; nevertheless, he believed that he and other well-educated blacks could, with hard work, elevate the lesser-educated. In 1893, Du Bois ended his essay "Cele­ brating His Twenty-fifth Birthday" with these hopeful words: "These are my plans: to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race .... and if I perish--! PERISH" (Against Racism 29).

Education would create a sense of self-consciousness in Negroes that Du Bois believed would help them advance.

But such was not to happen--at least not to the extent the scholar had envisioned and hoped. Unfortunately for Du

Bois, and despite his capable leadership, the "enslaved

Israelites" were still largely in bondage, even at his death in 1963, ninety-eight years after the end of the War

Between the States.

1 Du Bois's optimism suffered many setbacks, and eventually disappeared. His public disagreements with the powerful Booker T. Washington had been raging for about three years when in 1903 he penned The Souls of Black

Folk. But Du Bois had not then given up hope that all races would live in peace, even symbiosis. His opening essay to Souls, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings,'' asks African

Americans to work toward

the ideal of human brotherhood ... the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to •.. other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. (Souls 11)

Du Bois, even in this early essay, hints at what later would become a mantra: The road to true freedom for blacks--and whites--lay in mutual understanding and aid.

The scholar believed in the early 1900s that blacks, to gain equality, would need the help of whites. But he did not see this as a one-way street; instead, the two groups would face the future together, creating a formidable united front. ~ooking back in 1940 at this early point in his life, he wrote in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an

Autobiography of a Race Concept that he had not opposed the white world but merely wanted to become part of it:

"What the white world was doing, its goals and ideals, I had not doubted were quite right. What was wrong was that

2 I and people like me ... were refused permission to be a

part of this world" (27).

As Du Bois's life progressed and he saw more setbacks

in civil rights and endured more injustices--such as his

two oustings from the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People, an organization he helped

establish--his writings reflected less and less hopeful­

ness. In 1940, the decades of segregation and of blacks

being denied the right to participate fully in the

opportunities afforded whites had exacted their toll. Du

Bois no longer considered the veil a metaphorical garment

above which the members of his race could, through self­

sacrifice and hard work, rise.

In his early writings, he frequently mentions

escaping the veil: "I lived above it in a region of blue

sky ... That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at

examination time, or beat them at a foot-race" (Souls 4).

Du Bois could transcend the veil by studying and working hard, then outperforming his white classmates. By the

1940s, however, the veil, no longer a poetic metaphor, had become a stifling--and "horribly tangible"--prison. In

Dusk of Dawn, he compares segregation to being sealed away, prisoners in "a dark cave" attempting to speak to the world outside. Such an attempt is in vain, and Du Bois issues a tocsin to whites:

3 It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world .... They get excited ... (and] may become hysterical. (130-31)

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Du Bois became

what many Americans considered "radical": He grew leftist;

ultimately, avowedly communist. He wrote his controversial

"Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human

Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro

Descent in the United States of America," then tried

repeatedly to have it presented at the United Nations's

General Assembly. Furthermore, he "denounced the Marshall

Plan and (North Atlantic Treaty Organization] as capitalist aggression, and distributed an explosively detailed memorandum for restructuring NAACP headquarters"

(Lewis, A Reader 9).

Largely because of these actions, the NAACP fired Du

Bois as director of special research in 1948, an event that precipitated his final--and hard--turn to the left.

His early, optimistic belief that the advancement of

Negroes would depend on science and rational discourse had been slowly but steadily replaced with a conviction, held until his death, that only extreme measures--e.g., economic revolution and political force--would allow his people to rend the hated veil.

Events in Du Bois's life brought about this change: his controversies with Booker T. Washington; his acrimon-

4 ious departure in 1934 from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; his firing from the

NAACP in September 1948; and his February 1951 arrest and trial, with four others, by the u.s. government as unregistered "foreign agents" (Lewis, "Dilemma of Race"

39-42). This thesis will explore these and other important developments and their effect on his writings as Du Bois metamorphosed from an optimist to extreme pessimist.

Du Bois scholars such as David Levering Lewis and

Manning Marable have misinterpreted or exaggerated how various developments in his life affected him. Lewis argues that the second turning point in Du Bois's life (he delineates four) 1 occurred "with DuBois's two explosive exits in 1934 and 1948 from the NAACP; the third concerns his quixotic quest for foundation money during the late

1930s in order to launch the Encyclopedia of the Negro"

(Lewis, A Reader 3-4). These assumptions appear incorrect on several fronts. To begin, as this thesis will show, the

Du Bois of 1948 was a vastly different man from the Du

Bois of 1934; nor does a fourteen-year span constitute a single turning point. In addition, Du Bois's failure to find Encyclopedia funding in the late 1930s does not appear to have affected him to any significant degree.

Marable interprets too literally the definition of words. Du Bois "did not perceive the necessity to engage overtly in politics in order to fulfill his cultural and

5 social program" (37) (emphasis added). Marable forgets--or

conveniently ignores--that all social movements are

political. Why bother to protest if not to effect change

in the direction you perceive it is needed? Certainly, Du

Bois did engage in politics, throughout his life. Further­

more, Marable himself quotes Du Bois criticizing Booker T.

Washington because he "does not rightly value the

privilege and duty of voting" (qtd. in Marable 49). Later,

Marable credits Du Bois's Niagara Movement as ''the group

most willing to jeopardize its material and political

security in the effort to achieve democratic rights for

the Afro-American people" (56). Here, "democratic" can mean nothing less than political--and the call for those

rights by the head of an organization seeking such change

places Du Bois squarely in the arena of politics.

As early as 1897, in his essay "The Conservation of the Races," DuBois advocated "black solidarity" (Harding

57). Negroes would succeed, Du Bois wrote, when they were

"bound and welded together, inspired by one vast ideal"

(qtd. in Harding 57)--in other words, when they possessed cohesive political power. In his early days, Du Bois felt that such cohesion would result from education and enlightenment; later, he believed it came from economic restructuring, even dictatorship of the proletariat. The means were different, but the results would be the same:

African Americans would wield political strength. Du Bois

6 would bring this about by directing them. If that is not

political, what is?

Du Bois's published works include eighteen books;

more than twenty long pamphlets; and a huge body of

articles, columns, commentaries and speeches--not to

mention "110,000 items in the Du Bois correspondence

alone; some 100 related manuscript collections" (Lewis,

"Dilemma of Race" 39). And his literary efforts were not

only prolific but generative: Du Bois scholar Eric

Sundquist calls The Souls of Black Folk nothing less than

"the founding text of modern African-American thought"

(15); James Weldon Johnson, who wrote The Autobiography of

an Ex-Colored Man, said Souls had "a greater effect upon

and within the Negro race in America than any other single book ••• since Uncle Tom's Cabin" (qtd. in Redding 49).

This thesis deals with representative passages from a variety of writings that clearly show Du Bois's lifelong progression from "a generally conservative orientation to a more and more liberal and then, in his final two decades, an increasingly radical outlook" (Aptheker xi).

By quoting and analyzing the works that best reflect

Du Bois's changing ideology, this thesis will show that his early writings were filled with hope and poetic metaphor, his later ones with pessimism and excoriating prose. In 1897, his essay "The Conservation of Races"

7 expressed his hopes for the "talented tenth": "We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic to-day" (A Reader 24-25).

Optimism of a vastly different sort exudes from his

1960 speech "Socialism and the American Negro," which Du

Bois delivered the year before he joined the Communist

Party of the United States and three years before he died:

"Today more than half the people of the world live under socialism, which is growing toward complete communism .... there is no doubt that the world of the 21st century, will be overwhelmingly communistic" (Against Racism 305) . This thesis will condense the works of a lifetime of one of the civil rights movement's greatest minds.

The mechanics of Du Bois's articles--especially comma use--are, very often, different from those commonly used today. Nevertheless, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the sources quoted, all punctuation, capital­ ization, and spelling will be shown as written.

8 Chapter One

Toward a More Perfect Union

In one of his earliest essays "The Conservation of

Races" (1897), DuBois expresses the importance of race relations:

we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world's races have met, and the resulting problem as to the future relations of these types ... forms an epoch in the history of mankind. (A Reader 21)

In the same essay, Du Bois carefully stresses that the two races--African Americans and whites--could live together in harmony. Of course, he attached some conditions to the peaceful co-existence:

if ... there is substantial agreement in laws, language and religion; if there is a satis­ factory adjustment of economic life, then there is no reason why ... two or three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. (A Reader 24)

This amalgamation would require race enlightenment, self-sufficiency, cohesion, Negro institutions of higher learning, a black press, and black business groups and cooperatives. The end goal was virtually pre-ordained and noble:

9 There is no power under God's high heaven that can stop the advance of eight thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired and united people .... out of the blood and dust of battle will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of earth a Divine truth that shall make them free. (Du Bois, A Reader 25)

All this will require sacrifice--a common theme in Du

Bois's earlier works--and self-reliance.

In "The Conservation of Races," DuBois is optimistic that Negroes will aid their country if they become organ- ized and educated:

We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic to-day .... we need race organizations: Negro colleges, Negro newspapers, Negro business organi zations, a Negro school of literature and art, and an intellectual clearing house, for all these products of the Negro mind. (A Reader 24- 25)

He further believed that the races could benefit in a symbiotic relationship:

two races in such essential political, economic, and religious harmony as the white and colored people of America (can] develop side by side, in peace and mutual happiness, the peculiar contribution which each has to make to the culture of their common country. (A Reader 26)

First, however, all races must lift the veil. Du

Bois's metaphorical veil functions much like that in the

Book of Exodus: in the temple, "a large curtain (sometimes a double curtain) was hung to separate the 'holy of holies' from the public .... Only the high priest had authority to enter the place of sacred power 'within the

10 veil'" (Savory 335). Du Bois envisioned rending the veil the same way as that event occurred in the Bible: when

Jesus died on the cross, "'the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom'" (qtd. in Savory

335) .

In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," written in 1903, Du

Bois describes the day that the metaphorical garment descended on him. During a card exchange among his fellow students at school, a girl refused his card. He realized

"with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others ... shut out from their world by a vast veil" (4).

However, far from imprisoning him, the veil provided a pleasant escape for the young, intelligent, hard-working scholar who often bested his classmates:

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I ... lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race. ( 4)

While the veil represented something above which Du

Bois could rise--and he believed for decades that he would

--probably nowhere is his optimism more obvious than in the concept of his "talented tenth"--"meaning leadership of the Negro race in America by a trained few" (A Reader

347). This attitude placed DuBois in direct confrontation with the very powerful Booker T. Washington, who in 1895 had delivered what came to be known as the "Atlanta

11 Compromise"--his "cast down your buckets where they are" address. 2 In parts of his speech, titled "The Atlanta

Exposition Address," Washington sounds much like the Du

Bois of that time: pragmatic, optimistic. For example,

Washington said, "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem" (Washington 646). But Washington's next sentence presages the serious schism that would, eight years later, develop between the two: "It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top" (646). Du Bois believed the opposite: that all culture and all schools, whether academic or industrial, "spring from knowledge and culture, the children of the university. So must men and nations build, not otherwise, not upside down" (Souls 72).

Washington's "programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights" (Du Bois, The Souls 36) easily won converts, especially in the South. But

Washington's success created problems for schools such as

Atlanta University, where Du Bois was then teaching:

"Schools which were successfully carrying out this program could look for further help from organized philanthropy.

Other schools, and this included Atlanta University, could not" (DuBois, Dusk of Dawn 69).

Furthermore, Washington's power was increasing with the growing number of his followers. Du Bois did not like

12 some of the tactics. In the 1890s (no more specific date

is available), two of DuBois's friends from Harvard,

Monroe Trotter and George Forbes, founded The Guardian,

"the first Negro paper to attack Booker T. Washington with open opposition. Washington's friends retorted by sending

Trotter to jail when he dared to heckle Washington in a public Boston meeting" (Du Bois, Autobiography 138). Du

Bois considered the jail sentence unfair, a sentiment that later led him to form the Niagara Movement, the beginning of the NAACP.

An obscure yet crucial event provided the final impetus for the controversy between the two men, one "that arose in 1903 and increased in virulence until 1908" (Du

Bois, Dusk of Dawn 68). 3 Washington's speech--and the

Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson, which ratified the separate-but-equal doctrine--"was bringing a philan­ thropic freeze to academically oriented African American institutions like Atlanta University" (Lewis, "Dilemma of

Race" 40) . Du Bois had applied for the position of assistant superintendent of "colored" schools in the

District of Columbia and asked Washington for a reference, which he supplied. Soon, however, Washington sent Du Bois another missive: "I think it not best for you to use the letter of recommendation which I have sent you" (qtd. in

Lewis, "Dilemma of Race" 40). DuBois and his supporters blamed Washington for the lost superintendency, and this--

13 coupled with their differences about how best to "rend the

veil" for their people--led to a disagreement that became

very public, and very nasty, on publication of Du Bois's

The Souls of Black Folk in 1903.

Having been well educated, Du Bois "believed that

advancement of the so-called 'darker peoples' would come

through wise policies based on scientific knowledge"

(Lewis, "Dilemma of Race" 43)--and through work. Address-

ing in 1898 the graduating class of Fisk University, in a

speech titled "Careers Open to College-Bred Negroes," he

said:

Three universal laws underlie the necessity of earning a living: the law of work, the law of sacrifice, the law of service. The law of work declares that to live one must toil contin­ uously, zealously ... however ... the greater satisfaction comes from the sacrifice of today's enjoyment that tomorrow's may be greater ... We must not only work and sacrifice for ourselves and others, but also render each other mutual service. (Du Bois Speaks 89)

He sums up this segment of his speech by using a metaphor for which he would five years later become well known.

This, fellow workers, is the veil of toil that hangs before the vision glorious. And yet, when on commencement morning, we leave behind the vivid hues of this, our inspiration, believe me, it is not easy to guard the sacred image, to keep alive the holy fire that lights and lightens life ... How often do we see young collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink and shrink to sordid, ~elfish, shrewd plodders. (Du Bois Speaks 92)

14 The work providing the most insight into the optimism the scholar felt in the early 1900s is The Souls of Black

Folk. This book also shows the veil, which operates in this text as "Du Bois's apt metaphor for 'the color line' of racial oppression and injustice" (Savory 334). The metaphors and symbols the author uses in this work reflect his purpose in writing it--and his optimism that the members of the reasonable, white audience toward whom he directed it would come to understand blacks. "You misjudge us because you do not know us," he had written in his essay "The Talented Tenth" (qtd. in Lester 386).

The opening passages of Souls are pessimistic. Du

Bois's first sentence reads, "Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the

Twentieth Century" (1). Rather than "when," the author opted for "if"--a subordinating conjunction used to introduce a clause indicating uncertainty. The use of

"when" would have implied a more positive outlook. Du

Bois's opening sentence is actually replete with apparent warnings. For instance, readers will need to expend some time and energy on searching if they want to understand his message. Further, he warns that readers will "view faintly its deeper recesses" (1-2) (emphasis added).

Readers will merely glimpse some of what lies under the veil, but will not be given full admission. They will not

15 see into the deepest corners--only into the "deeper" ones.

Much as whites have excluded blacks from full participa-

tion in society, whites will not be allowed full under-

standing of what lies on the other side of the veil.

We can determine the optimism inherent in "The

Forethought" if we examine all its passages. Du Bois knew

that he needed the help of white readers, toward whom he targeted this book, to improve African-American lives. By the fourth paragraph, he is promising that readers will glean understanding:

Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses--the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls. (1-2)

Du Bois promises "many things" that will enlighten readers about their black countrymen and -women. But the numerous meanings "lie buried" in the text; readers must excavate them. They cannot, however, search too quickly-- they must explore "with patience" or they will miss what the author wants to show them. And despite their work, they still might not succeed: The "many things ... may show the strange meaning" (emphasis added).

Du Bois was confident that readers would expend the energy needed to discover that "strange meaning." After all, Du Bois believed that his audience wished to resolve the largest problem the United States faced at the time:

16 "This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle

Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the

problem of the color-line" (1). Thus, he hoped, Souls would spur his (mostly white) readership to action. The

author opens each chapter with a bar from the Sorrow

Songs, "weird old songs in which the soul of the black

slave spoke to men" (Souls 204). Du Bois begins each

chapter with a bar of the Sorrow Songs because they

symbolize--embody--the theme of Souls:

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope--a faith in the ultimate justice of things .... the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. (Souls 213-14)

The eleventh of the book's fourteen chapters delin- eates the brief life of Du Bois's son Burghardt, who died of diphtheria in 1899 because his parents could not find a competent doctor in segregated Atlanta. Nowhere is Du

Bois's optimism and joy more obvious--and, at the same time, poetic--than in "Of the Passing of the First-Born."

Moreover, this chapter escorts the reader on a roller- coaster ride--from joy to sorrow, then back to joy, then to sorrow. '"Unto you a child is born,' sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered into my room one brown October morning" (Souls 169). The paper sings. And it is not delivered; it flutters in as of its own free will, to brighten the gloomy morning.

17 He had been traveling but returned home and saw his

son for the first time. Du Bois at first did not love him

--"it seemed a ludicrous thing to love" (170)--but he came

to do so, then watched in wonder as his son began to grow.

"I came to love the wee thing, as it grew and waxed

strong; as its little soul unfolded itself in twitter and

cry and half-formed word, and as its eyes caught the gleam

and flash of life" (170). His euphoria was, unfortunately,

short-lived:

Why was his hair tinted with gold? ... Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?--for brown were his father's eyes, and his father's father's. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. (Souls 170)

Initially in "Passing," DuBois laments that his son

was born within the veil. But then Burghardt begins to

develop, and his father reflects on his son once he

reaches the age of eighteen months: "So sturdy and

masterful he grew, so filled with bubbling life ... we

were not far from worshipping this revelation of the

divine, my wife and I" (171). In fact, Du Bois's optimism

reached the point that. he came to regard Burghardt as a

sort of deity who would, by lifting the garment that held

African Americans in check, lead them toward a better

tomorrow. Du Bois further wrote:

I saw the strength of my own arm stretched on­ ward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger step onward in the wild phantasm of the

18 world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil. (171)

That dream ended with the two-year-old's death. But even the final moment of Burghardt's life, at eventide, provides poetic grist for Du Bois's mill: "I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leapt like a star that travels in the night and left a world of darkness in its train" (172). Du Bois mourns his son. Yet even through his heavy sadness, Du

Bois, toward the end of "Passing," once again becomes optimistic:

surely this is not the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me,--I shall die in my bonds,--but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning. ( 174)

Though saddened by the loss, Du Bois maintains his optimism for a brighter future for African Americans--as well as his belief in a supreme deity and in the importance of religion.

A year earlier, during the already mentioned 1898 commencement address to Fisk University graduates, he discusses the importance of the "Negro church" to its members: "As a social and business institution the church has had marvelous success. As a religious institution, also, it has played some part" (Du Bois Speaks 97). The speech takes the Negro church, collectively, to task, arguing it has failed "as a teacher of morals and inspirer

19 to the high ideals of Christianity" (97) because the wrong

people--i.e., untrained, uneducated men--have joined the

ministry. Du Bois poetically stresses the importance of

earnest, broad, and cultured ... men who will really be active agents of social and moral reform in their communities. There, and there only, is the soil which will transform the mysticism of Negro religion into the righteousness of Christianity. (98)

He concludes this speech on a further metaphorical

note:

through the weary striving and disappointment of life, fear not for the end, even though you fail: Truth forever on the scaffold Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above his own. (Du Bois Speaks 101)

Du Bois is saying that, though "Truth" will suffer constant travails and "Wrong" will play the role of king, the "scaffold sways the future"--i.e., rules or governs it

(a now archaic usage). Moreover, God remains vigilant; thus, Du Bois believes, truth will ultimately triumph.

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois alludes in "Of

Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" to his rival's immense power: "To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions" (38). In fact, Du Bois compliments Washington on the difficult task

20 he faces and how well he has performed: "it is no ordinary tribute to this man's tact and power that, steering as he must between so many diverse interests and opinions, he so largely retains the respect of all" (Souls 39).

Economics is the point where Du Bois critiques

Washington most acutely; specifically, Washington's willingness to surrender political and civil rights in exchange for economic development. Du Bois argued that this program was "becoming a gospel of Work and Money to

••• almost completely overshadow the higher aims of life"

(Souls 43).

And though Du Bois did not realize until many years later the full implications of the industrial North's subscribing to this program, he shows some sense of them here: "The rich and dominating North ... was not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely in

Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation. Thus ... the voice of criticism was hushed"

(Souls 43). The captains of industry were betting that if money could not buy happiness for Southern blacks, it could at least buy their silence.

At the time Du Bois wrote Souls, he "felt he was dealing with an essentially moral and intellectual issue"

(Gibson xxi) that might be addressed by education, reason, and science. In 1886, while a student at Fisk University,

Du Bois taught school "in the hills of Tennessee'' (Souls

21 51) . He quickly realized that educating young Negroes was

crucial. He noted some students "whose young appetites had

been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-

awakened thought. Ill could they be content And their weak wings beat against their barriers" (57).

Du Bois prophesied that such students would not long

be content to live within the veil; indeed, he envisioned

them serving as a vanguard to help their fellow Negroes

rend the garment. Du Bois saw such ill-contented students maturing into a well-educated "talented tenth," the academic elite among Negroes, who would spread the gospel of "work, culture, liberty--all these we need, not singly but together" (Souls 11). Education would lead, he believed, to a love of science and reason and to the development of a rational method for solving the world's ills.

Du Bois closes Souls with a final, poetic appeal to action and reason:

0 God the Reader ... Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful . ... may infinite reason turn the tangle straight, and these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed THE END. (217)

Hence, Du Bois considered Souls not a mature plant--a finished product--but a seed that would germinate and grow because self-sacrificing, rational people would help it do so. That viewpoint eventually vanished. He came to

22 discover that the fight for equal rights for African

Americans "was far less a moral or political issue than an economic one" (Gibson xxi) .

In 1930, Du Bois began studying seriously the writings of Karl Marx. As a result of the Depression and increasing unemployment, monthly circulation of The

Crisis, the newspaper of the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People, plummeted from 100,000 to

15,000. Du Bois, the paper's editor and one of the founders of the organization, felt the NAACP's general staff was ignoring the economic hardship facing blacks and instead "electing to pursue litigation and lobbying rather than to focus on economic strategies" (Lewis, Du Bois: A

Reader 6). Loans from the NAACP's general fund kept The

Crisis afloat but forced Du Bois to cede some editorial control to those with a less rabid pen. The stage was set for his departure from the NAACP.

23 Chapter Two

The Demise of Optimism

Du Bois's twenty-four years as editor of The Crisis was, in many respects, the zenith of his career. The first issue was published on August 1, 1910. By the end of 1915, the paper was financially self-supporting, and it remained so until 1933. By 1918, monthly circulation had skyrock- eted to more than one hundred thousand. Du Bois described proudly in his 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, the success of The Crisis:

It reached every state in the Union, beside Europe, Africa, and the South Seas .... With this organ ••• and with its legal bureau, lecturers and writers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was able to organize one of the most effective assaults of liberalism upon prejudice and reaction that the modern world has ever seen. (226-27)

Du Bois considered himself largely the reason for the paper's success: "If ... the Crisis had not been in a sense a personal organ and the expression of myself, it could not possibly have attained its popularity and effectiveness" (Dusk of Dawn 294). In other words, for more than two decades, The Crisis's editor rode the crest of a rising wave of influence--one that would crash in

1934 when he left the NAACP.

24 Other writers, too, have noted the heights to which

Du Bois rose during these years:

his place in the history of the Negro American and of the country, from which the history of the race cannot be divorced, is fixed as that of leader •... [This position crested] during the period of his editorship of The Crisis ... until 1934, when he broke with the NAACP over the issue of segregation. (Moon 15-17)

Du Bois's first ousting from the NAACP was brought about by his radically changed attitude toward segreg- ation. The catalyst was an editorial he wrote for The

Crisis. Since 1910, he had opposed segregation. In fact,

he and his magazine The Crisis were widely perceived as the very embodiment of the NAACP's struggle for racial integration. He had sustained a drumfire of editorials denouncing the segregationist policies of Woodrow Wilson ... the barbarous repression in the South and racial exclusiveness of organized labor in the North ••. He had demanded full political and social equality for his people ~ithout compromise. (Lewis, A Reader 5)

The impetus behind the change in Du Bois's attitude was economic. The Great Depression that began in 1929 exacted a tremendous toll on Crisis readers, who began to cancel subscriptions. Du Bois soon realized that the only hope for staving off mass economic destruction of his fellow blacks was to alter the policies of the NAACP:

in a world where economic dislocation had become so great as in ours, a mere appeal based on the old liberalism, a mere appeal to justice .•. was missing the essential need; that the essential need was to guard and better the chances of Negroes, educated and ignorant, to earn a living, safeguard their income, and raise the level of their employment. (Dusk of Dawn 295-96)

25 Once again, Du Bois noted, the salvation of the Negro depended on economic improvement. But the NAACP did not

support The Crisis editor's new policy, largely because the organization, which beginning in 1933 had to start

funneling money to support the paper,

had attracted the higher income group of colored people, who regarded it as a weapon to attack the sort of social discrimination which especially irked them; rather than as an organization to improve the status and power of the whole Negro group. (Dusk of Dawn 297)

In January 1934, Du Bois shocked many of his readers, and certainly the NAACP's board of directors, by reversing his longtime anti-segregation stance. In a Crisis editorial titled "Segregation," DuBois argues that "The experience in the United States has been that usually when there is racial segregation there is also racial discrim- ination. But the two things do not necessarily go together" (Du Bois, Emerging Thought 195). He adds a qualifier, however: "there should never be an opposition to segregation pure and simple unless that segregation does involve discrimination" (195).

This editorial further calls for Negroes to form communities and farms and exhorts readers to recall that their greatest advances in the past twenty-five years had occurred when they worked "by and for themselves" (195).

DuBois, ever the pragmatist, 6 brings up an interesting point in this attack against the very thing he had opposed

26 all his life: "never ... should our fight be against

association with ourselves, because by that very token we

give up the whole argument that we are worth associating

with" (196}.

In the last paragraph of this editorial, Du Bois

hints at what would become in future years his major

theme: the importance of class--not race--as the ultimate

savior of the working class. "It is the class-conscious workingman uniting together who will eventually emancipate

labor throughout the world" (Emerging Thought 196}. But

first, Du Bois argues in the closing sentence, African

Americans must help themselves:

It is the race-conscious black man cooperating together in his own institutions and movements who will eventually emancipate the colored race, and the great step ahead today is for the American Negro to accomplish this economic emancipation through voluntary determined cooperative effort. (196)

This theme, of mutual interdependence for blacks, would continue for some time to play a part in his writings.

His next Crisis editorial dealing with segregation, published two months later in March 1934, was titled

"History of the Segregation Philosophy." This essay details the economic roots of segregation. (Du Bois's writings had begun by this time to focus more on economics as the root cause of oppression, prejudice, and segregation.) At first, blacks brought to America were classed as laborers, most of whom had come from Europe and

27 had contracted to work for a specified amount of time. A distinction then arose between those who served for a

specific term and those who served for life. Once slavery became based on race, even the few free Negroes were forced to segregate themselves from whites. At the same time, however, as "History of the Segregation Philosophy" points out, free blacks did not want to associate with--or to be associated with--their slave counterparts.

The result was that there grew up in the minds of the free Negro class a determination and a prejudice which has come down to our day. They fought bitterly with every means at their command against being classed with the mass of slaves .... They objected to being coupled with black folk by legislation or custom .... They developed, therefore, both North and South as a separate, isolated group. (Emerging Thought 197)

The free blacks progressed economically and professionally. But the more successful they were on these fronts, "the more they protested against being called

Negroes or classed with Negroes, because Negroes were slaves" (197). Thus, segregation had long had economic roots--and economics had, even in the beginning, served to divide Negroes among themselves.

Economics, however, was not the only dividing factor in Negro life, according to Du Bois; religion also played a major part. The result of early religious segregation,

DuBois argued in "History of the Segregation Philosophy," ultimately proved beneficial. Richard Allen and Absalom

Jones, two leaders of the free colored people of Philadel-

28 phia, worshipped at St. George's Methodist Church. In the

late 1700s, emancipation in Pennsylvania was increasing

the number of blacks attending St. George's, and one

Sunday, the preacher announced that, to create enough room

for whites, blacks would have to worship in the gallery.

Du Bois equates what had happened in 1787 to what was

happening in the 1930s:

what would you have done, Dear Reader of 1934? ••• You might have been able to impress it upon the authorities of the church that you were not like other Negroes; that you were different, with more wealth and intelligence, and ... other Negroes should be sent to the gallery .•. You could walk out of the church, but whither[?] •.. There were no other white churches that wanted you .... You might have said with full right and reason that the action of st. George's was un­ Christian and despicable. (Emerging Thought 198)

None of these arguments, Du Bois points out, would have affected the attitude of St. George's clergy. Hence,

Jones and Allen walked out of the church and formed the

Free African Society. Their choices were limited: 1) request admission as a segregated group in some white organization; 2) form their own. Jones formed St. Thomas's

Church, in the Episcopal communion but a separate entity;

Allen formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church (198-

99). DuBois does not judge the merits of either approach; instead, he issues a call to arms: "No matter which solution seems to you wisest, segregation was compulsory, and the only answer to it was internal self-organization;

29 and the answer that was inevitable in 1787 is just as inevitable in 1934'' (Emerging Thought 199).

A controversy erupted over these two editorials. As

Du Bois's February editorial points out, the NAACP in its twenty-five-year history had never adopted or issued any statement opposing segregation. That prompted Joel

Spingarn, chairman of the NAACP's board of directors, to reply in the March 1934 Crisis that "the Association has always been opposed to segregation, though it never thought out clearly just what this opposition involved we have always believed that even voluntary segregation is evil" (Emerging Thought 201).

As mentioned, although Du Bois had long recognized the importance of economics in the struggle for equal rights, he began at this time to focus more on the topic.

Asked in late 1934 by Victor Robinson to write an essay on miscegenation for the physician's Encyclopedia Sexualis,

Du Bois contributed an entry, never published, that provides insight into his increasing emphasis on econo- mics. This period also served as the beginning of his transition to what many--especially at that time-- considered "radical."

In this essay "Miscegenation" (1935), the scholar begins by noting that European countries at that time:

being generally convinced of their superiority to other types of men, are opposed in theory to racial inter-mingling as tending to degrade

30 their stock. Beneath this, and supporting the conviction, are decided economic advantages based on the use of colored labor as an exploit­ ed caste, held in place by imperial military and naval expansion. (Against Racism 90)

In other words, one cannot breed with a people while

subjugating them. Du Bois further points out that no

"demand made on the human body or mind ••. would prove to be beyond the powers of the Negro" (Against Racism 92).

Unfortunately, the ability of the subjugated races to perform sufficiently in the larger society is never really the issue: Economics is, since it can provide--as it was doing with Adolf Hitler in Germany at that time--grist for the mill of oppression.

Hitler's renaissance of anti-Semitism is simply a part of the general resentment and suffering in Germany .•. present economic rivalry and racial jealousy give Hitler and his followers a whip today to drive the German people into clannish and cruel opposition to their Jewish fellow citizens. (Against Racism 95)

He also describes in "Miscegenation" the economic basis for laws forbidding interracial marriages. Such unions dated back to colonial days.

Many white women of the indentured servant class married slaves or free Negroes. Much confusion arose in the fixing of the legal status of the issue of such marriages ... because of their economic results. An indentured servant marrying a free Negro legally became free, and the child of a slave by a free white woman was according to American law also free. (Against Racism 96)

Despite the many civil rights setbacks he had witnessed over the years, Du Bois still was optimistic about the long-term effects of equal rights:

31 continued residence of white and black people together in this country over a sufficiently long term of years will inevitably result in complete absorption, unless strong reasons against it ... are adduced .... (But] it may be questioned if separate racial growth over a considerable time may not achieve better results than quick amalgamation. It is here that the nation needs the guidance of careful and un­ biased scientific inquiry. (Against Racism 100)

Thus, he ends "Miscegenation" with yet another appeal to

reason as a way to solve an important dilemma. He also

invokes his new, changed attitude toward segregation--that

perhaps "separate racial growth over a considerable time"

is preferable to quick desegregation.

Although Du Bois had altered his attitude toward

segregation, he was still optimistic about the role of science and rational discourse in creating a brighter future for all races in America. In 1935, he published

Black Reconstruction in America. His concluding chapter,

"The Propaganda of History," shows that he still retains his original belief that self-sacrifice and truth are worthy goals, but that the latter is in all cases more important than the former:

somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief .... What is the object of writing the history of Reconstruction? Is it to wipe out the disgrace of a people which fought to make slaves of Negroes? ... Is it to prove that Negroes were black angels? No, it is simply to establish the Truth, on which Right in the future may be built. (211-13}

32 ''The Propaganda of History" also describes a

situation in which Du Bois remained unpublished, losing an

important opportunity to supplement then-avail able

information about positive contributions by American

Negroes. The editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had

asked him to write an article for the new edition. Du Bois

insisted on including this statement:

White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union [and] estab­ lished the new democracy, both for white and black. (A Reader 203)

The editors were satisfied with his article, save

this one passage, which they refused to print. Du Bois

subsequently declined to print the article at all. The

editors had sacrificed truth for greater sales of their

encyclopedia. Du Bois's concluding sentence in "The

Propaganda of History" shows how daunting was the task

facing him: "in propaganda against the Negro since

emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupen- dous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social

life, and religion" (214). Du Bois realized that he was

fighting a formidable opponent--potent economic forces directing an entire culture and society--but he had not yet given up hope.

33 In another essay of 1935, Du Bois focuses on the

economic concerns of blacks and poor whites, and how they

interrelate. "The Negro and Social Reconstruction" is some thirty-five thousand words long; it too was never published because of the editor's "feeling that Du Bois's views were too radical, too challenging, too unusual"

(Aptheker 104). In this essay, far more than in earlier works, the civil rights leader draws parallels between poor, working-class Negroes and whites--and stresses economic reconstruction as the answer to improving the lot of all.

In "Chapter II: Political Power," Du Bois traces the evolution of black political power from 1867 to his present day. At first given the right to vote, African

Americans were later, from 1890 to 1910, denied that right as a result of Jim Crow legislation. Anti-discrimination legislation had been passed in some cases, but the record was spotty. The problem, once again, was that a lack of economic development caused a stasis in political advance- ment for Negroes:

Their political power could only have been permanently sustained by economic security-­ ownership of land, control of some capital and education .... But the power of the Southern landholders and capitalists hindered this and these efforts were reinforced by Northern capital; this economic combination ruined the political as well as the economic hopes of the Negroes. (Against Racism 108)

34 As a result of continuing economic depression, which had resulted in political impotence for African Americans, true emancipation of the Negro had, to this point, failed.

But poor whites also suffered: "the failure has been no greater in the case of Negroes than it has in that of whites. It has simply made the fact more clear that without economic reconstruction political freedom and power is impossible" (Against Racism 112). Du Bois has begun to sound much like his former nemesis, Booker T.

Washington, and much unlike the Du Bois of 1903, who wrote in "Of the Dawn of Freedom" that since the federal government could not "stand guardian over its helpless

[black] wards, then there is left but one alternative,--to make those wards their own guardians by arming them with the ballot" (Souls 32-33). He had reversed his stand of years before and, by the 1930s, saw that economics fuels political power, not vice versa.

In "Chapter III: Capital and Labor" of "The Negro and

Social Reconstruction," DuBois delves even further into economics. Once African Americans were freed after the War

Between the States:

it was evident from the first that economic power must underlie all efforts of the American Negro to establish himself .... The first clear and coherent plan to this end was presented by Booker T. Washington and enunciated at his celebrated speech at the Cotton States' Exposition, Atlanta, in 1895. (113)

35 Du Bois has come from vehemently criticizing Washington to

admitting, after four decades, that the economic program

initially advanced by the founder of "the Tuskegee

Machine" (Dusk of Dawn 71) was worthwhile.

Du Bois also admits in this chapter that Washington's

economic program, which included blacks surrendering

political and civil rights in exchange for training in

farming, industry, and artisanship through industrial

schools and a vocational-education program, was valid. At this point, Du Bois and Washington sound alike: Washington knew that African Americans must first "gain an industrial

status" (Du Bois, Against Racism 114) before they could effectively function in the political arena. By 1935, Du

Bois also realized that Negroes must advance economically before they could exercise political power.

In "Chapter III: Capital and Labor" of "The Negro and

Social Reconstruction," DuBois also analyzes the long- term effect of such a plan. He notes that the economic improvement of Negroes concerned--in some cases, panicked

--working-class whites:

the attempt to set up a Negro labor class in rivalry to white laborers led to increased race hatred and lawlessness in the South between white and black labor .... In the North, results were no better. White labor inherited from before the Civil War a fear of the competition of slave labor and of the competition of the free blacks. (115)

36 The working class was thus split into opposing

factions of white and black. Nevertheless, Du Bois saw

that this schism, if it could be closed, would unite the

divided working class. Sadly, economics was to play a

cruel trick on the beneficiaries of Washington's economic-

improvement plan. The number of farms owned by blacks

increased dramatically, from 97,458 in 1890 to 218,467 in

1910 (DuBois, Against Racism 116). Then came the

Depression, which wiped out many of those gains. Bankrupt

farmers--black and white--moved to cities and worked in

industry; the number of blacks in such jobs almost

tripled. Du Bois noted the harsh effect of prejudice--and

economics--on these people:

they did not become, as Washington had hoped, skilled workers and business leaders ... this was not the result of lack of skill or unwill­ ingness to work. It was partly the result of race prejudice and partly a change in the whole industrial system of the nation. (Against Racism 116)

Du Bois castigated American industrial leaders--all of whom were white--for not only allowing such a situation to develop but for purposely creating it. William Baldwin, president of the Long Island Railroad, exemplified the problem, according to Du Bois:

He knew that Negro labor with proper training and treatment could be made effective and he and other industrialists also feared the new demands and growing organization of unionism among white craft laborers. As a firm believer in capital­ istic exploitation, Baldwin ... wanted the black laborers trained in skilled industry .... [thus

37 curbing white workers of] their increasingly intolerant demand for a voice in industry. (Against Racism 114)

The deepening Depression had caused Du Bois to move

further toward believing that economic reconstruction

(later, economic revolution) was the only answer. He witnessed the economic devastation firsthand. Philanthropy

to black organizations declined, rivalry among black and white workers increased, revenues generated by membership

in the NAACP dropped, and subscriptions to The Crisis plummeted. This further decreased the likelihood that

Negroes would earn equality. Facing a rapidly declining economic base and escalating unemployment, white America was not concerned with racial equality. 7 Worse, "the difficulties which faced the Negroes in the basic matter of earning a living were so large ... that the Negroes themselves did not have the power to make effective their demands for their rights" (Against Racism 121) . Once again, the scholar points out that economics determines political power.

In 1939, Du Bois published Black Folk: Then and Now.

Nazism ruled Germany, the Spanish Civil War had just ended with a fascist victory, and "discourse on Africa at the time was largely dominated by colonialist perspectives ...

[that] assumed the backwardness of African cultures and the need for 'civilizing' influences" (Byerman 89). Du

Bois hated the rationale for subjugating, exploiting--and,

38 in many cases, virtually enslaving--Africans and other

peoples. (One white British authority, Sir Harry Johnston,

said of the Africans whom the whites had helped "save":

"They may have been drifting away from the human standard

back towards the brute when migratory impulses drew the

Caucasian, the world's redeemer, to enter Tropical Africa"

(qtd. in Byerman 89-90).

Du Bois more and more blames the increasing indust-

rial concentration of wealth and means of production for

the exploitation in Africa and elsewhere, and for the

economic hardship that had spread among American blacks

and working-class whites. He writes in Black Folk: Then

and Now:

There was a time when poverty was due mainly to scarcity, but today it is due to monopoly founded on our industrial organization. This strangle hold must be broken. It can be broken not so much by violence and revolution ... but by the ancient cardinal virtues: individual prudence, courage, temperance, and justice, and the more modern faith, hope and love. (qtd. in Byerman 98)

Du Bois's "political views by the late thirties and

forties had become more radical" (Byerman 98). They had not yet, however, become revolutionary.

39 Chapter Three

Workers of the World, Unite

In 1944, Du Bois returned to the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People, from which he had

resigned under fire in 1934. The purpose of the NAACP's

board in rehiring him, as director of special research,

was to provide window dressing. Du Bois's reason for

accepting the offer, which included a promise of two

offices and a secretary, was more practical. Having been

forcibly "retired" from Atlanta University at the age of

seventy-six with just a small pension and almost no

savings, "I was without employment to support me and my

family, and two men whom I regarded as close friends urged me to give serious heed to this invitation, Arthur

Spingarn and Louis Wright" (Autobiography 326). Du Bois quickly noticed that although the NAACP had grown tremend­ ously since his departure ten years before, it had become much like a business enterprise, and power lay in a few hands, notably those of Executive Secretary Walter White, whom Du Bois did not trust and who did not like Du Bois.

The following year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Du Bois as a consulting delegate to the establishment of the United Nations. Du Bois immediately

40 began to take to task the fledgling United Nations, an

"international body whose charter was ambivalent about the rights of colonial peoples" (Lewis, A Reader 9). His 1947 document "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the

Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of

Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of

America"--which Du Bois had tried repeatedly to have presented at the U.N. General Assembly during 1947 and

1948--caused the NAACP's board of directors to fire him.

His "close friends," Spingarn and Wright, had agreed to the firing.

"From then on, it was politics in earnest for Du

Bois. This was the beginning of the fourth and final turning point" to the left (Lewis, A Reader 9). Earlier,

Du Bois had believed that advancement of African Americans would come through rational discourse and scientific policies. Eventually, however, he came to understand that

"for black people the rights of citizenship ... (were] far less a moral or political issue than an economic one"

(Gibson xxi). In 1903, DuBois had penned, "I was different from the others shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil" (Souls 4). By 1948, he felt that the only possible salvation for Negroes was rending the garment completely.

An essay he wrote in July 1950 that appeared in the

Chicago Globe shows how much his vision had darkened since

41 the early days. Titled "I Bury My Wife," this essay summarizes his fifty-five years of marriage . Far from being the poetic tribute that "On the Passing of the

First-Born" was to his infant son, "I Bury My Wife" is written very matter-of-factly. "First-Born" ends with Du

Bois's plan to see his son again, when "I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet-- above the Veil" (Souls 175). No such spiritual optimism prevails in "I Bury My Wife." The most optimistic passages are these:

(My] dark fear that somehow she might outlive me and that I would be unable to care for her until the end--this was gone ... And I am infinitely glad that I lived long enough to keep her from poverty and worry and excess of pain and to see her die in honor and love. (A Reader 142-43)

Moreover, in this essay, Du Bois expresses regret that he has not been a model husband:

The family and its interests were never the main center of my life. I was always striving to guide the world and certainly the Negro group, so that always I was ranging away in body or in soul and leaving the home to my wife. She must often have been lonesome and wanted more regular and personal companionship than I gave. (~ Reader 142-143)

But the two harshest lessons--the two that would help to push him into the Communist Party--Du Bois had yet to learn. One lay in his bid for elective office, the other in being charged by the U.S. government as an unregistered foreign agent. In August 1950, he accepted an invitation from the American Labor Party to run for u.s. senator from

42 New York in that fall's campaign. His anti-war platform was well received in his ten campaign speeches and seven radio broadcasts, but he soon learned the harsh realities faced by a black man in a white political world.

Until this time, he had never run for political office and the experience embittered him.

My last speech in the city of New York was at that marvelous gathering of 17,000 persons at Madison Square Garden on October 24, news of which was nearly blacked out by the press .... I heard many stories of how the industries of Rochester and Syracuse threatened their workers [black and white]. (Autobiography 362)

Du Bois's limited finances hurt him, and opened his eyes to the electoral process:

Above all, I was amazed and exasperated by the overwhelming use and influence of money in politics. Millionaires and corporations, not record and logic, defeated [Vito] Marcantonio (a Du Bois ally running for u.s. representative from New York]. Dewey (Thomas Dewey, DuBois's opponent] could afford to spend $35,000 for one day on radio; while friends of mine the nation over sent $600 to further my campaign. Autobiography 362)

Du Bois pulled four percent of the vote. But that defeat was minor compared to what lay ahead.

His fiancee--Shirley Graham, to whom Du Bois had proposed marriage a few months after his wife's death--had arranged for a dinner, on February 23, 1951, to celebrate his eighty-third birthday. On February 14, already under federal indictment, Du Bois had married her because the couple feared the government would not otherwise let her

43 visit him in prison. On February 16, he was arraigned in

Washington, D.C.--he and four others having been indicted by the Justice Department on the charge of being unregistered foreign agents. Though the trial judge, after only two days, dismissed all charges, Du Bois was bitter.

He felt betrayed--not by the u.s. government but by the very people who, earlier in life, he believed would help him better the lot of their fellow Negroes:

The intelligentsia, the "Talented Tenth," the successful business and professional men, were not, for the most part, outspoken in my defense .... Other Negroes of intelligence and prosperity had become American in their acceptance of exploitation as defensible, and in their imitation of American "conspicuous expenditure" .... They hated "communism" and "socialism" .... This development of class structure was to be expected, and will be more manifest in the future, as discrimination against Negroes as such decreases. (Autobiography 370-71)

At this point, Du Bois fully recognized that economics played an even larger role in racism than he had previously believed. Hence, he could confidently predict the paradoxical: that discrimination against Negroes would slowly decrease, thus bettering them economically, at the same time that a divisive class structure would rise among them. His writings of this era reflect his feelings. He also began to paraphrase Karl Marx. In his article "There

Must Come a Vast Social Change in the United States," Du

Bois echoes the founder of communism: "to each according to his need and from each what he best can do, is the high

44 ideal" (A Reader 621). In this 1951 essay, he blasts the

American way of life, praising the communist approach as the only way left to save the country:

There is no way in the world for us to preserve the ideals of a democratic America, save by drastically curbing the present power of concentrated wealth, by assuming ownership of some natural resources, by administering many of our key industries and by socializing our services for public welfare .... either in some way ... we socialize our economy ... and inaugurate the welfare state or we descend into a military fascism. (621)

Two years later, his "Negroes and the Crisis of

Capitalism in the United States" focused on the effects of

Northern laissez-faire economics that had spread to the

South after 1865 and on its dehumanizing, exploitative effect on African Americans. In earlier writings such as

"Of the Dawn of Freedom," written in 1903, DuBois values highly the Negro right to vote, which Congress passed in

1870 after "justice and force joined hands" (Souls 33).

Not until years later, however, did the far more experienced--and disillusioned--scholar address the economic basis for this "force," which had resulted in the

Negro right to vote and its sad aftermath:

The nation yielded because only Negro votes could force the white South to conform to the demands of Big Business in tariff legislation and debt control. This accomplished, the nation took away the Negro's vote, and the vote of most poor whites went with it. (A Reader 622)

As earlier, Du Bois recognized that the economic future of Negroes was tied to that of poverty-stricken

45 whites. He also observed the effect of this bond on the

Southern working class even as the federal government and private industry, after World War II, poured billions of dollars into the new Southern "economic paradise" (A

Reader 622):

The mass of labor was historically split into white and black ... Southern labor was further split into organized and unorganized groups ••. This newest South ..• believes its present and future prosperity can best be built on the poverty and ignorance of its disfranchised lowest masses--(who] include not only Negroes, but Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the unskilled, unorganized whites. Progress by means of this poverty is the creed of the present South. (623)

Du Bois's later essays are not nearly as poetic as those of earlier days, especially those in The Souls of

Black Folk. He has fought many battles and been defeated; seen much history, but little of it that affected blacks in a positive way. As he notes in "Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism," however, these experiences have served to make him aware of the economic aspects of class struggle, and how blacks--and whites--are victims:

If Negro wages were low in the South, what business was that of New England white labor? Today the union man sees that it was his business. The factories are moving out of New England and the North into the South .... Wages in the South are 20 percent lower than in the North, and Negro wages ... at least 20 percent below white wages. (A Reader 624)

Furthermore, in another passage reminiscent of Marx, ou

Bois points out "a paradox of capitalism: in the South, the nation, and the world, the workers are too poor to buy

46 the textiles they need; while machinery is able to make more textiles than its owners can sell at the prices they demand" (A Reader 624). In other words, capitalism has become too efficient, an eventuality that Marx had predicted in The Communist Manifesto.

Unlike Marx, however, Du Bois does not predict a positive outcome in this working-class struggle. Far from it. At this time, many blacks were leaving the South, moving North to earn slightly better wages and to enjoy more opportunities in industries, many of which were opening up for the first time to African Americans. That, of course, pitted them against the heretofore higher-paid whites whom they were replacing. Du Bois predicted pessimistically how these related trends would play out in the future, for he saw that even this progress--in 1953,

Negroes were, after all, gaining economically, however slightly--was a double-edged sword:

the color bar will not release the main mass of the group. The bar may bend and loosen. Rich Negroes may travel with less annoyance; they may ••• eat in the more costly restaurants •.• the wall of segregation in education may be breached. But with all this, what results? The color bar in this nation will not soon be broken. Even as it yields in places, the insult of what remains will be more deeply felt by the still half-free. (A Reader 625)

Economic progress, in his view, would do nothing more than create a two-tiered society of blacks: the haves and the have-nots. They would not, as Du Bois had earlier

47 hoped, stand on equal footing with each other--much less

with whites. Worse, blacks were becoming more divided than

ever. "Some Negro leaders with much to lose in property,

credit, or reputation have yielded to panic; two colored

authors in recent new editions of their books have deleted

references to Paul Robeson and myself" (A Reader 625) .

This passage does not sound at all like the poetic, metaphorical "Of Our Spiritual Strivings'' of fifty years

earlier: "we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith

and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness"

(Souls 11-12). In the 1950s, DuBois observed, many

African Americans in the best position to effect positive change for their people were selling their "birthright for a mess of pottage" (Johnson 510-11) . The final result would be, Du Bois predicted at the end of "Negroes and the

Crisis of Capitalism," class warfare:

When the whole caste structure finally does fall, Negroes will be divided into classes even more sharply than now, and the main mass will become a part of the working class of the nation and the world, which will surely go socialist. (A Reader 625)

Just how much Du Bois had come to believe in the importance of economics--indeed, many of his later writings focus largely on the subject--can be seen by a

1958 speech in which he warned Africa against accepting help from outside:

Boycott the export of big capital from the exploiting world, led by America. Refuse to buy

48 machines, skills and comforts with cocoa, coffee, palm oil and fruit ... Live simply. Buy of the Soviet Union and China. Save thus your own capital and drive the imperialists into bankruptcy or into Socialism. (Autobiography 402)

In a subsequent speech that was, due to a long

illness Du Bois suffered while traveling in Russia,

delivered by his wife, Shirley Graham, Du Bois predicts

the downfall of laissez-faire economics and government.

Speaking at the All-African Conference held in Accra,

Ghana, 8 in December 1958, Graham said,

The whole world, including Capitalist countries, is moving toward Socialism, inevitably, inexorably. You can choose between blocs of military alliance, you can choose between groups of political union, you cannot choose between Socialism and Private Capitalism, because Private ownership of capital is doomed. (Autobiography 402)

Du Bois considered true socialism a combination of econ-

omics and politics in which the highest ideal of a citizen

was to serve the state. In return, the state, composed of

the "mass of workers with hand and brain" (Autobiography

402), would have one function: to ensure the collective

prosperity of those who constitute it--the workers

themselves.

After reminding the conference attendees that the·

original African tribes were communistic--no tribesman was

free; all were servants of the tribe; the chief was the voice; the tribe carried on trade through individuals

49 (403)--his speech exhorted listeners not to accept goods

or loans from

the colonial powers like France, Britain, Holland, Belgium and the United States ... You can starve a while longer ... A body of local private capitalists, even if they are black, can never free Africa; they will simply sell it into new slavery to old masters overseas ...• Africa awake, put on the beautiful robes of Pan-African Socialism. You have nothing to lose but your Chains! (403-04)

Du Bois had written The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du

Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life From the Last Decade

of Its First Century (his third autobiography) from 1958

to 1959 and revised it slightly in 1960. He carried it

with him to Ghana in 1961 when he began his exile. At the

end of part one is a short, two-page interlude titled,

simply, "Communism." In it, the scholar reveals his

thoughts on the movement that he believed would sweep--

was, in fact, sweeping--the world:

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 .... Once I thought that these ends could be attained under capitalism, means of production privately owned, and used in accord with free individual initiative. After earnest observation, I now believe that private ownership of capital and free enterprise are leading the world to disaster. (57)

But Du Bois did not stop there. In subsequent paragraphs, he makes even stronger statements:

I shall therefore hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way that I can:

50 without deceit or hurt .•• without war; and with goodwill to all men of all colors, classes and creeds •.•• I know well that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task ... it is my duty to contribute whatever enlighten­ ment I can. This is the excuse for this writing which I call a Soliloquy. (57-58)

Du Bois joined the Communist Party of the United

States in 1961. 9 Shortly afterward, at the invitation of

Ghana President Kwame Nkrumah, he moved to Ghana. Nonethe-

less, Du Bois--even at the age of ninety-three--was not content to retire; Nkrumah wanted him to produce an

Encyclopedia Africana, a longtime dream of Du Bois's. In

1963, the scholar renounced his u.s. citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana. He suggested a march there to support the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, scheduled for August 28, 1963. DuBois died the day before that historic civil rights demonstration.

On August 29, a state funeral was held in Ghana, at which Nkrumah delivered "Tribute to W.E.B. DuBois." The short speech included a list of the departed scholar's accomplishments: "poet, historian and sociologist"

(Nkrumah, DuBois Speaks 327). Furthermore, "He was an undaunted fighter for the emancipation of colonial and oppressed people, and pursued this objective throughout his life" (327). That was literally true: At the time of his death, at ninety-five, Du Bois was still working on the Encyclopedia Africana--a publication he hoped would

eliminate the artificial boundaries created on this continent by colonial masters. Designations

51 such as "British Africa," "French Africa," "Black Africa," "Islamic Africa" too often serve to keep alive differences which in large part have been imposed on Africans by outsiders. (Du Bois Speaks 323)

Almost twenty years before his death, Du Bois, bitter

and hurt after being involuntarily retired from Atlanta

University, expressed his feelings by quoting poet Sara

Teasdale:

"When I can look life in the eyes, Grown calm and very coldly wise, Life will have given me the Truth And taken in exchange--my youth." My youth? I laughed grimly. It was not my youth that I was losing; it was my old age. (Autobiography 324)

He died--in old age--still seeking "the Truth."

52 Conclusion

W.E.B. Du Bois left behind a literary legacy, a huge oeuvre whose message was essential to development of the civil rights movement. "There is no American thinker of his time who may vie with Du Bois in terms of the depth and breadth of his achievements" (Gibson xxxv) . His writings reflect his paradoxical life--from privileged Negro growing up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to optimistic scholar and advocate of equal rights for all to disillusioned, capitalist-hating Communist Party member who, in the last year of his life, became a citizen of Ghana. "Being Negro ... limited his opportunities and yet propelled him into a role in which he achieved possibly greater distinction than he would have if he had not been so restricted" (Moon 37). Du Bois was never content merely to decry racism. He wanted--through education and its corollary, the "talented tenth"; through reason and scientific thought; through truth and right--to eliminate racial barriers for the betterment of all races. At twenty-five, Du Bois wrote in his diary, "be the truth what it may, I shall 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

53 I die" (qtd. in Foner 3). He spent a lifetime searching

for that truth--and trying to discover a formula by which

he could better the lives of others.

He did not live long enough to see the fruits of his

seventy-year civil rights struggle mature. Nevertheless,

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois sowed seeds that others would, later, fully harvest:

Du Bois's importance lies both in the influence of The Souls of Black Folk ... and in the fact that he made the twentieth-century "problem of the color line" ... the point of departure for a diaspora aesthetic whose ramifications would be realized only over the course of the century in the growth of postcolonial and minority liter­ atures. (Sundquist 15)

On his ninetieth birthday, Du Bois spoke to two thousand friends and well-wishers; but he addressed his speech to his great-grandson, and part of it reveals the secret of his success: "I have been able to earn a living by doing the work which I wanted to do and work that the world needed done" (Autobiography 398). Unfortunately, at his death three years later, the world still needed his work. Nevertheless, everyone should be so lucky as to be able to say what Du Bois did on that night.

The day after DuBois's death on August 27, 1963, Roy

Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a participant in the August 28 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, delivered the sad news to the two hundred fifty thousand

54 people attending the march and to those listening to the

radio or watching television. "It was an historic

coincidence--the passing of the nation's foremost advocate

and symbol of racial protest and the opening of the

greatest protest assembly in the history of the nation"

(Moon 11). A life filled with irony had ended on a final

note of it. On the Washington Mall, listening to the

speech, was "an audience which would have pleased the

departed leader--its vastness, its orderliness, its

representative character, and its purpose of peaceful

protest" (Moon 12).

Du Bois's writings enjoy a distinct advantage over

anything penned today, no matter how well researched:

"History written in 1991 rarely, if ever, captures the

feel of 1891" (Andrews 297). With his numerous contribu­

tions to literature, Du Bois ensured the retention of that

feeling. He lived through the degradation of Jim Crow and

described its pain; he burned at prejudice and delineated

its effects--in short, he penned an era's history. Thanks to the words he left behind, readers today can relive it.

55 Notes

1 In fairness to Lewis, this thesis must point out that the other two turning points--Du Bois's controversy with Booker T. Washington and Du Bois's "hard turn to the

Left during the 1950s" (A Reader 3-4)--are correct.

Further, Lewis adds a qualifier before he delineates what he calls the "four developments": he narrows the field to these four points "at the price of justice to this long and rich life" (3).

2 In 1895, after Washington's speech, many newspapers with predominantly African American readerships condemned his proposal of compromise. Du Bois, however, initially supported the concept, "if the South opened to the Negroes the doors of economic opportunity and the Negroes co­ operated with the white South in political sympathy" (Du

Bois, Dusk of Dawn 55). But soon after the speech, the

South began restricting Negroes' right to vote and enacted

Jim Crow laws.

3 Ironically, Du Bois had applied to Tuskegee for a teaching position. But Washington's 1894 offer--"Can give mathematics if terms suit" (qtd. in Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn

49)--arrived eight days after Du Bois had accepted a position teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce

University in Ohio.

56 4 One of the reasons Du Bois became pessimistic later

in life was because of these "sordid, selfish, shrewd

plodders" who valued materialism over spiritualism. Many

of his former "friends" abandoned him after he was accused

in 1951 of being a foreign agent; he also saw many young,

intelligent African Americans following the lure of money

rather than helping to lift the veil. hanging between their

people and the white world.

5 Though Du Bois does not mention the Industrial

Workers of the World, its actions and quick demise could

not have escaped his notice. The IWW was the only signifi­

cant union to include blacks. Members used strikes and

sabotage in addition to their motto--"The final aim is

revolution" (Norton 272)--to further their goals. But

government jailings and deportations of "communist"

members from 1917 to 1920 soon led to the union's breakup.

6 Du Bois had studied at Harvard under William James,

a well-known pragmatist. Giles Gunn, in his book Thinking

Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the

New Pragmatism, calls Du Bois one of that philosophy's

"most vigorous if unacknowledged advocates" (2).

7 As a result of this hardship, increasingly liberal

political movements arose in the early 1930s and gained in

popularity. Louisiana Senator Huey Long's Share our Wealth

Society promised enormous taxes on the wealthy to ensure a minimum annual family income of two thousand dollars; this

57 movement attracted seven million members by 1935. In addition, the Communist Party stopped advocating violent overthrow of the U.S. government and began to cooperate with trade unions and intellectual organizations. Its membership increased substantially through 1938.

8 In 1961, Du Bois, disillusioned with the glacial progress of civil rights in the United States, exiled himself to this city. Kwame Nkrumah was the head of state.

9 This coincided with President John Kennedy's realization by August 1961 that his New Frontier program-­ which included civil rights for Negroes, federal aid to education, medical care for all, and the abolition of poverty (Norton 490)--would not pass Congress.

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61