Cassius Clay
7th June 2003, 15:03
The Science of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois
By Dr. Anthony Monteiro
W.E.B. DuBois was one of the twentieth century's great scientifi minds. His intellect was impressive for its scope, discipline, rigor, creative and heroic imagination . His accomplishments in the battles to end racism and colonialism, and to bring peace and socialism to the world's peoples, are as impressive. Ultimately his scientific discoveries and predictions concerning race, civilization, world and African history have significantly altered world ideological relationships. Extending, as it were, scientific foundations for working class and peoples unity and enhancing the ideological conditions for socialism. Moreover, the modern civil rights and African liberation movements owe more to him than any other single person. As the leader of the Pan African Movement between 1919 and 1945 his impact upon African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Namdi Azikwe, Almicar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane and Sekou Toure, to name a few, was considerable. He was a founder of the World Peace Council and fighter against the Cold War. He fought in th early part of this century for the rights of women, including the vote for Black and white women.
DuBois was born three years after the end of the Civil War, at the beginning of
Reconstruction, on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington Massachusetts, to Alfred
and Mary Burghardt DuBois. He passed away gently in the West African nation of
Ghana on August 27, 1963 where he had gone at the invitation of President
Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah to start work on an Encyclopedia Africana. Nkrumah
speaking over Ghanaian radio summed up DuBois's life with simplicity and
eloquence. "Dr. DuBois", he said, "is a phenomenon. May he rest in peace." The
world's democratic and revolutionary forces over the next days would bid farewell
to DuBois as a comrade in arms. Gus Hall, General Secretary of the CPUSA, Chief
Awolo, leader of Nigeria's independence movement, Cheddi Jagan of British
Guiana, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria's National Liberation Front, President Kim Il
Sung of The People's Democratic Republic of Korea, and Walter Ulbricht of the
German Democratic Republic paid the highest tribute to his life and work. Ulbricht
wished that "the memory of Dr. DuBois--an outstanding fighter for the liberation
and prosperity of Africans--continue to live in our hearts." Chou En-lai, head of
state of China, insisted that DuBois's life was "one devoted to struggles and truth
seeking for which he finally took the road of thorough revolution." Nikita Kruschev,
General Secretary of the CPSU wrote to DuBois's wife Shirley Graham DuBois
that her husband's "shining memory" would remain forever "in the hearts of the
Soviet people."
Paul Robeson said of him, "His is a rich life of complete dedication to the
advancement of his own people and all the oppressed and injured." He continued,
"... let us not forget that he is one of the greatest masters of our language: the
language of Shakespeare and of Milton on the one hand; and on the other, of the
strange beauty of the folk speech-- the people's speech-- of the American Negro...
"For Dr. DuBois gives us proof that the great art of the Negro has come
from the inner life of the Afro-American people themselves....and that
the roots stretch back to the African land whence they came."
DuBois, however, wrote his own last will and testament some years earlier. In his
posthumously published Autobiography, subtitled "A Soliloquy on Viewing My
Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century" he wrote, "I have studied
communism long and carefully in lands where they are practiced and in
conversation with their adherents, and with wide reading. I now state my
conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism." He declared, "I shall
therefore hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way that I
can...I know well that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task,
involving mistakes of every sort. It will call for progressive change in human nature
and a better type of manhood than is common today. I believe this possible, or
otherwise we will continue to lie, steal and kill as we are doing today." The path he
traveled to arrive at this conclusion was complex, often contradictory, yet filled with
profound meaning.
DuBois's scientific and scholarly work were organically intertwined with his life and
revolutionary activity. The profound importance of his scientific achievements were
that they laid the materialist foundation for the study of race and racial oppression.
He established that racism and colonialism were central organizing mechanisms of
the modern world. That they stood along side and were in dialectical relationship to
the system of capitalist exploitation. In the end, the world could not be understood
or changed without grasping this central dynamic.
THE PATHS OF HIS SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT
The ultimate form of DuBois's scientific work is inseparable from his humble and
working class beginnings. His family was one of an estimated thirty five African
Americans families living in the Berkshires at the time of his birth. While race
prejudice was not unknown to whites or Blacks in Great Barrington, it in no way
took on the violence and brutality of the South's Jim Crow segregation. As he
reached his teenage years he knew he was racially different than most of his
classmates, however, he overcame the affects of prejudice through becoming an
academic overachiever. And he could in this racially ambiguous environment fall
back upon the fact that while the blood of Africa flooded his veins, there was as he
said a "strain of French, a bit of Dutch". His racial identity, however, would only
achieve its permanent anchorage when he began college in Nashville Tennessee at
the historically African American Fisk University. Still, it was his humble roots and
his experience with racial prejudice, albeit considerably milder than the bulk of
African Americans were experiencing in the South, that shaped within him a
democratic sensibility early on. At the age of fourteen in his first published articles
appearing in The New York Globe, an African American newspaper published by
the radical T. Thomas Fortune, DuBois evidenced a moral rejection of racism. A
moral sensibility which would assert itself throughout his life, finding intellectual
expression in his greatest works.
At Fisk University his general democratic leanings were deepened. As he would put
it, it was during this period that he "learned to be a Negro." The summer after his
sophomore year was spent in the poverty ridden Black Belt of rural Tennessee. He
later wrote, he "touched the very shadow of slavery." DuBois biographer David
Levering Lewis writes of this period,
Wilson County, Tennessee, would remain in his memory bank for a
lifetime, influencing a prose to which he was beginning to give a mythic
spin, his conception of what he would later call the black proletariat, and
most profoundly, his gestating, romantic idea about African American
`racial traits'."
This early experience with the Black Belt proletariat would germinate throughout
his life finding theoretical and social scientific expression in among other works The
Souls of Black Folk(1903),"The African Roots of the War" (1914) and eventually
in his monumental Black Reconstruction (1935).
In the Fall of 1888 after graduating from Fisk he entered Harvard to pursue an
undergraduate degree in philosophy. He found his Harvard professors no more
qualified than those at Fisk, only better known. He would at Harvard come in
contact with the new liberal racism and philosophical pragmatism, US imperialism's
emerging philosophical and ideological paradigms.
The intellectual high point of DuBois' Harvard years was a fifty-two page
handwritten essay entitled "The Renaissance of Ethics: A Critical Comparison of
Scholastic and Modern Ethics", prepared for a course taught by the American
pragmatist William James. Pragmatism as articulated by James and later John
Dewey held that human knowledge was severely limited to immediate experience.
As such the possibilities for changing the world were restricted to the limitations of
human knowledge. Human beings had to, more or less, make due with minor
reforms in existing societies. Capitalism, racism and colonialism, in this rendering,
were, therefore, immutable and even expressions of human nature. This was the
reactionary essence of pragmatism. There were, as a consequence, no revolutionary
alternatives to poverty, exploitation and racism. Pragmatism's roots must be traced
to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of its subjective idealist
substance shares a similar philosophical zone with logical positivism. Both
positivism and pragmatism were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to
dialectical and historical materialism. For the young DuBois pragmatist's limitations
on knowledge and transforming the world were intellectually unacceptable, but
more rang untrue.
In his paper DuBois proposed an elemental materialist alternative to pragmatism. In
fact, he proposed answers to pragmatism, which in their larger significance, were
not unlike the alternatives to idealist philosophy posited by Marx in Capital and
Engels in Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of Nature. What DuBois essentially
argued was that the ethical and moral imperative was determined on the basis of
what actions they led to. While it cannot be said that DuBois at this stage of his
intellectual development had discovered a consistent philosophical position, his
instincts were certainly in the right direction. In this regard, his term paper for
William James was a harbinger of his future intellectual and ideological materialism.
At the root of his argument was the idea that morality and ethics rather than being
issues of pure reflection, as Kant and following him much of Western philosophy,
were to the contrary matters decided in life and through practice.
After receiving his undergraduate degree and being accepted to Harvard's graduate
program in the social sciences he expressed the view that he would apply the
principles of the social sciences "to the social and economic rise of the Negro
people."
At the very moment when DuBois was deciding upon his life's vocation the US
ruling class was facing the specter of a rising working class which was challenging
the citadels of capital. The Haymarket repression and the wave of railroad strikes in
1886 was the beginning, followed by the Pinkerton carnage at the Homestead
Steelworks outside Pittsburgh and the massacre of copper miners at Coeur d'Alene,
Colorado in 1892. The assault upon the rights of labor in the late 1880's and
throughout the 1890's coincided with the wave of lynchings and KKK terrorism
against Blacks in the South and the Supreme Court's legalization of racism in its
Plessey v Ferguson decision in 1896.
As a graduate student DuBois was confronted by the new economic doctrine which
claimed to answer the Marxian formulation that capitalist profits flow from the
exploitation of labor. In a 158 page critique and analysis of this new economics
entitled "A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory" he argued, in social democratic
fashion, for restrictions upon the unfettered maximization of profit. While this paper
fails as a theoretical reformulation, it proposed that from a ethical standpoint society
was obligated to moderate profits in the interests of a fair distribution of incomes
and wealth. The significance of the paper in terms of DuBois's later intellectual
development is a two page examination of Marx's labor theory of value. For the
first time we have evidence of DuBois' interest in Marxian economics.
Upon the completion of the course work for his Harvard doctorate DuBois applied
for and received a fellowship to do graduate studies at the University of Berlin. His
intention was to study philosophy and economics. He studied German philosophy,
especially Hegel's Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Mind, as well as
Marxian social theory. He also studied the innovative historical research methods
than in vogue in the German academy. He, as well, attended meetings in working
class Pankow district of Berlin of the German Social Democratic Party. He later
said that his interest in socialism at this time was exploratory and that he did not
grasp the differences between Marxism and the revisionism of Lasalle, Bebel and
Karl Kautsky. These issues, he said, were "too complicated for a student like
myself to understand." He blamed his student status for inhibiting "close personal
acquaintanceship with workers, which in his Autobiography he felt he needed for
a full understanding of socialism.
As at Harvard, while in Berlin DuBois spent much of his time alone, reflecting upon
the world and his possible contribution to changing it. Many of these reflections
were entered in his diary. One particularly significant entry made on his twenty fifth
birthday. A stream of conscious consideration upon his life tells us much about
mental processes, which combined imagination, poetic and courageous leaps and
intellectual rigor. he declared in his diary, "The hot dark blood of a black
forefather--born king of men-- is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a
genius or a fool. O I wonder what I am-- I wonder what the world is-- I wonder if
live is worth striving...I do know: be the truth what it may, I will seek it on the pure
assumption that it is worth seeking--and Heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall turn
me from my purpose till I die... there is a grandeur in the very hopelessness of such
a life--? and is life all?" He then conclude, "These are my plans: to make a name in
science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race. " And then, "I
wonder what will be the outcome? Who knows?... and if I perish--I PERISH."
The historical methodology of both Marx and Hegel, and contemporary German
academicians, along with deepening studies of the race question, helped to convince
him that racial oppression must be understood as part and parcel of the world
system of economic relations and thus its elimination would have world historic
meaning. He became further convinced that only the most advanced scientific and
philosophical methods could advance understanding of this system. In this regard he
sought to do for the issue of racial oppression what Marx had achieved for class
exploitation.
In respect to his intellectual development his work began to combine social
scientific data and analysis with historical studies. He began what he hoped would
be his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin (which if successful would
have become the first of two Ph.D.'s), a study of the land tenure system in the US
south. We glimpse what that dissertation might have looked like from a term paper
entitled "The Large and Small Scale System of Agriculture in the Southern United
States 1840--1890". It presented his research, using the materialist methods than
popular among German historians from the bottom up. That is form the standpoint
of the peasantry and agricultural workers. This was a further development of his
philosophical materialism and its application to historical, economic and sociological
inquiry. However, the world would never see that dissertation, because the
semester before he was to complete his courses his fellowship was cut. David
Levering Lewis who looked into this situation suggests DuBois' failure to win a
German doctorate resulted from a combination of circumstance and the sinister.
DuBois' German professors were effusive in their support of his academic work.
They were prepared to trim off a semester of work so as to allow him to get started
on writing his thesis. Johns Hopkins President Daniel Gilman a trustee of the Slater
Fund, from which DuBois was receiving his scholarship, however, expressed the
view that `Negro education' should be more practical and that DuBois' program of
study had become too rarefied for a Negro. This was an expression in DuBois' life
of white liberal racism which was now throwing its support to Booker T.
Washington and the gospel that Blacks should "put your buckets down where you
are." Blacks with doctorates from prestigious German universities were not a
priority in the new racist atmosphere.
Returning to Harvard he completed his dissertation in 1896, entitled, "The
Suppression of the Slave trade to the United States of america 1638--1870", which
a few years later was published as the first volume in the prestigious Harvard
Historical Series. In spite of the achievement in the Suppression six decades later
when a new edition was being prepared for publication DuBois included an
"Apologia". He criticized the book, asserting that what was needed was "to add to
my terribly conscientious search into the facts...the clear concept of Marx on the
class struggle for income and power..."
After receiving his Ph.D. DuBois was offered a teaching position at Wilberforce
College a small African american college in Ohio. After a year of teaching at
Wilberforce he was contacted by a group of upper class Philadelphia Quakers to
conduct a study of the African American community in Philadelphia. They felt that
such a study could embarrass the corrupt city administration. DuBois was offered
an ‘assistantship' at the University of Pennsylvania, which meant the University
would pay his salary, but he was neither allowed to live on its racially segregated
campus or to teach in its all white classrooms. For two years DuBois his and wife
Nina Gomer Du Bois lived in the 7th Ward in the heart of the Black ghetto at the
corner of 7th and Lombard (across from Mother Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal Church founded by the anti-racist radical Richard Allen) where he
worked on what became the Philadelphia Negro . While his sponsors had no idea
that such a major study would be produced, DuBois wrote a book that initiated the
field of urban sociology and advanced empirical sociology itself.
What the Philadelphia Negro achieved, in spite of an overdose of stern Victorian
moralizing and a preaching to poor African Americans to conduct themselves in
acceptable ways, was to empirically verify the social and class origins of poverty
and inequality. He substantially showed that the Black ghetto was a creation of
poverty and racism, rather than the so-called innate inferiority and supposed
criminal tendencies of African Americans.
Upon the completion of his research in Philadelphia he took a teaching position at
Atlanta University, an historically African American institution. For ten years he
would not only teach, but became the prime mover of annual conferences which
drew scholars from around the world to examine the social, economic, historical
and cultural roots of Black inequality. He led researchers who produced a series of
monographs and papers known as the Atlanta Studies, one of the most significant
bodies of scientific research on Black folk at the beginning of the twentieth century.
AFRICA ROOTS OF WAR AND BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
Landmarks of DuBois's scientific development are found in his Atlantic Monthly
article "The African Roots of the War" and the Black Reconstruction. Together
they demonstrate DuBois' full intellectual powers and his development of Marxism.
"The African Roots of the War" parallels Lenin's Imperialism The Highest Stage
of Capitalism and in several formulations anticipates it by two years. Like Lenin
he viewed world economic relationships as being now dominated by finance
capital--a new situation where banks controlled industrial and merchant capital. The
merger of industrial and bank capital under the hegemony of big bank capital Lenin
called finance capital. The nation itself, as Lenin and DuBois saw it, was now under
the heal of the financier, who through the export of capital were carving out
economic spheres throughout the world. DuBois makes his argument from the
standpoint that a new epoch in world history had arrived. What Lenin would define
as the imperialist stage of capitalism, which made capitalism overripe for revolution.
But DuBois saw Africa as the weakest link in the imperialist chain. It is worth
commenting at this point upon DuBois' alleged support of the US participation in
WWI. To understand what was a tactical maneuver on his part was the attempt to
play US against German imperialism in the interest of gaining time for and
strengthening the position of the anti-colonial forces in Africa and the anti-racists in
the US. Furthermore, DuBois' stance after the war at the Versailles Peace
Conference is significant. Again his stance was a consistently anti-colonial position,
geared to use the contradictions between European colonial powers and their
weakened position after the war to advance the cause of African freedom. At this
stage he indeed harbored illusions about the possible role of the US as an ally of the
African struggle. And it should be remembered in evaluating DuBois' position that
right at the moment of the Versailles Conference he called the First Pan African
Congress, dedicated to the joint struggle and liberation of Africans and their
descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean.
David Levering Lewis evaluates DuBois' "African Roots" as "one of the analytical
triumphs of the early twentieth century." He goes on to contextualize the work in
the following manner:
DuBois poured into it his mature ideas about capitalism, class and
race...The essay opened with a novel proposition--that, 'in a very real
sense' Africa was the prime cause of the World War. Using a quotation
from Pliny as his text--'Semper novi quid ex Africa' ('Africa is always
producing something new')--DuBois passed in kaleidoscopic review the
ravages of African history from earliest times to the European
Renaissance, Stanely's two-year charge from the source of the Congo
River to its mouth in 1879, the partition five years later of the continent
at the Berlin Conference, and the miasma of Christianity and commerce
suffocating indigenous cultures and kingdoms. European hegemony
based on technological superiority had produced the 'color line', which
became 'in the world's thought synonymous with inferiority...Africa was
another name for bestiality and barbarism.' The color line paid huge
dividends, and DuBois described the 'lying treaties , rivers of rum,
murder, assassination, rape and torture' excused in the name of racial
superiority with his staple power and imagery.
DuBois posited that finance capital had produced mutually exclusive and competing
economic spheres controlled by differing imperialist nations for the sake of
exploiting peoples and natural resources. A situation which would inevitably cause
world war.
DuBois makes a crucial discovery concerning the nation, big bourgeois nationalism
and white chauvinism. He argued that bourgeois democracy, big power nationalism
and imperialism went hand in glove. And that the democracy of the imperialist
bourgeoisie was but a mechanism for its expansion and a cover for its barbarity.
Bourgeois rhetoric about democracy and the so-called common interests of workers
and capitalists was but a ploy DuBois argued, to win labor to the so-called national
interest as defined by imperialism. DuBois put it bluntly, "it is the nation, a new
democratic nation composed of united capital and labor," where "[t]he white
workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting 'chinks and niggers'."
Even though labor's percentage of the gross was minimal, its 'equity is recognized.'
What Lenin proposed, however, and which was not present in DuBois's analysis,
was the concept of the labor aristocracy, a bought off section of labor leaders who
actually did share in the spoils, at the expense of the interests of the labor
movement as a whole. But more, the nation, its political, economic and cultural
resources were transformed into a mechanism of imperialist expansion and war.
However, as a result the nation itself is spoiled, corrupted and destroyed as
monopolies become transnational corporation. The working class is for the
imperialist bourgeoisie nothing by fodder for its wars to control the world. In this
sense Lenin's concept of capitalist social relations being overripe for revolution
carries with it Marx's warning made with respect to the class struggle in France, that
when a revolutionary situation is in place and neither of the major classes is able to
win a circumstance leading to the `destruction of all classes' is possible. It is this
ruing of nations and classes by imperialism that DuBois saw. World Wars are but
its most horrific expression.
The lasting strength of DuBois's analysis , however, was how he understood the
`scramble for Africa' as the central cause of World War I. And how the `scramble
for Africa' imparted an irreversible and overriding racist nature to the colonial
system and imperialism in general. Therefore, World War I had a racist imprint.
DuBois' understanding of the historical evolution of European bourgeois nationalism
and his recognition that it in substance had become a racist nationalism is of lasting
significance. This feature would take on its most extreme forms with the rise of
Nazism in Germany.
Black Reconstruction which appeared almost twenty years after "The African
Roots of the War" in essence is an extension of the DuBoisian development of the
class-race dialectic, and thus a fundamental contribution to the development of
Marxism. It was conceived not only as a scholarly study, but as a theoretical
justification of the inevitability of socialism. The study is an examination of the
period after the Civil War when the forces of democracy were hegemonic in the
former states of the Confederacy. DuBois suggests this was the most democratic
period not only in the history of the South, but of the nation. He suggests that under
the right conditions the democratic remaking of the South could have possibly gone
over to the dictatorship of the proletariat, if not throughout the South, at least in
several states. He felt that this could have sparked a socialist revolution throughout
the nation. He, thus, saw the Civil War, the overturning of slavery and the period of
Reconstruction as a single revolutionary period, with Reconstruction constituting a
revolutionary democratic situation pregnant with deeper revolutionary possibilities.
A crucial feature of his thesis was the centrality of the African American question to
democracy and the class struggle. While Black Reconstruction focused upon the
pre-imperialist stage of capitalist development in the US, when combined with the
earlier "The African Roots of the War" a single logic is apparent. That logic is based
upon DuBois's notion of the fundamental nature of the unity of the class struggle
and the struggles against racial oppression and colonialism.
The central conclusions that can be made from an examination of these two basic
works are the following: First, the unity of the class struggle and the struggles
against racism and colonialism are central to the struggles for democracy and
socialism; secondly, the imperialist stage of capitalist development ushers in a new
epoch where the anti-colonial struggle assumes a larger role in the fight for peace
and socialism; and thirdly, that Great Power nationalism leads to the ruin of nations
and peoples and to war. These ideas would be further developed in Color And
Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) and The World and Africa (1947).
DuBois' scientific work, presents essentially a single line of
philosophical-theoretical-ideological development, albeit with zig-zags and certain
inconsistencies. Nonetheless, DuBois's radicalism is congealed by the end of the
second decade of this century in a strong Marxist theoretical-ideological stance.
DuBois's Marxism, like his radicalism, was creative, taking into account the specific
conditions of US capitalism. Perhaps more than any thinker of this century he fully
saw the profound significance of racism and colonial oppression in the development
of capitalism and how the struggles against racism and colonialism are central to the
fight for democracy and revolution.
THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT
DuBois was an initiator and leader of many mass movements. The Niagara
Movement, the NAACP, Pan Africanism, and the Council on African Affairs are
high points of his organizational activity. Besides which he founded, published and
edited any number of journals and magazines, The Moon, The Horizon, Phylon,
and the high point of his publishing and editing careers The Crisis, the magazine of
the NAACP, which he founded and edited for over twenty five years.
What is crucial in understanding DuBois as a leader of mass movements is how his
ideological positions animated and interacted with his organizational activity. From
this standpoint the major debates and polemics he waged with leaders within the
African American struggle, such as the ones with Booker T. Washington and
Marcus Garvey, are central.
The DuBois-Booker T. Washington debate which begins at the start of the century
and rages until Washington's death in 1915 defined the terms of the African
American struggle. Washington assumed the mantle of "leader of the race" after the
death of Frederick Douglass in 1895. Washington became known as the `Great
Accommodator', because of his willingness to accommodate the aspirations of
Black folk to the reemergence of racism. The terms of the great compromise to
racism as understood by Washington was expressed in the equation "Duty without
Rights". Rather than fight for the right to vote and other civil rights, the obligation
of Blacks was to serve whites and subordinate themselves to the white ruling class.
and that eventually whites would reward our service by granting us rights. In the
meantime, Washington urged Blacks to `put your buckets down where you are'.
Washington's deal was a Faustian Bargain--an agreement with the devil. DuBois's
Souls of Black Folk answered the liberal and conservative racists and Booker T.
Washington's accommodation to them.. It is here that DuBois proclaimed that `The
Problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line'.
To grasp the meaning of this statement in its historical context those to whom it was
addressed must be understood. The two main targets were neo-racism, the
so-called liberal racism of monopoly capitalism, and Booker T. Washington
accomodationist line. The two were political ideological bedfellows; each cross
fertilized the other.
The Souls of Black Folk was for the struggle of the African American people what
the Communist Manifesto was for the class struggle in Europe in the mid 19th
century and the Declaration of Independence was for the American revolutionaries.
It, however, suffered from a failure to address the class question. A problem
addressed head on by DuBois a year after its publication. At a public speech on Des
Moines Iowa he insisted that the color line "was but the sign of growing class
privilege and caste distinction in America, and not, as some fondly imagine, the
cause of it. (quote taken from Lewis: 313)" Having said this the overriding question
for DuBois remained the color line and Booker T. Washington's accommodation to
it.
The Souls of Black Folk and the color line as the problem of the twentieth century
can be illuminated by also placing alongside them DuBois's John Brown. By the
turn of the century DuBois had certainly concluded that to overturn the new system
of segregation and racism would require a renewed revolutionary struggle and
certainly the loss of blood. In this respect DuBois saw himself continuing the line of
struggle of Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Harriet Tubman, Soujouner Truth and
Frederick Douglass. The Souls his then a call to arms, not a call to vote, even if
Black folk had the franchise. Its essence is revolutionary and democratic, not as
some contend cultural nationalism. As with the anti-slavery struggle DuBois
understood that Black people would need white allies. Hence the example of John
Brown. As he put it in the opening of the book:
John Brown worked not simply for Black Men-- he worked with them;
and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues
and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot.
The story of John Brown , then , cannot be complete unless due
emphasis is given this. And then DuBois observed, "He came to them on
a plane of perfect equality.."
John Brown became an archetype of the white ally, the anti-racist, the white
revolutionary. It appears at the very time the NAACP was being formed and can be
considered a guidepost for what the Blacks in the Niagara Movement would expect
of their white allies in the NAACP.
By the summer of 1905 a cadre of radical African American democrats, many
college educated and professionals, arrived at the conclusion that it now rested upon
their shoulders to strike the first blow on behalf of the freedom of their people. A
Call for the convening of a conference to begin "organized determination and
aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth", to
open July 10 in Ontario Canada (on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls). The
conference began what became known as the Niagara Movement. Thirty nine men
made up the first conference. Monroe Trotter and DuBois drafted the Declaration
of Principles. It declared, "we refuse to allow the impression to remain that the
Negro American assents to inferiority...that he is submissive under oppression and
apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of
protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows,
so long as America is unjust." They called for an all-sided assault upon racism and
inequality where ever it was to be found, including the policies of the Samuel
Gompers led AFL for the practice of "proscribing and boycotting and oppressing
thousands of their fellow-toilers, simply because they are black." Proclaiming the
beginning of a new era of protest they spoke in words that have resonated
throughout the century.
The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded, struggling up
through difficulties and oppression, needs sympathy and receives
criticism; needs help and is given hinderance, needs protection and is
given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership
and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone.
this nation will never stand justified before God until these things are
changed.
Symbolic of the identification of the Niagara Movement with the nation's
revolutionary and abolitionist past was the holding of the second conference in
Harper's Ferry West Virginia to celebrate "the 100th anniversary of John Brown's
birth, and the 50th jubilee of the battle of Osawatomie."
The Niagara Movement and the sharpening repression against African Americans
which was dramatically demonstrated in the Atlanta riots of 1906, sharpened
DuBois's radicalism. In 1907 he assumed the editorship of a new magazine named
The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line. In its second issue DuBois declared
his faith in socialism. He was, as he put it, a "socialist-of -the-path". The natural
allies of Black folk were, he declared, not "the rich, but the poor, not the great, but
the masses, not the employer, but the employees." He believed that America was
approaching a time when railroads, coal mines, and many factories can and ought
be run by the public for the public." And he asserted, "the one great hope of the
Negro American" is socialism. The Niagara movement would convene annually
until 1910, when it was superseded by the more broadly based civil rights
organization the NAACP. Most of those in the Niagara Movement joined the new
organization, with DuBois becoming a member of its executive board and editor of
it monthly journal The Crisis. The Niagara Movement is the predecessor to the
NAACP. The origins of the NAACP, therefore, are in the 1905 Niagara
Conference. Monroe Trotter and Ida Welles Barnett, radicals from the Niagara
Movement and socialist like DuBois and Mary White Ovington joined with liberal
anti-racist like Joel A. Spingarn and Oswald Villard to form a broader and larger
organization. Nevertheless the Niagara Movement left an indelible mark on future
struggles. Its most important achievement was that it gave an organized form to the
left and socialist forces within the African community, who were prepared to take
on Booker T. Washington and his backers. By so doing they laid the basis for a
new level of left-center unity against racism. By rekindling the fires of protest they
established that freedom would only be achieved through struggle; realizing in life
the dictum of the great Frederick Douglass, "Without struggle there is no progress,
there never has been and there never will be."
As the executive secretary of the Niagara Movement DuBois proved himself an
able organizer. Added to his proven skills as a scholar, journalist, propagandist,
editor and publisher, he stood as a potent force and invaluable resource in his
peoples struggle and a force which would have to be reckoned with by all sides.
THE NAACP
As the first decade of the century moved to a close DuBois's concept of the alliance
between the African American people and labor , between racism and class
exploitation deepened. In the interest of advancing this strategic notion and while
keeping heat on Booker T. Washington he attacked the "color-blindness" of certain
left liberals and socialists. The philosopher John Dewey, for instance, that racism
deprived society of social capital. This instrumental explanation made no mention of
the denial of the vote and other civil rights to Blacks. Eugene V. Debs, the nation's
leading socialist, articulated the view that the Socialist Party could not "make
separate appeals to all races..." "There is," he stated, "no `Negro problem' apart
from the general labor problem." After the 1912 presidential election, where Debs
got over 1 million votes, DuBois would declare, `the magnificent Debs', as he called
him, wrong. "The Negro problem, then, is the great test of the American socialists."
As Booker Washington became more reactionary DuBois became more merciless in
his attack upon his program. Washington, he insisted, was the past, the Niagara
Movement the future. He tied the `Great Accommodator' to monopoly capital.
Accommodation DuBois argued was submission pure and simple. "The vested
interest", DuBois wrote in May 1910, "who so largely support Mr. Washington's
program are to a large extent men who wish to raise in the South a body of black
laboring men who can be used as clubs to keep white laborers from demanding too
much."
With the founding of the NAACP DuBois for the first time became a full time
employee of an organization other than a college or university. As Levering Lewis
put it, "The problem of the twentieth century impelled him from mobilizing racial
data to becoming the prime mobilizer of a race.(408)" DuBois's imprint was
considerable upon the organization from its outset. The name itself bares the
imprint of DuBois's worldview. Rather than having Negro or black in its name the
new organization used the term colored, because as DuBois saw things the
Association should fight the color line on a world scale and thus fight for the rights
of all peoples of color and all victims of racism and colonialism. DuBois would
become the editor of the NAACP's journal, named (and once again reflecting his
ideological impact on the new organization) The Crisis: A Record of the Darker
Races. No one could have predicted the success and impact of the journal. It
eventually would reach over 150,000 African American households, become the
main instrument for forming Black opinion. It manifested DuBois's militant brand
of journalism. The Crisis, according to Levering Lewis, traced its roots from
Frederick Douglass's North Star, and William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator back to
North America's first newspaper published by person's of African descent, Samuel
Eli Cornish and John Russwurm's Freedom Journal.
However, while the terrain of struggle had shifted the essence had not. The decline
of Booker Washington had shifted the terms of the fight. On the horizon was World
War, President Woodrow Wilson's drive to make the world safe for imperialism
with a human face, the rise of the nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose aim was to
extend the program of Booker Washington to Africa and the Caribbean, the
appearance of the `New Negro'--a movement of militant intellectuals-- and
significantly for the development of DuBois' world view,the Russian Revolution
and the rise of the world communist and national liberation forces. In the face of
these events, pregnant with danger and enormous possibilities, DuBois' direction
was clear--everything to the front of struggle for African American freedom.
His greatest battles within the NAACP were with white and Black liberals who
preached caution and compromise. DuBois's militant anti-imperialism and support
for the Russian Revolution made the liberals uncomfortable. He became after 1919
the central figure in the rise of the Pan African Movement which linked the struggle
for equality to the struggle for African independence. This movement became
another way of fighting the `color line' on a world scale. He used the The Crisis to
assail lynchings, police brutality, the rise of the KKK and pogroms against African
Americans. In one editorial he excoriated Jim Crow mob`justice', where Black men
were regularly lynched in the North and South on trumped up charges of raping
white women. DuBois declared the crime of Black men was their blackness.
"Blackness" he said, "is the crime of crimes... It is therefore necessary, as every
white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this
crime of crimes." Reflecting the rising spirit of resistance, DuBois would editorially
declare in The Crisis, "But let every black American gird his loins. The great day is
coming. We have crawled and pleaded for justice and we have been cheerfully spit
upon and murdered and burned. We will not endure it forever." And than the words
that would inspire Claude McKay's revolutionary poem, DuBois demanded, "If we
must die, in God's name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay."
Going beyond what liberals, pro-capitalists and `respectable' civil rights leaders
could stomach, DuBois linked his calls for militant, even armed, resistance, to racist
violence to anti-imperialism and internationalism. His Pan Africanism was,
therefore, qualitatively different from Garvey's pro-imperialist big business oriented
version. Garvey was mainly interested in business contacts and relationships with
Africa and was at best only inconsistently anti-colonial. Yet, for millions of African
Americans who faced the rise of racism in the late teens, for whom the North,
rather than the promised land, was more of the same old Jim Crow, now occurring
in large city ghettos, Garvey's calls for self improvement and self uplift through
hard work were appealing. For DuBois after the rhetoric was swept aside Garvey
was proposing more submission and acceptance of oppression here in the US and in
Africa.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND IMPERIALIST WAR
The World War and the Russian Revolution were united as part of a single cloth in
DuBois's world view. The War represented the fact that the greed of the capitalist
class had plunged Europe into chaos, occasioning a profound European
civilizational crisis, with more long term meaning than the War itself or the
economic depression which followed it. As he put it, Western civilization had met
its Waterloo. He lectured the US ruling class concerning its racist double standard. "
The civilization by which America insists on measuring us and to which we must
conform our natural tastes and inclinations" he insisted, "is the daughter of that
European civilization which is now rushing furiously to its doom." And he
impatiently proclaimed that as soon as the stinking edifices of racism and class
exploitation crumble, the sooner the world would be bathed "in a golden hue that
harks back to the heritage of Africa and the tropics." Imperialism, he demanded,
had consumed European civilization transforming it into it opposite and
emasculating it of its humane qualities.
While Woodrow Wilson was proclaiming his `Fourteen Freedoms' which under US
tutelage was to make the `world safe for democracy', African Americans were
being lynched and massacred from the Black Belt South, to East St. Louis and the
South Side of Chicago. Once again DuBois warned the nation, and the ruling class
in particular, "We are perfectly well aware that the outlook for us is not
encouraging...We, the American Negroes, are the acid test for occidental
civilization. If we perish we perish." And in the most stern language he warned,
"But when we fall, we shall fall like Samson, dragging inevitably with us the pillars
of a nation's democracy." Racism, thus, could not, and he would not, view it as a
`Negro problem', if not solved it would destroy the nation.
DuBois increasingly viewed the Russian Revolution as the opposite of racism,
exploitation, war and the civilizational crisis they propelled. He viewed the Russian
Revolution as creating the material bases to create a global emancipatory alliance of
Russia and the darker races. A position not that far from the strategic thinking of
Lenin who urged the Communist to support the revolutions in the Third World
because here was imperialism's weak link. He especially called for special attention
to India and China and foresaw an alliance of Soviet Russia, India and China as
constituting the majority of the planet's population and thus main specific weight of
the world revolutionary process. DuBois would propose that a belief in humanity
"means a belief in colored men." and that "The future world will, in all reasonable
probability, be what colored make it."
His position on the civilizational dimensions of racism began to take form in an
article published in 1910 in an article entitled "The Souls of White Folk".He argued
that "Those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is fraught with
tremendous and eternal significance" had foisted a unique racial perversion upon
humankind. He went on to insist, as he challenged the racist view of history, that in
the sweep of history the achievements of white folk were as recent as yesterday.
He condemned as tragicomic arrogance, a joke were its consequences not so
horrible, the presumption that "whiteness alone is candy to the world child." This
tragicomic view of world history undergird both liberal and conservative racists and
was part of the ideological arsenal of Presidents and KKKers.
The Russian Revolution for DuBois was contextualized within broad civilizational
terms. It embraced it from the outset. Upon his return from his first trip to the
Soviet Union in 1927 he declared, "If what I have seen is Bolshevism than I am a
Bolshevik." The fate of humankind rested with the success or failure of the
Communist in Russia to consolidate their revolution. In this endeavor they deserved
the support of all fighters against the color line. This stance he maintained until his
death.
DUBOIS AND THE CPUSA
Gerald Horne indicates that DuBois's relationships with the CPUSA was of long
standing and thoroughly principled. DuBois was friendly with James W. Ford the
African American Communist who ran for Vice President in 1932 on the ticket with
party chairman William Z. Foster. He was also friendly with Foster whom he lent
books to, as Horne tells us, one on Haiti, for Foster's 'complex historical studies"
which DuBois praised highly. "But the comrade to whom DuBois probably had the
closest relationship was Foster's ideological compatriot, the Amherst and
Harvard-trained lawyer, Ben Davis. (306)" It was this close relationship that
naturally brought DuBois to the forefront in the struggle to defend Communist
during the Cold War. In fact, there are few who did more than DuBois to campaign
against the imprisonment of Eugene Dennis , Ben Davis, Gus Hall, Henry Winston,
George Meyer, William L. Patterson, James Jackson and others. The wife of
George Meyers, for example, was highly appreciative of how positively DuBois's
writings had affected her jailed husband (Horne:302).
Thus, according to Horne, "DuBois' formal casting of his lot with the Communist
was not an aberration(296). Neither was it an aberration or a radical departure from
logic of his ideological and political trajectories.
US imperialism's drive to turn the twentieth century into the `American Century'
did not cause DuBois to retreat, but "to deepen his study of
Marxism-Leninism"--even though he was than in his eighties. (Horne:289) And
while DuBois had done a thorough study of Marx in the 1930's and produced one
of the great Marxist classics by 1935, by 1954 he was "reading again Lenin's
Imperialism" and searching for the "best logical follow-up of his argument."
(Horne:ibid)
In his letter to Gus Hall requesting membership in the Communist Party of the
USA, "on this first day of October" 1961, he openly acknowledged past differences
with the Party on "tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their advocacy of
a Negro state". That aside he declared:
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to
self-destruction...Communism...this is the only way of human life. It is a
difficult and hard end to reach--it has and will make mistakes...On this
first day of October 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in
the Communist Party of the United States.
THE LEGACY AND MESSAGE
Dr. James E. Jackson, close friend of DuBois and former leader and theoretician of
the Communist Party, summarized the life of DuBois in the following words:
"W.E.B. DuBois, the scholar and scientist, was equally a man of action. He chose
to keep the banners and goals of full equal rights flying from the halyard of
principle, no matter the difficulties and hardships." Of DuBois' "lasting testament"
Jackson asserts,
His last historic deed was to dramatize his firm conviction that `capitalist
society is altogether evil.' He concluded that to finally solve the problem
of racism, to really solve the problem of poverty, and to secure peace to
the world's peoples, humankind must, sooner or later, come to the
conclusion that this old structure is beyond effective reform...
W.E.B DuBois was a great fighter for the people, a true scientist, thinker
and humanist. He held aloft a bright torch of poetic inspiration that
lightens the way and illuminates the path of all who struggle for freedom.
The questions that DuBois posed and dealt with along the way of a long
and arduous life of unceasing service and dedication to the cause of
people's progress will find resolution on the path that he chose, the route
of the great humanists and social scientists,the Marxists. (Political
Affairs, July ,1989,5)
DuBois is our future. To understand his life and legacy is to
take hold of and understand our future. To be indifferent to it
is to considerably weaken our ability to fight for and realize
humanity's, and our nation's, democratic, peaceful and
socialist future. "History cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois,"
Martin Luther King insisted. In the end we are called on to
heed the words of Dr. Martin Luther King who in celebrating
the 100th anniversary of DuBois' birth declared,
We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing
that he was a radical all of his life. Some people
would like to ignore the fact that he was a
Communist in his later years. It is worth noting
that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the
support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and
corresponded with him freely. In contemporary
life the English-speaking world has no difficulty
with the fact that Sean O'Casey was a literary
giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or
that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the
greatest living poet though he also served in the
Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease
muting the fact that Dr. DuBois was a genius and
chose to be a Communist. Our obsessive
anti-communism has led us into too many
quagmires to be retained as it were a mode of
scientific thinking.
By Dr. Anthony Monteiro
W.E.B. DuBois was one of the twentieth century's great scientifi minds. His intellect was impressive for its scope, discipline, rigor, creative and heroic imagination . His accomplishments in the battles to end racism and colonialism, and to bring peace and socialism to the world's peoples, are as impressive. Ultimately his scientific discoveries and predictions concerning race, civilization, world and African history have significantly altered world ideological relationships. Extending, as it were, scientific foundations for working class and peoples unity and enhancing the ideological conditions for socialism. Moreover, the modern civil rights and African liberation movements owe more to him than any other single person. As the leader of the Pan African Movement between 1919 and 1945 his impact upon African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Namdi Azikwe, Almicar Cabral, Eduardo Mondlane and Sekou Toure, to name a few, was considerable. He was a founder of the World Peace Council and fighter against the Cold War. He fought in th early part of this century for the rights of women, including the vote for Black and white women.
DuBois was born three years after the end of the Civil War, at the beginning of
Reconstruction, on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington Massachusetts, to Alfred
and Mary Burghardt DuBois. He passed away gently in the West African nation of
Ghana on August 27, 1963 where he had gone at the invitation of President
Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah to start work on an Encyclopedia Africana. Nkrumah
speaking over Ghanaian radio summed up DuBois's life with simplicity and
eloquence. "Dr. DuBois", he said, "is a phenomenon. May he rest in peace." The
world's democratic and revolutionary forces over the next days would bid farewell
to DuBois as a comrade in arms. Gus Hall, General Secretary of the CPUSA, Chief
Awolo, leader of Nigeria's independence movement, Cheddi Jagan of British
Guiana, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria's National Liberation Front, President Kim Il
Sung of The People's Democratic Republic of Korea, and Walter Ulbricht of the
German Democratic Republic paid the highest tribute to his life and work. Ulbricht
wished that "the memory of Dr. DuBois--an outstanding fighter for the liberation
and prosperity of Africans--continue to live in our hearts." Chou En-lai, head of
state of China, insisted that DuBois's life was "one devoted to struggles and truth
seeking for which he finally took the road of thorough revolution." Nikita Kruschev,
General Secretary of the CPSU wrote to DuBois's wife Shirley Graham DuBois
that her husband's "shining memory" would remain forever "in the hearts of the
Soviet people."
Paul Robeson said of him, "His is a rich life of complete dedication to the
advancement of his own people and all the oppressed and injured." He continued,
"... let us not forget that he is one of the greatest masters of our language: the
language of Shakespeare and of Milton on the one hand; and on the other, of the
strange beauty of the folk speech-- the people's speech-- of the American Negro...
"For Dr. DuBois gives us proof that the great art of the Negro has come
from the inner life of the Afro-American people themselves....and that
the roots stretch back to the African land whence they came."
DuBois, however, wrote his own last will and testament some years earlier. In his
posthumously published Autobiography, subtitled "A Soliloquy on Viewing My
Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century" he wrote, "I have studied
communism long and carefully in lands where they are practiced and in
conversation with their adherents, and with wide reading. I now state my
conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism." He declared, "I shall
therefore hereafter help the triumph of communism in every honest way that I
can...I know well that the triumph of communism will be a slow and difficult task,
involving mistakes of every sort. It will call for progressive change in human nature
and a better type of manhood than is common today. I believe this possible, or
otherwise we will continue to lie, steal and kill as we are doing today." The path he
traveled to arrive at this conclusion was complex, often contradictory, yet filled with
profound meaning.
DuBois's scientific and scholarly work were organically intertwined with his life and
revolutionary activity. The profound importance of his scientific achievements were
that they laid the materialist foundation for the study of race and racial oppression.
He established that racism and colonialism were central organizing mechanisms of
the modern world. That they stood along side and were in dialectical relationship to
the system of capitalist exploitation. In the end, the world could not be understood
or changed without grasping this central dynamic.
THE PATHS OF HIS SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT
The ultimate form of DuBois's scientific work is inseparable from his humble and
working class beginnings. His family was one of an estimated thirty five African
Americans families living in the Berkshires at the time of his birth. While race
prejudice was not unknown to whites or Blacks in Great Barrington, it in no way
took on the violence and brutality of the South's Jim Crow segregation. As he
reached his teenage years he knew he was racially different than most of his
classmates, however, he overcame the affects of prejudice through becoming an
academic overachiever. And he could in this racially ambiguous environment fall
back upon the fact that while the blood of Africa flooded his veins, there was as he
said a "strain of French, a bit of Dutch". His racial identity, however, would only
achieve its permanent anchorage when he began college in Nashville Tennessee at
the historically African American Fisk University. Still, it was his humble roots and
his experience with racial prejudice, albeit considerably milder than the bulk of
African Americans were experiencing in the South, that shaped within him a
democratic sensibility early on. At the age of fourteen in his first published articles
appearing in The New York Globe, an African American newspaper published by
the radical T. Thomas Fortune, DuBois evidenced a moral rejection of racism. A
moral sensibility which would assert itself throughout his life, finding intellectual
expression in his greatest works.
At Fisk University his general democratic leanings were deepened. As he would put
it, it was during this period that he "learned to be a Negro." The summer after his
sophomore year was spent in the poverty ridden Black Belt of rural Tennessee. He
later wrote, he "touched the very shadow of slavery." DuBois biographer David
Levering Lewis writes of this period,
Wilson County, Tennessee, would remain in his memory bank for a
lifetime, influencing a prose to which he was beginning to give a mythic
spin, his conception of what he would later call the black proletariat, and
most profoundly, his gestating, romantic idea about African American
`racial traits'."
This early experience with the Black Belt proletariat would germinate throughout
his life finding theoretical and social scientific expression in among other works The
Souls of Black Folk(1903),"The African Roots of the War" (1914) and eventually
in his monumental Black Reconstruction (1935).
In the Fall of 1888 after graduating from Fisk he entered Harvard to pursue an
undergraduate degree in philosophy. He found his Harvard professors no more
qualified than those at Fisk, only better known. He would at Harvard come in
contact with the new liberal racism and philosophical pragmatism, US imperialism's
emerging philosophical and ideological paradigms.
The intellectual high point of DuBois' Harvard years was a fifty-two page
handwritten essay entitled "The Renaissance of Ethics: A Critical Comparison of
Scholastic and Modern Ethics", prepared for a course taught by the American
pragmatist William James. Pragmatism as articulated by James and later John
Dewey held that human knowledge was severely limited to immediate experience.
As such the possibilities for changing the world were restricted to the limitations of
human knowledge. Human beings had to, more or less, make due with minor
reforms in existing societies. Capitalism, racism and colonialism, in this rendering,
were, therefore, immutable and even expressions of human nature. This was the
reactionary essence of pragmatism. There were, as a consequence, no revolutionary
alternatives to poverty, exploitation and racism. Pragmatism's roots must be traced
to British empiricism and skepticism, and because of its subjective idealist
substance shares a similar philosophical zone with logical positivism. Both
positivism and pragmatism were viewed by their proponents as alternatives to
dialectical and historical materialism. For the young DuBois pragmatist's limitations
on knowledge and transforming the world were intellectually unacceptable, but
more rang untrue.
In his paper DuBois proposed an elemental materialist alternative to pragmatism. In
fact, he proposed answers to pragmatism, which in their larger significance, were
not unlike the alternatives to idealist philosophy posited by Marx in Capital and
Engels in Anti-Duhring and The Dialectics of Nature. What DuBois essentially
argued was that the ethical and moral imperative was determined on the basis of
what actions they led to. While it cannot be said that DuBois at this stage of his
intellectual development had discovered a consistent philosophical position, his
instincts were certainly in the right direction. In this regard, his term paper for
William James was a harbinger of his future intellectual and ideological materialism.
At the root of his argument was the idea that morality and ethics rather than being
issues of pure reflection, as Kant and following him much of Western philosophy,
were to the contrary matters decided in life and through practice.
After receiving his undergraduate degree and being accepted to Harvard's graduate
program in the social sciences he expressed the view that he would apply the
principles of the social sciences "to the social and economic rise of the Negro
people."
At the very moment when DuBois was deciding upon his life's vocation the US
ruling class was facing the specter of a rising working class which was challenging
the citadels of capital. The Haymarket repression and the wave of railroad strikes in
1886 was the beginning, followed by the Pinkerton carnage at the Homestead
Steelworks outside Pittsburgh and the massacre of copper miners at Coeur d'Alene,
Colorado in 1892. The assault upon the rights of labor in the late 1880's and
throughout the 1890's coincided with the wave of lynchings and KKK terrorism
against Blacks in the South and the Supreme Court's legalization of racism in its
Plessey v Ferguson decision in 1896.
As a graduate student DuBois was confronted by the new economic doctrine which
claimed to answer the Marxian formulation that capitalist profits flow from the
exploitation of labor. In a 158 page critique and analysis of this new economics
entitled "A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory" he argued, in social democratic
fashion, for restrictions upon the unfettered maximization of profit. While this paper
fails as a theoretical reformulation, it proposed that from a ethical standpoint society
was obligated to moderate profits in the interests of a fair distribution of incomes
and wealth. The significance of the paper in terms of DuBois's later intellectual
development is a two page examination of Marx's labor theory of value. For the
first time we have evidence of DuBois' interest in Marxian economics.
Upon the completion of the course work for his Harvard doctorate DuBois applied
for and received a fellowship to do graduate studies at the University of Berlin. His
intention was to study philosophy and economics. He studied German philosophy,
especially Hegel's Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Mind, as well as
Marxian social theory. He also studied the innovative historical research methods
than in vogue in the German academy. He, as well, attended meetings in working
class Pankow district of Berlin of the German Social Democratic Party. He later
said that his interest in socialism at this time was exploratory and that he did not
grasp the differences between Marxism and the revisionism of Lasalle, Bebel and
Karl Kautsky. These issues, he said, were "too complicated for a student like
myself to understand." He blamed his student status for inhibiting "close personal
acquaintanceship with workers, which in his Autobiography he felt he needed for
a full understanding of socialism.
As at Harvard, while in Berlin DuBois spent much of his time alone, reflecting upon
the world and his possible contribution to changing it. Many of these reflections
were entered in his diary. One particularly significant entry made on his twenty fifth
birthday. A stream of conscious consideration upon his life tells us much about
mental processes, which combined imagination, poetic and courageous leaps and
intellectual rigor. he declared in his diary, "The hot dark blood of a black
forefather--born king of men-- is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a
genius or a fool. O I wonder what I am-- I wonder what the world is-- I wonder if
live is worth striving...I do know: be the truth what it may, I will seek it on the pure
assumption that it is worth seeking--and Heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall turn
me from my purpose till I die... there is a grandeur in the very hopelessness of such
a life--? and is life all?" He then conclude, "These are my plans: to make a name in
science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race. " And then, "I
wonder what will be the outcome? Who knows?... and if I perish--I PERISH."
The historical methodology of both Marx and Hegel, and contemporary German
academicians, along with deepening studies of the race question, helped to convince
him that racial oppression must be understood as part and parcel of the world
system of economic relations and thus its elimination would have world historic
meaning. He became further convinced that only the most advanced scientific and
philosophical methods could advance understanding of this system. In this regard he
sought to do for the issue of racial oppression what Marx had achieved for class
exploitation.
In respect to his intellectual development his work began to combine social
scientific data and analysis with historical studies. He began what he hoped would
be his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin (which if successful would
have become the first of two Ph.D.'s), a study of the land tenure system in the US
south. We glimpse what that dissertation might have looked like from a term paper
entitled "The Large and Small Scale System of Agriculture in the Southern United
States 1840--1890". It presented his research, using the materialist methods than
popular among German historians from the bottom up. That is form the standpoint
of the peasantry and agricultural workers. This was a further development of his
philosophical materialism and its application to historical, economic and sociological
inquiry. However, the world would never see that dissertation, because the
semester before he was to complete his courses his fellowship was cut. David
Levering Lewis who looked into this situation suggests DuBois' failure to win a
German doctorate resulted from a combination of circumstance and the sinister.
DuBois' German professors were effusive in their support of his academic work.
They were prepared to trim off a semester of work so as to allow him to get started
on writing his thesis. Johns Hopkins President Daniel Gilman a trustee of the Slater
Fund, from which DuBois was receiving his scholarship, however, expressed the
view that `Negro education' should be more practical and that DuBois' program of
study had become too rarefied for a Negro. This was an expression in DuBois' life
of white liberal racism which was now throwing its support to Booker T.
Washington and the gospel that Blacks should "put your buckets down where you
are." Blacks with doctorates from prestigious German universities were not a
priority in the new racist atmosphere.
Returning to Harvard he completed his dissertation in 1896, entitled, "The
Suppression of the Slave trade to the United States of america 1638--1870", which
a few years later was published as the first volume in the prestigious Harvard
Historical Series. In spite of the achievement in the Suppression six decades later
when a new edition was being prepared for publication DuBois included an
"Apologia". He criticized the book, asserting that what was needed was "to add to
my terribly conscientious search into the facts...the clear concept of Marx on the
class struggle for income and power..."
After receiving his Ph.D. DuBois was offered a teaching position at Wilberforce
College a small African american college in Ohio. After a year of teaching at
Wilberforce he was contacted by a group of upper class Philadelphia Quakers to
conduct a study of the African American community in Philadelphia. They felt that
such a study could embarrass the corrupt city administration. DuBois was offered
an ‘assistantship' at the University of Pennsylvania, which meant the University
would pay his salary, but he was neither allowed to live on its racially segregated
campus or to teach in its all white classrooms. For two years DuBois his and wife
Nina Gomer Du Bois lived in the 7th Ward in the heart of the Black ghetto at the
corner of 7th and Lombard (across from Mother Bethel African Methodist
Episcopal Church founded by the anti-racist radical Richard Allen) where he
worked on what became the Philadelphia Negro . While his sponsors had no idea
that such a major study would be produced, DuBois wrote a book that initiated the
field of urban sociology and advanced empirical sociology itself.
What the Philadelphia Negro achieved, in spite of an overdose of stern Victorian
moralizing and a preaching to poor African Americans to conduct themselves in
acceptable ways, was to empirically verify the social and class origins of poverty
and inequality. He substantially showed that the Black ghetto was a creation of
poverty and racism, rather than the so-called innate inferiority and supposed
criminal tendencies of African Americans.
Upon the completion of his research in Philadelphia he took a teaching position at
Atlanta University, an historically African American institution. For ten years he
would not only teach, but became the prime mover of annual conferences which
drew scholars from around the world to examine the social, economic, historical
and cultural roots of Black inequality. He led researchers who produced a series of
monographs and papers known as the Atlanta Studies, one of the most significant
bodies of scientific research on Black folk at the beginning of the twentieth century.
AFRICA ROOTS OF WAR AND BLACK RECONSTRUCTION
Landmarks of DuBois's scientific development are found in his Atlantic Monthly
article "The African Roots of the War" and the Black Reconstruction. Together
they demonstrate DuBois' full intellectual powers and his development of Marxism.
"The African Roots of the War" parallels Lenin's Imperialism The Highest Stage
of Capitalism and in several formulations anticipates it by two years. Like Lenin
he viewed world economic relationships as being now dominated by finance
capital--a new situation where banks controlled industrial and merchant capital. The
merger of industrial and bank capital under the hegemony of big bank capital Lenin
called finance capital. The nation itself, as Lenin and DuBois saw it, was now under
the heal of the financier, who through the export of capital were carving out
economic spheres throughout the world. DuBois makes his argument from the
standpoint that a new epoch in world history had arrived. What Lenin would define
as the imperialist stage of capitalism, which made capitalism overripe for revolution.
But DuBois saw Africa as the weakest link in the imperialist chain. It is worth
commenting at this point upon DuBois' alleged support of the US participation in
WWI. To understand what was a tactical maneuver on his part was the attempt to
play US against German imperialism in the interest of gaining time for and
strengthening the position of the anti-colonial forces in Africa and the anti-racists in
the US. Furthermore, DuBois' stance after the war at the Versailles Peace
Conference is significant. Again his stance was a consistently anti-colonial position,
geared to use the contradictions between European colonial powers and their
weakened position after the war to advance the cause of African freedom. At this
stage he indeed harbored illusions about the possible role of the US as an ally of the
African struggle. And it should be remembered in evaluating DuBois' position that
right at the moment of the Versailles Conference he called the First Pan African
Congress, dedicated to the joint struggle and liberation of Africans and their
descendants in the Americas and the Caribbean.
David Levering Lewis evaluates DuBois' "African Roots" as "one of the analytical
triumphs of the early twentieth century." He goes on to contextualize the work in
the following manner:
DuBois poured into it his mature ideas about capitalism, class and
race...The essay opened with a novel proposition--that, 'in a very real
sense' Africa was the prime cause of the World War. Using a quotation
from Pliny as his text--'Semper novi quid ex Africa' ('Africa is always
producing something new')--DuBois passed in kaleidoscopic review the
ravages of African history from earliest times to the European
Renaissance, Stanely's two-year charge from the source of the Congo
River to its mouth in 1879, the partition five years later of the continent
at the Berlin Conference, and the miasma of Christianity and commerce
suffocating indigenous cultures and kingdoms. European hegemony
based on technological superiority had produced the 'color line', which
became 'in the world's thought synonymous with inferiority...Africa was
another name for bestiality and barbarism.' The color line paid huge
dividends, and DuBois described the 'lying treaties , rivers of rum,
murder, assassination, rape and torture' excused in the name of racial
superiority with his staple power and imagery.
DuBois posited that finance capital had produced mutually exclusive and competing
economic spheres controlled by differing imperialist nations for the sake of
exploiting peoples and natural resources. A situation which would inevitably cause
world war.
DuBois makes a crucial discovery concerning the nation, big bourgeois nationalism
and white chauvinism. He argued that bourgeois democracy, big power nationalism
and imperialism went hand in glove. And that the democracy of the imperialist
bourgeoisie was but a mechanism for its expansion and a cover for its barbarity.
Bourgeois rhetoric about democracy and the so-called common interests of workers
and capitalists was but a ploy DuBois argued, to win labor to the so-called national
interest as defined by imperialism. DuBois put it bluntly, "it is the nation, a new
democratic nation composed of united capital and labor," where "[t]he white
workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting 'chinks and niggers'."
Even though labor's percentage of the gross was minimal, its 'equity is recognized.'
What Lenin proposed, however, and which was not present in DuBois's analysis,
was the concept of the labor aristocracy, a bought off section of labor leaders who
actually did share in the spoils, at the expense of the interests of the labor
movement as a whole. But more, the nation, its political, economic and cultural
resources were transformed into a mechanism of imperialist expansion and war.
However, as a result the nation itself is spoiled, corrupted and destroyed as
monopolies become transnational corporation. The working class is for the
imperialist bourgeoisie nothing by fodder for its wars to control the world. In this
sense Lenin's concept of capitalist social relations being overripe for revolution
carries with it Marx's warning made with respect to the class struggle in France, that
when a revolutionary situation is in place and neither of the major classes is able to
win a circumstance leading to the `destruction of all classes' is possible. It is this
ruing of nations and classes by imperialism that DuBois saw. World Wars are but
its most horrific expression.
The lasting strength of DuBois's analysis , however, was how he understood the
`scramble for Africa' as the central cause of World War I. And how the `scramble
for Africa' imparted an irreversible and overriding racist nature to the colonial
system and imperialism in general. Therefore, World War I had a racist imprint.
DuBois' understanding of the historical evolution of European bourgeois nationalism
and his recognition that it in substance had become a racist nationalism is of lasting
significance. This feature would take on its most extreme forms with the rise of
Nazism in Germany.
Black Reconstruction which appeared almost twenty years after "The African
Roots of the War" in essence is an extension of the DuBoisian development of the
class-race dialectic, and thus a fundamental contribution to the development of
Marxism. It was conceived not only as a scholarly study, but as a theoretical
justification of the inevitability of socialism. The study is an examination of the
period after the Civil War when the forces of democracy were hegemonic in the
former states of the Confederacy. DuBois suggests this was the most democratic
period not only in the history of the South, but of the nation. He suggests that under
the right conditions the democratic remaking of the South could have possibly gone
over to the dictatorship of the proletariat, if not throughout the South, at least in
several states. He felt that this could have sparked a socialist revolution throughout
the nation. He, thus, saw the Civil War, the overturning of slavery and the period of
Reconstruction as a single revolutionary period, with Reconstruction constituting a
revolutionary democratic situation pregnant with deeper revolutionary possibilities.
A crucial feature of his thesis was the centrality of the African American question to
democracy and the class struggle. While Black Reconstruction focused upon the
pre-imperialist stage of capitalist development in the US, when combined with the
earlier "The African Roots of the War" a single logic is apparent. That logic is based
upon DuBois's notion of the fundamental nature of the unity of the class struggle
and the struggles against racial oppression and colonialism.
The central conclusions that can be made from an examination of these two basic
works are the following: First, the unity of the class struggle and the struggles
against racism and colonialism are central to the struggles for democracy and
socialism; secondly, the imperialist stage of capitalist development ushers in a new
epoch where the anti-colonial struggle assumes a larger role in the fight for peace
and socialism; and thirdly, that Great Power nationalism leads to the ruin of nations
and peoples and to war. These ideas would be further developed in Color And
Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) and The World and Africa (1947).
DuBois' scientific work, presents essentially a single line of
philosophical-theoretical-ideological development, albeit with zig-zags and certain
inconsistencies. Nonetheless, DuBois's radicalism is congealed by the end of the
second decade of this century in a strong Marxist theoretical-ideological stance.
DuBois's Marxism, like his radicalism, was creative, taking into account the specific
conditions of US capitalism. Perhaps more than any thinker of this century he fully
saw the profound significance of racism and colonial oppression in the development
of capitalism and how the struggles against racism and colonialism are central to the
fight for democracy and revolution.
THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT
DuBois was an initiator and leader of many mass movements. The Niagara
Movement, the NAACP, Pan Africanism, and the Council on African Affairs are
high points of his organizational activity. Besides which he founded, published and
edited any number of journals and magazines, The Moon, The Horizon, Phylon,
and the high point of his publishing and editing careers The Crisis, the magazine of
the NAACP, which he founded and edited for over twenty five years.
What is crucial in understanding DuBois as a leader of mass movements is how his
ideological positions animated and interacted with his organizational activity. From
this standpoint the major debates and polemics he waged with leaders within the
African American struggle, such as the ones with Booker T. Washington and
Marcus Garvey, are central.
The DuBois-Booker T. Washington debate which begins at the start of the century
and rages until Washington's death in 1915 defined the terms of the African
American struggle. Washington assumed the mantle of "leader of the race" after the
death of Frederick Douglass in 1895. Washington became known as the `Great
Accommodator', because of his willingness to accommodate the aspirations of
Black folk to the reemergence of racism. The terms of the great compromise to
racism as understood by Washington was expressed in the equation "Duty without
Rights". Rather than fight for the right to vote and other civil rights, the obligation
of Blacks was to serve whites and subordinate themselves to the white ruling class.
and that eventually whites would reward our service by granting us rights. In the
meantime, Washington urged Blacks to `put your buckets down where you are'.
Washington's deal was a Faustian Bargain--an agreement with the devil. DuBois's
Souls of Black Folk answered the liberal and conservative racists and Booker T.
Washington's accommodation to them.. It is here that DuBois proclaimed that `The
Problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line'.
To grasp the meaning of this statement in its historical context those to whom it was
addressed must be understood. The two main targets were neo-racism, the
so-called liberal racism of monopoly capitalism, and Booker T. Washington
accomodationist line. The two were political ideological bedfellows; each cross
fertilized the other.
The Souls of Black Folk was for the struggle of the African American people what
the Communist Manifesto was for the class struggle in Europe in the mid 19th
century and the Declaration of Independence was for the American revolutionaries.
It, however, suffered from a failure to address the class question. A problem
addressed head on by DuBois a year after its publication. At a public speech on Des
Moines Iowa he insisted that the color line "was but the sign of growing class
privilege and caste distinction in America, and not, as some fondly imagine, the
cause of it. (quote taken from Lewis: 313)" Having said this the overriding question
for DuBois remained the color line and Booker T. Washington's accommodation to
it.
The Souls of Black Folk and the color line as the problem of the twentieth century
can be illuminated by also placing alongside them DuBois's John Brown. By the
turn of the century DuBois had certainly concluded that to overturn the new system
of segregation and racism would require a renewed revolutionary struggle and
certainly the loss of blood. In this respect DuBois saw himself continuing the line of
struggle of Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, Harriet Tubman, Soujouner Truth and
Frederick Douglass. The Souls his then a call to arms, not a call to vote, even if
Black folk had the franchise. Its essence is revolutionary and democratic, not as
some contend cultural nationalism. As with the anti-slavery struggle DuBois
understood that Black people would need white allies. Hence the example of John
Brown. As he put it in the opening of the book:
John Brown worked not simply for Black Men-- he worked with them;
and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues
and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot.
The story of John Brown , then , cannot be complete unless due
emphasis is given this. And then DuBois observed, "He came to them on
a plane of perfect equality.."
John Brown became an archetype of the white ally, the anti-racist, the white
revolutionary. It appears at the very time the NAACP was being formed and can be
considered a guidepost for what the Blacks in the Niagara Movement would expect
of their white allies in the NAACP.
By the summer of 1905 a cadre of radical African American democrats, many
college educated and professionals, arrived at the conclusion that it now rested upon
their shoulders to strike the first blow on behalf of the freedom of their people. A
Call for the convening of a conference to begin "organized determination and
aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth", to
open July 10 in Ontario Canada (on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls). The
conference began what became known as the Niagara Movement. Thirty nine men
made up the first conference. Monroe Trotter and DuBois drafted the Declaration
of Principles. It declared, "we refuse to allow the impression to remain that the
Negro American assents to inferiority...that he is submissive under oppression and
apologetic before insults. Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of
protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows,
so long as America is unjust." They called for an all-sided assault upon racism and
inequality where ever it was to be found, including the policies of the Samuel
Gompers led AFL for the practice of "proscribing and boycotting and oppressing
thousands of their fellow-toilers, simply because they are black." Proclaiming the
beginning of a new era of protest they spoke in words that have resonated
throughout the century.
The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded, struggling up
through difficulties and oppression, needs sympathy and receives
criticism; needs help and is given hinderance, needs protection and is
given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership
and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone.
this nation will never stand justified before God until these things are
changed.
Symbolic of the identification of the Niagara Movement with the nation's
revolutionary and abolitionist past was the holding of the second conference in
Harper's Ferry West Virginia to celebrate "the 100th anniversary of John Brown's
birth, and the 50th jubilee of the battle of Osawatomie."
The Niagara Movement and the sharpening repression against African Americans
which was dramatically demonstrated in the Atlanta riots of 1906, sharpened
DuBois's radicalism. In 1907 he assumed the editorship of a new magazine named
The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line. In its second issue DuBois declared
his faith in socialism. He was, as he put it, a "socialist-of -the-path". The natural
allies of Black folk were, he declared, not "the rich, but the poor, not the great, but
the masses, not the employer, but the employees." He believed that America was
approaching a time when railroads, coal mines, and many factories can and ought
be run by the public for the public." And he asserted, "the one great hope of the
Negro American" is socialism. The Niagara movement would convene annually
until 1910, when it was superseded by the more broadly based civil rights
organization the NAACP. Most of those in the Niagara Movement joined the new
organization, with DuBois becoming a member of its executive board and editor of
it monthly journal The Crisis. The Niagara Movement is the predecessor to the
NAACP. The origins of the NAACP, therefore, are in the 1905 Niagara
Conference. Monroe Trotter and Ida Welles Barnett, radicals from the Niagara
Movement and socialist like DuBois and Mary White Ovington joined with liberal
anti-racist like Joel A. Spingarn and Oswald Villard to form a broader and larger
organization. Nevertheless the Niagara Movement left an indelible mark on future
struggles. Its most important achievement was that it gave an organized form to the
left and socialist forces within the African community, who were prepared to take
on Booker T. Washington and his backers. By so doing they laid the basis for a
new level of left-center unity against racism. By rekindling the fires of protest they
established that freedom would only be achieved through struggle; realizing in life
the dictum of the great Frederick Douglass, "Without struggle there is no progress,
there never has been and there never will be."
As the executive secretary of the Niagara Movement DuBois proved himself an
able organizer. Added to his proven skills as a scholar, journalist, propagandist,
editor and publisher, he stood as a potent force and invaluable resource in his
peoples struggle and a force which would have to be reckoned with by all sides.
THE NAACP
As the first decade of the century moved to a close DuBois's concept of the alliance
between the African American people and labor , between racism and class
exploitation deepened. In the interest of advancing this strategic notion and while
keeping heat on Booker T. Washington he attacked the "color-blindness" of certain
left liberals and socialists. The philosopher John Dewey, for instance, that racism
deprived society of social capital. This instrumental explanation made no mention of
the denial of the vote and other civil rights to Blacks. Eugene V. Debs, the nation's
leading socialist, articulated the view that the Socialist Party could not "make
separate appeals to all races..." "There is," he stated, "no `Negro problem' apart
from the general labor problem." After the 1912 presidential election, where Debs
got over 1 million votes, DuBois would declare, `the magnificent Debs', as he called
him, wrong. "The Negro problem, then, is the great test of the American socialists."
As Booker Washington became more reactionary DuBois became more merciless in
his attack upon his program. Washington, he insisted, was the past, the Niagara
Movement the future. He tied the `Great Accommodator' to monopoly capital.
Accommodation DuBois argued was submission pure and simple. "The vested
interest", DuBois wrote in May 1910, "who so largely support Mr. Washington's
program are to a large extent men who wish to raise in the South a body of black
laboring men who can be used as clubs to keep white laborers from demanding too
much."
With the founding of the NAACP DuBois for the first time became a full time
employee of an organization other than a college or university. As Levering Lewis
put it, "The problem of the twentieth century impelled him from mobilizing racial
data to becoming the prime mobilizer of a race.(408)" DuBois's imprint was
considerable upon the organization from its outset. The name itself bares the
imprint of DuBois's worldview. Rather than having Negro or black in its name the
new organization used the term colored, because as DuBois saw things the
Association should fight the color line on a world scale and thus fight for the rights
of all peoples of color and all victims of racism and colonialism. DuBois would
become the editor of the NAACP's journal, named (and once again reflecting his
ideological impact on the new organization) The Crisis: A Record of the Darker
Races. No one could have predicted the success and impact of the journal. It
eventually would reach over 150,000 African American households, become the
main instrument for forming Black opinion. It manifested DuBois's militant brand
of journalism. The Crisis, according to Levering Lewis, traced its roots from
Frederick Douglass's North Star, and William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator back to
North America's first newspaper published by person's of African descent, Samuel
Eli Cornish and John Russwurm's Freedom Journal.
However, while the terrain of struggle had shifted the essence had not. The decline
of Booker Washington had shifted the terms of the fight. On the horizon was World
War, President Woodrow Wilson's drive to make the world safe for imperialism
with a human face, the rise of the nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose aim was to
extend the program of Booker Washington to Africa and the Caribbean, the
appearance of the `New Negro'--a movement of militant intellectuals-- and
significantly for the development of DuBois' world view,the Russian Revolution
and the rise of the world communist and national liberation forces. In the face of
these events, pregnant with danger and enormous possibilities, DuBois' direction
was clear--everything to the front of struggle for African American freedom.
His greatest battles within the NAACP were with white and Black liberals who
preached caution and compromise. DuBois's militant anti-imperialism and support
for the Russian Revolution made the liberals uncomfortable. He became after 1919
the central figure in the rise of the Pan African Movement which linked the struggle
for equality to the struggle for African independence. This movement became
another way of fighting the `color line' on a world scale. He used the The Crisis to
assail lynchings, police brutality, the rise of the KKK and pogroms against African
Americans. In one editorial he excoriated Jim Crow mob`justice', where Black men
were regularly lynched in the North and South on trumped up charges of raping
white women. DuBois declared the crime of Black men was their blackness.
"Blackness" he said, "is the crime of crimes... It is therefore necessary, as every
white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this
crime of crimes." Reflecting the rising spirit of resistance, DuBois would editorially
declare in The Crisis, "But let every black American gird his loins. The great day is
coming. We have crawled and pleaded for justice and we have been cheerfully spit
upon and murdered and burned. We will not endure it forever." And than the words
that would inspire Claude McKay's revolutionary poem, DuBois demanded, "If we
must die, in God's name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay."
Going beyond what liberals, pro-capitalists and `respectable' civil rights leaders
could stomach, DuBois linked his calls for militant, even armed, resistance, to racist
violence to anti-imperialism and internationalism. His Pan Africanism was,
therefore, qualitatively different from Garvey's pro-imperialist big business oriented
version. Garvey was mainly interested in business contacts and relationships with
Africa and was at best only inconsistently anti-colonial. Yet, for millions of African
Americans who faced the rise of racism in the late teens, for whom the North,
rather than the promised land, was more of the same old Jim Crow, now occurring
in large city ghettos, Garvey's calls for self improvement and self uplift through
hard work were appealing. For DuBois after the rhetoric was swept aside Garvey
was proposing more submission and acceptance of oppression here in the US and in
Africa.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND IMPERIALIST WAR
The World War and the Russian Revolution were united as part of a single cloth in
DuBois's world view. The War represented the fact that the greed of the capitalist
class had plunged Europe into chaos, occasioning a profound European
civilizational crisis, with more long term meaning than the War itself or the
economic depression which followed it. As he put it, Western civilization had met
its Waterloo. He lectured the US ruling class concerning its racist double standard. "
The civilization by which America insists on measuring us and to which we must
conform our natural tastes and inclinations" he insisted, "is the daughter of that
European civilization which is now rushing furiously to its doom." And he
impatiently proclaimed that as soon as the stinking edifices of racism and class
exploitation crumble, the sooner the world would be bathed "in a golden hue that
harks back to the heritage of Africa and the tropics." Imperialism, he demanded,
had consumed European civilization transforming it into it opposite and
emasculating it of its humane qualities.
While Woodrow Wilson was proclaiming his `Fourteen Freedoms' which under US
tutelage was to make the `world safe for democracy', African Americans were
being lynched and massacred from the Black Belt South, to East St. Louis and the
South Side of Chicago. Once again DuBois warned the nation, and the ruling class
in particular, "We are perfectly well aware that the outlook for us is not
encouraging...We, the American Negroes, are the acid test for occidental
civilization. If we perish we perish." And in the most stern language he warned,
"But when we fall, we shall fall like Samson, dragging inevitably with us the pillars
of a nation's democracy." Racism, thus, could not, and he would not, view it as a
`Negro problem', if not solved it would destroy the nation.
DuBois increasingly viewed the Russian Revolution as the opposite of racism,
exploitation, war and the civilizational crisis they propelled. He viewed the Russian
Revolution as creating the material bases to create a global emancipatory alliance of
Russia and the darker races. A position not that far from the strategic thinking of
Lenin who urged the Communist to support the revolutions in the Third World
because here was imperialism's weak link. He especially called for special attention
to India and China and foresaw an alliance of Soviet Russia, India and China as
constituting the majority of the planet's population and thus main specific weight of
the world revolutionary process. DuBois would propose that a belief in humanity
"means a belief in colored men." and that "The future world will, in all reasonable
probability, be what colored make it."
His position on the civilizational dimensions of racism began to take form in an
article published in 1910 in an article entitled "The Souls of White Folk".He argued
that "Those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is fraught with
tremendous and eternal significance" had foisted a unique racial perversion upon
humankind. He went on to insist, as he challenged the racist view of history, that in
the sweep of history the achievements of white folk were as recent as yesterday.
He condemned as tragicomic arrogance, a joke were its consequences not so
horrible, the presumption that "whiteness alone is candy to the world child." This
tragicomic view of world history undergird both liberal and conservative racists and
was part of the ideological arsenal of Presidents and KKKers.
The Russian Revolution for DuBois was contextualized within broad civilizational
terms. It embraced it from the outset. Upon his return from his first trip to the
Soviet Union in 1927 he declared, "If what I have seen is Bolshevism than I am a
Bolshevik." The fate of humankind rested with the success or failure of the
Communist in Russia to consolidate their revolution. In this endeavor they deserved
the support of all fighters against the color line. This stance he maintained until his
death.
DUBOIS AND THE CPUSA
Gerald Horne indicates that DuBois's relationships with the CPUSA was of long
standing and thoroughly principled. DuBois was friendly with James W. Ford the
African American Communist who ran for Vice President in 1932 on the ticket with
party chairman William Z. Foster. He was also friendly with Foster whom he lent
books to, as Horne tells us, one on Haiti, for Foster's 'complex historical studies"
which DuBois praised highly. "But the comrade to whom DuBois probably had the
closest relationship was Foster's ideological compatriot, the Amherst and
Harvard-trained lawyer, Ben Davis. (306)" It was this close relationship that
naturally brought DuBois to the forefront in the struggle to defend Communist
during the Cold War. In fact, there are few who did more than DuBois to campaign
against the imprisonment of Eugene Dennis , Ben Davis, Gus Hall, Henry Winston,
George Meyer, William L. Patterson, James Jackson and others. The wife of
George Meyers, for example, was highly appreciative of how positively DuBois's
writings had affected her jailed husband (Horne:302).
Thus, according to Horne, "DuBois' formal casting of his lot with the Communist
was not an aberration(296). Neither was it an aberration or a radical departure from
logic of his ideological and political trajectories.
US imperialism's drive to turn the twentieth century into the `American Century'
did not cause DuBois to retreat, but "to deepen his study of
Marxism-Leninism"--even though he was than in his eighties. (Horne:289) And
while DuBois had done a thorough study of Marx in the 1930's and produced one
of the great Marxist classics by 1935, by 1954 he was "reading again Lenin's
Imperialism" and searching for the "best logical follow-up of his argument."
(Horne:ibid)
In his letter to Gus Hall requesting membership in the Communist Party of the
USA, "on this first day of October" 1961, he openly acknowledged past differences
with the Party on "tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their advocacy of
a Negro state". That aside he declared:
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to
self-destruction...Communism...this is the only way of human life. It is a
difficult and hard end to reach--it has and will make mistakes...On this
first day of October 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in
the Communist Party of the United States.
THE LEGACY AND MESSAGE
Dr. James E. Jackson, close friend of DuBois and former leader and theoretician of
the Communist Party, summarized the life of DuBois in the following words:
"W.E.B. DuBois, the scholar and scientist, was equally a man of action. He chose
to keep the banners and goals of full equal rights flying from the halyard of
principle, no matter the difficulties and hardships." Of DuBois' "lasting testament"
Jackson asserts,
His last historic deed was to dramatize his firm conviction that `capitalist
society is altogether evil.' He concluded that to finally solve the problem
of racism, to really solve the problem of poverty, and to secure peace to
the world's peoples, humankind must, sooner or later, come to the
conclusion that this old structure is beyond effective reform...
W.E.B DuBois was a great fighter for the people, a true scientist, thinker
and humanist. He held aloft a bright torch of poetic inspiration that
lightens the way and illuminates the path of all who struggle for freedom.
The questions that DuBois posed and dealt with along the way of a long
and arduous life of unceasing service and dedication to the cause of
people's progress will find resolution on the path that he chose, the route
of the great humanists and social scientists,the Marxists. (Political
Affairs, July ,1989,5)
DuBois is our future. To understand his life and legacy is to
take hold of and understand our future. To be indifferent to it
is to considerably weaken our ability to fight for and realize
humanity's, and our nation's, democratic, peaceful and
socialist future. "History cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois,"
Martin Luther King insisted. In the end we are called on to
heed the words of Dr. Martin Luther King who in celebrating
the 100th anniversary of DuBois' birth declared,
We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing
that he was a radical all of his life. Some people
would like to ignore the fact that he was a
Communist in his later years. It is worth noting
that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the
support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and
corresponded with him freely. In contemporary
life the English-speaking world has no difficulty
with the fact that Sean O'Casey was a literary
giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or
that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the
greatest living poet though he also served in the
Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease
muting the fact that Dr. DuBois was a genius and
chose to be a Communist. Our obsessive
anti-communism has led us into too many
quagmires to be retained as it were a mode of
scientific thinking.