92 DL6b Broderick, Francis L $>5,00 *EBo Du Bois, Megro leader lii a time of crisis. Stanford, Calif 0, Stanford University Press, 1959* 259p* MOV 10 1!75 WEF ,HJ1 STACKS 92 D816b Broderick, Francis L. W.E.B. Du Bois, Negro leader in a time of 1959. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten William Edward Burghardt DuBois W. 8. ft NEGRO LEADER IN A TIME OF CRISIS by Francis . Roderick STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Stanford, California 1939 STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 1959 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-7422 PUBLISHED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE FORD FOUNDATION To Mother and Dad W^TPORT OCT 29 1959 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A study of the public career of a complex figure like William Edward Burghardt DuBois, who has put so much on the record and who has been a controversial figure for over half a century, of invites controversy at almost every chapter. It is not the job the historian to avoid controversy. It is his job to reconstruct the his past as accurately as his limitations permit, even when judg I done. ments contradict existing judgments. This is what have My intention has been neither to exalt nor to demean Dr. DuBois; it has been to understand him in the context of his time. My work has put me in debt to many people. At the head of the list is Dr. DuBois himself. Not only did he ease my way into sources of information, such as the Harvard archives, which other wise would have been unavailable; he also gave me unlimited access to his own voluminous papers. Since he has kept full and a sizable well-organized files since his adolescence, this opened up im body of material without which it would have been almost first half of his life. possible to look into the Unfortunately my research had been carried only to 1910 when, at the time of his indictment by a federal grand jury in 1951, he closed his papers had to to outsiders. My chapters for the period following 1910 I rely on other material, published and unpublished. am grate collected. While ful for his permission to use the material already I worked in Dr. DuBois s office, first at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and then at the Council on African Affairs, I had the continuing cooperation of his sec in the months of of retary, Lillian Murphy, and, early my work, his research assistant, Hugh H. Smythe. Dr. Smythe did much a to orient me in Negro history and made available to me number of DuBois s speeches in 1948. Many others have helped along the way. I have a continuing the work from the be obligation to Oscar Handlin, who guided both ginning and gave the final version a close critical reading, vii VH1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS for style and for content. His own published work suggests what a valuable aid this has been. Walter P. Metzger read through the manuscript carefully; almost every page is better because of his suggestions. Richard F. Niebling and Janet Wicks Gillespie went over the text with me chapter by chapter, and Henry W. Bragdon gave me some valuable tips on organization. Eric F. Goldman advised me in the early stages. Herbert Aptheker did much to ease my orientation in the DuBois papers and generously made available to me the work he had done in the DuBois papers on the Movement. Leslie H. Niagara Fishel, Jr., pointed out many bits of material on DuBois in the Negro press. I profited a great deal from conversations with C. Flint Kellogg, who worked in the DuBois papers at the same time as I, and even more from a three- day exchange of views and notes with Elliott M. Rudwick, who was studying DuBois from a different point of view. Arna Bon- temps helped me track down a reference on DuBois and gave me a comment on DuBois s influence on revealing the "Negro Renais sance." The late Walter White allowed me to look at the files of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and to study the minutes of its board of directors. Until the late of I knew stages my work, August Meier only through his writings. Personal acquaintance has confirmed what is apparent in his pub lished workthat a is, subtle grasp of Negro history of the past hundred years. and librarians carried Library toleration far. I am grateful for the courtesies of the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Har the Davis at vard, Library Phillips Exeter Academy, the manu division of the of script Library Congress, the Sterling Memorial at Library Yale, the New York Public Library and its branch, the the Schomburg Collection, Union Theological Seminary Library, the Boston Public the State Library, University of Iowa Library, the Howard University Library, and the Congregational Library in Boston. I owe a special debt to Jean Blackwell at the Schom Collection and to P. burg Margaret Tate at the Davis Library. My wife, Barbara Baldridge Broderick, has put up with much in the name of DuBois. Her patience has been admirable, but her judgment and skepticism have been worth even more. I can see ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX why scholars want wives, but I do not understand how they can get them. Though everybody knows it, I suppose I must say explicitly that none of these people bears responsibility for anything which appears below. Parts of the material in this book have appeared, in different form, in the Progressive, the Journal of Negro Education, Phylon, and (without my permission) in the Negro History Bulletin. A word on the footnotes. I am reluctant to weigh down the book with them, yet anxious to satisfy the curiosity of the reader about the precise time and place of something Dr. DuBois has said. The result is a compromise which, like most compromises, will satisfy nobody. I have given the source for quotations close to the length of a sentence, but not for single words or phrases picked up because of their characteristic flavor. In borderline cases, I have followed my own whim. When I discuss Dr. DuBois s books at some length, it has not seemed necessary to add dozens of useless citations for each page from which a quotation was drawn. F. L. B. Exeter, New Hampshire November i, 1958 PREFACE American liberation from as the of Negroes greeted slavery "day not that freed them for a jubilee," realizing emancipation only long struggle, the end of which is still not in sight. That struggle has now been carried on beyond three generations, and for each of these there arose a leader whose career symbolized an epoch. For thirty years, from 1865 to 1895, Frederick Douglass spoke for Negro America. A crusading abolitionist, he carried the tra dition of democratic idealism into the period when the goal of freedom was not the abrogation of slavery but the enjoyment of political, civil, and social equality. A loyal Republican office holder, Douglass continued to demand full rights for Negroes even after they were set adrift by the party of Lincoln, and when the South began to impose ever narrower limitations on Negro equal ity. Until his death in 1895, he spoke brave words. But by 1895 they were hollow words. As if by prearrangement, Booker T. Washington came to na tional prominence the year Douglass died. The principal of a Negro industrial school in Alabama, Washington viewed the Ne gro s plight from its lowest economic level, not from the plane of justice. The period of his leadership coincided with the great retreat into disfranchising constitutions and Jim Crow legislation in the South. Though he never repudiated a single long-range goal of Douglass s program for Negro progress, Washington was prepared to move cautiously through a dark night, speaking soft words to white men and careful words to colored men. For twenty years Washington appealed to a national mood of moderation on Negro rights: economic progress, especially through industrial education, and postponement of civil, political, and, above all, social equality. At Washington s death in 1915, the Negroand perhaps the nation as a whole was ready for the uncompromising demands of W. E. B. DuBois. Some would say that the leadership passed xi xii PREFACE years before; but that would be hard to concede. Long restive under Washington s acquiescence in second-class citizenship, Du- Bois ordered the Negro to be a man and demanded that white America recognize him as such. Slowly at first and then in in creasing numbers, the race responded, so that even when DuBois faltered after thirty years of shouting, enough of the race had heard him to carry on without him. A generation looking for Negro equality by 1963, the hundredth anniversary of the Eman cipation Proclamation, is using his great ideas. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Preface xi I. The Search for a Career i II. The Scholar s Role 33 III. From Tower to Arena 55 IV. Entente with White Liberals 90 V. Pan-Africa and Socialism 123 VI. Negro Chauvinism 150 VII. The Time of Hesitation 180 VIII. The Eclipse of Race 198 IX. The Man behind the Myth 227 Bibliographical Note 233 Notes 237 Index 253 Xlll THE SEARCH FOR A CAREER After his birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Will DuBois took twenty-six years to settle on a career. A black man in a white culture, he learned that the barrier of color created two worlds: a dominant white society and a separate Negro com munity.