All,
Today February 23, 2018 marks the 150th year birthdate or sesquicentennial of the legendary W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) one of the world's greatest and most important as well as influential scholars, public intellectuals, philosophers, historians, sociologists, radical activists, political leaders, and cultural critics of the past century. In homage to and celebration of this pivotal world historical figure and his extraordinary life, work, and legacy we offer the following articles, commentary, and documentary material. Enjoy and pass the word…
Kofi
CALIFORNIA NEWSREEL
Film and Video for Social Change since 1968
W.E.B. DUBOIS: A BIOGRAPHY IN FOUR VOICES
DVD and DVD + 3-Year Site/Local Streaming
116 minutes, 1995
Producer/Director: Louis Massiah, Writer/Narrators: Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka
The long and remarkable life of Dr. William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B) Du Bois (1868-1963) offers unique insights into an eventful century in African American history. Born three years after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois witnessed the imposition of Jim Crow, its defeat by the Civil Rights Movement and the triumph of African independence struggles
Du Bois was the consummate scholar-activist whose path-breaking works remain among the most significant and articulate ever produced on the subject of race. His contributions and legacy have been so far-reaching, that this, his first film biography, required the collaboration of four prominent African American writers. Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka narrate successive periods of Du Bois' life and discuss its impact on their work.
Part One: Black Folk and the New Century (1895-1915)
Du Bois' first sociological work, The Philadelphia Negro, and, even more, The Souls of Black Folk, examined the cultural and political psychology of the American African Diaspora. During the same period, racism was institutionalized under the Jim Crow system. Du Bois emerged as the most outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington's advocacy of accommodation to segregation. He co-founded the Niagara Movement and then the NAACP to agitate for full equality between blacks and whites.
Part Two: The Crisis and the New Negro (1919-1929)
Du Bois created the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, which became a vital organ in the burgeoning African American cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois also was a founder of the Pan African movement, organizing the first international congresses of leaders from Africa and the Diaspora.
Part Three: A Second Reconstruction? (1934-1948)
Dismissed from the editorship of The Crisis for his radical views, Du Bois was forced to resume his academic career at age 68. It was now the Depression and he became more open to leftist ideology as reflected in his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction.
Part Four: Color, Democracy, Colonies and Peace (1949-1963)
Du Bois' continuing anti-racist activism and growing leftist sympathies made him a target during the McCarthy years. He was indicted and for a time his passport was revoked. In 1961, Kwame Nkrumah, the president of the newly independent African state of Ghana, invited him to participate in that country's development; Du Bois accepted, living there for the remainder of his life.
CRITICAL COMMENTS:
"An absolutely incredible job! Your film on Du Bois nears perfection . . . A resonantly full work of art. I can't imagine that Du Bois himself would not weep in gratitude upon seeing the work."
--Houston A. Baker Jr., University of Pennsylvania
"Scholar, activist, father of Pan-Africanism, founder of the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights, W.E.B. Du Bois succeeds in capturing this remarkable man and his significance. It will enlighten anyone - student scholar or general viewer - fortunate enough to see it."
--Eric Foner, Columbia University
"Sets a new standard for documentary film. The brilliance of interpretation and historical breadth make it a fitting tribute to the man whom I believe is the most important intellectual of our century."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, New York University
"One of the essential tools for teaching about the great Dr. Du Bois...Hearing this most self-reflective of men speaking in his own voice about the meaning of the central events of his life is at once profoundly moving and a source of insight."
--K. Anthony Appiah, Harvard University
"A beautiful and moving epic - not only about a brilliant and important figure but about the struggle of a people in the 20th century...Will make a wonderful teaching tool. I was personally inspired."
--Lani Guinier, University of Pennsylvania
All,
Today February 23, 2018 marks the 150th year birthdate or sesquicentennial of the legendary W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) one of the world's greatest and most important as well as influential scholars, public intellectuals, philosophers, historians, sociologists, radical activists, political leaders, and cultural critics of the past century. In homage to and celebration of this pivotal world historical figure and his extraordinary life, work, and legacy we offer the following articles, commentary, and documentary material Enjoy and pass the word…
Kofi
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: "Running after Du Bois"
The American Academy in Berlin
November 2017
W.E.B. Du Bois was the most influential black intellectual of his time. In this talk, Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers Du Bois in the great diversity of his positions—from the American “Negro” all the way to global communism and Pan-Africanism, with reference to his literary and autobiographical works as well. Her focus is his analysis of the emergence of US “abolition-democracy” as reflected in Du Bois’s massive Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, a pioneering study of the societal role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War.
VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/241178298
Today February 23, 2018 marks the 150th year birthdate or sesquicentennial of the legendary W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) one of the world's greatest and most important as well as influential scholars, public intellectuals, philosophers, historians, sociologists, radical activists, political leaders, and cultural critics of the past century. In homage to and celebration of this pivotal world historical figure and his extraordinary life, work, and legacy we offer the following articles, commentary, and documentary material Enjoy and pass the word…
Kofi
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: "Running after Du Bois"
The American Academy in Berlin
November 2017
W.E.B. Du Bois was the most influential black intellectual of his time. In this talk, Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers Du Bois in the great diversity of his positions—from the American “Negro” all the way to global communism and Pan-Africanism, with reference to his literary and autobiographical works as well. Her focus is his analysis of the emergence of US “abolition-democracy” as reflected in Du Bois’s massive Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, a pioneering study of the societal role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War.
VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/241178298
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor, and a founding member of
the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. B.A. English
(First Class Honors), Presidency College, Calcutta, 1959. Ph.D.
Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 1967. D. Litt, University of
Toronto, 1999; D. Litt, University of London, 2003; D. Hum, Oberlin
College, 2008; D. Honoris Causa, Universitat Roveri I Virgili, 2011; D.
Honoris Causa, Rabindra Bharati, 2012; Kyoto Prize in Thought and
Ethics, 2012; Padma Bhushan 2013; D.Honoris Causa, Univeridad Nacional
de San Martin, 2013; D. Litt, University of St. Andrews, 2014; D.
Honoris Causa, Paris VIII, 2014; Presidency University, 2014; D. Hum,
Yale University, 2015; D. Litt, University of Ghana-Legon, 2015; D.
Honoris Causa, Universidad de Chile, 2016; Lifetime Scholarly
Achievement from the Modern Language Association of America, 2018.
Fields:
19th- and 20th-century literature; politics of culture; feminism; Marx,
Derrida; globalization. Books: Myself Must I Remake: The Life and
Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974), Of Grammatology (translation with critical
introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976), In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987; Routledge Classic 2002),
Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in
Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993; 2d ed forthcoming), Outside in the
Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge classic 2003), Imaginary Maps
(translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta
Devi, 1994), The Spivak Reader (1995), Breast Stories (translation with
critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1997), Old
Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by
Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative
zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed.
forthcoming), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of
the Vanishing Present (1999), Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with
introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000), Chotti Munda and His Arrow
(translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi,
2002), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), An Aesthetic
Education in the Age of Globalization (2012), Readings (2014), Du Bois
and the General Strike (forthcoming). Significant articles: "Subaltern
Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" (1985), "Three Women's Texts and
a Critique of Imperialism" (1985), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988),
"The Politics of Translation" (1992), "Moving Devi" (1999), "Righting
Wrongs" (2003), "Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain
Scenes of Teaching" (2004), "Translating into English" (2005),
"Rethinking Comparativism" (2010), "A Borderless World" (2011), "General
Strike" (2012), "Crimes of Identity" (2014), "Our World" (2014).
Activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements
since 1986.
W.E.B.
Du Bois was the most influential black intellectual of his time. In
this talk, Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
considers Du Bois…vimeo.com
All,
Today
February 23, 2018 marks the 150th year birthdate or sesquicentennial of
the legendary W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) one of the world's greatest and
most important as well as influential scholars, public intellectuals,
philosophers, historians, sociologists, radical activists, political
leaders, and cultural critics of the past century. In homage to and
celebration of this pivotal world historical figure and his
extraordinary life, work, and legacy we offer the following articles,
commentary, and documentary material Enjoy and pass the word…
Kofi
'He's
still teaching us about injustice in the world': UMass, Great
Barrington celebrate 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois' birth
February 17, 2018
'He's still teaching us about injustice': 150th anniversary of W.E.B. DuBois' birth
by Diane Lederman
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/QQ0qloDipRc
AMHERST
-- Although he was born 150 years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois is as relevant as
today's headlines, an executive at the University of Massachusetts
library named after him says.
"He
is still teaching us about injustice in the world," said Carol Connare,
UMass Amherst Libraries W.E.B. Du Bois Center director of Library
Development and Communication.
Du
Bois, who was born in Great Barrington, founded the NAACP and created
"The Crisis," a magazine for that organization that looked at race and
social injustice.
The
UMass Board of Trustees voted Oct. 5, 1994, to name the library in
honor of the African-American historian and activist. The library holds
his writings.
UMass
and Great Barrington are holding events to honor Du Bois all month to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth on Feb. 23.
Director of UMass Du Bois Center gives away books to call attention to library namesake
Whitney Battle-Baptiste was giving away 500 copies.
He was the first black man to graduate from Harvard, Connare said. He wrote non-fiction and plays.
"We
have this extraordinarily prolific writer, and activist, who is
commenting and changing his mind over time and we have it all documented
in really amazing quality of writing," she said.
He might best be known for "The Souls of Black Folk," which was published in 1903.
"His
ideas are more relevant today than ever and those are ideas about
social injustice of all kinds and how do we as a people address (that),"
Connare said. "Those are questions we're wrestling with today. You can
look back, but here we have this relevance that has never been more
relevant because we're still listening to him.
"He
said that the problem of the 20th century is the color line. And we're
well into the 21st century. It's time to listen," she said.
Upcoming events in Great Barrington include:
Sunday
at 11 a.m., Karla Nicholson, executive director of the Haymarket
People's Fund in Boston, will speak on the "Courage to Change" at the
Macedonia Baptist Church, 9 Rosseter St.
Monday
at 7 p.m., the documentary "Du Bois in Four Voices" will be screened at
Berkshire South, 15 Crissey Road, followed by a panel discussion.
Feb. 23, UMass history students will provide guided tours of the Du Bois home site.
Also
Feb. 23, Reiland Rabaka, University of Colorado at Boulder professor of
African, African American, and Caribbean studies in the department of
ethnic studies, will speak the Mahaiwe Performing Arts center at 7 p.m.
Rabaka
also will speak at UMass Feb. 21 at 4 p.m. at the Old Chapel. His talk
at both locations is titled "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of the
Civil Rights Movement."
UMass
will celebrate Du Bois' Feb. 23 birthday with cake at 10 a.m. in the
library lobby. There is also a new exhibit in the Learning Commons in
the library showing publications photographs and writing to further
augment his life.
On the UMass Amherst Libraries W.E.B. Du Bois Center homepage, director Whitney Battle-Baptiste wrote:
"We
live in complicated times. For each national victory, there is a
sobering moment to temper our celebration. This has been a summer of
mourning, crying, shouting, and marching, and one also questioning why?
In moments like these, I find myself reaching for the words of Dr. Du
Bois from so long ago, to help with context and perspective."
W.E.B. Du Bois Biography
Civil Rights Activist, Educator, Journalist
1868–1963
W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important African-American activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and supported Pan-Africanism.
Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois?
Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Du Bois wrote extensively and was the best known spokesperson for African-American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) in 1909. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.
Early Life & Education
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, better known as W.E.B. Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While growing up in a mostly European American town, W.E.B. Du Bois identified himself as "mulatto," but freely attended school with whites and was enthusiastically supported in his academic studies by his white teachers. In 1885, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Fisk University. It was there that he first encountered Jim Crow laws. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism.
After earning his bachelor's degree at Fisk, Du Bois entered Harvard University. He paid his way with money from summer jobs, scholarships and loans from friends. After completing his master's degree, he was selected for a study-abroad program at the University of Berlin. While a pupil in Germany, he studied with some of the most prominent social scientists of his day and was exposed to political perspectives that he touted for the remainder of his life.
Du Bois' Unprecedented Accomplishment
Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895, and went on to enroll as a doctoral student at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität). (He would be awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Humboldt decades later, in 1958.)
Writing and Activism
Not long after, Du Bois published his landmark study — the first case study of an African-American community — The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), marking the beginning of his expansive writing career. In the study, he coined the phrase "the talented tenth," a term that described the likelihood of one in 10 black men becoming leaders of their race.
W.E.B. Du Bois' Beliefs
While working as a professor at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois rose to national prominence when he very publicly opposed Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise," an agreement that asserted that vocational education for blacks was more valuable to them than social advantages like higher education or political office. Du Bois criticized Washington for not demanding equality for African Americans, as granted by the 14th Amendment. Du Bois fought what he believed was an inferior strategy, subsequently becoming a spokesperson for full and equal rights in every realm of a person's life.
Co-Founder of the N.A.A.C.P.
In 1903, Du Bois published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays. In the years following, he adamantly opposed the idea of biological white superiority and vocally supported women's rights. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served as editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis for over 25 years.
Pan-Africanism and Death
A proponent of Pan-Africanism, Du Bois helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers.
W.E.B. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963 — one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington — at the age of 95, in Accra, Ghana, while working on an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora.
VIDEOS:
W.E.B. DuBois - Civil Rights Pioneer
W.E.B. DuBois - Civil Rights Pioneer(TV-PG; 2:22)
W.E.B. DuBois - Rivalry with Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. DuBois - Rivalry with Booker T. Washington(TV-PG; 2:16)
W.E.B. Du Bois - The Niagara Movement
W.E.B. Du Bois - The Niagara Movement(TV-14; 3:46)
W.E.B. Du Bois - Mini Biography
W.E.B. Du Bois - Mini Biography(TV-14; 3:47)
W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important African-American activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and supported Pan-Africanism.
biography.com
https://www.bostonglobe.com/…/Grzxw0bwxRr3Q08JeS…/story.html
Opinion | Cornell William Brooks
W.E.B. Du Bois offers lessons to this generation of citizen activists
by Cornell William Brooks
February 23, 2018
The Boston Globe
PHOTO: John Lindsay/Associated Press. Some 200 members
of the W.E.B. Du Bois Club carry banners and placards as they
demonstrate in front of New York’s City Hall, on March 11, 1966. The
club members were protesting police brutality and Attorney General
Nicholas Katzenback’s recent effort to have the organization register as
a Communist front.
During this tumultuous time in America, the youngest Americans are
being inspired to become advocates by the most American of tragedies —
violence. From the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to
the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., to last week’s school
schooting in Parkland, Fla., younger Americans by the millions have been
energized to advocate against persistent police brutality, rising hate
crime, and pervasive gun violence. In the wake of the violent deaths of
Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Heather Heyer, and of
numerous school shootings, America has witnessed a generationally
unprecedented level of activism. On Friday, the 150th anniversary of the
birth of a global citizen and son of Great Barrington, W.E.B. Du Bois,
offers a few lessons to this generation of citizen activists.
In 1899, the life of the still young scholar Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was radicalized by a single act of horrific violence. As the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, Du Bois was then a 31-year-old Atlanta University professor. This already distinguished professor was walking to a meeting with the editor of The Atlanta Constitution to discuss the case of Sam Hose, a black laborer who was accused of murdering his white employer and raping his wife. Du Bois was all too aware that African-Americans were often falsely accused of crimes and then, without judge or jury, lynched by mobs. While walking to meet the editor, Du Bois was informed that Sam Hose had already been lynched. Indeed, Du Bois learned that Hose’s knuckles were already being sold as a gruesome souvenir in an Atlanta store.
During this tumultuous time in America, the youngest Americans are being inspired to become advocates by the most American of tragedies — violence. From the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., to last week’s school schooting in Parkland, Fla., younger Americans by the millions have been energized to advocate against persistent police brutality, rising hate crime, and pervasive gun violence. In the wake of the violent deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Heather Heyer, and of numerous school shootings, America has witnessed a generationally unprecedented level of activism. On Friday, the 150th anniversary of the birth of a global citizen and son of Great Barrington, W.E.B. Du Bois, offers a few lessons to this generation of citizen activists.
In 1899, the life of the still young scholar Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was radicalized by a single act of horrific violence. As the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, Du Bois was then a 31-year-old Atlanta University professor. This already distinguished professor was walking to a meeting with the editor of The Atlanta Constitution to discuss the case of Sam Hose, a black laborer who was accused of murdering his white employer and raping his wife. Du Bois was all too aware that African-Americans were often falsely accused of crimes and then, without judge or jury, lynched by mobs. While walking to meet the editor, Du Bois was informed that Sam Hose had already been lynched. Indeed, Du Bois learned that Hose’s knuckles were already being sold as a gruesome souvenir in an Atlanta store.
Du Bois later wrote that the lynching of Hose inspired him to forgo the cool detached logic of an academic for the heated arguments of advocate. Over the course of his 95 years, Du Bois founded the NAACP; launched and led the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, served as a progenitor of Pan-Africanism, wrote voluminously against racism and colonialism, raged against lynching and the wanton taking of black lives, and defied racism. These are a few lessons for the citizen activists of this Twitter-age civil rights movement:
First, our heroes and heroines need not demonstrate an uncritical patriotism for their contributions to demand American recognition and gratitude. After having been arrested by the American government at age 82 for being a communist, Du Bois left America and lived out his remaining years in Ghana. He died estranged from the land of his birth, believing the ideal of American equality, in the words of scholar David Levering Lewis, to be a “mirage.” And yet on his deathbed, he sent a telegram of support to attendees of the 1963 March on Washington. The writings of Du Bois both painfully castigated and powerfully inspired America to end Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations with the Civil Rights Act, grant African-Americans fuller access to the franchise through the Voting Rights Act, end lynching, and reexamine the white-washed American history that erased the contributions of African-Americans.
Du Bois and today’s citizen activists cannot be judged by whether they kneel before or wave the American flag with uncritical enthusiasm but to the degree they compel America to fulfill her promises to all her citizens. By this measure, no one has researched, written, spoken, or advocated more over so many decades for American racial justice. Du Bois is a heroic figure not for the absence of his criticism but for the excellence and enduring relevance of his critique and analysis of American racism.
Second, DuBois’s life and legacy make clear that activism must not be a plaything of the young. Some older Americans have suggested that activism is a passing phase that millennials and Gen Xers will grow out of. Du Bois stood against injustice until the edge of his death bed. True, his world view and writings evolved over the decades. That said, the protean intensity of his advocacy is reflected at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which houses the Du Bois collection of nearly 300 boxes, or 100,000 items, of correspondence, speeches, plays, short stories, book reviews, nonfiction books, fables, and poetry.
Lastly, the tools needed to address the challenges before the country must be interdisciplinary and globally informed. Du Bois is a role model for today’s generation of activists. He examined the American and global injustices of his age through the lens of sociology, economics, literature, poetry, policy, and politics. It is hard to think of a tool available to him that he did not use during his long life. The diversity of Du Bois’s advocacy suggests not only the breadth of his brilliance as one activist but also the variety of reform opportunities for today’s activists.
As we observe the birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois, there is much for Massachusetts and America to celebrate. There is far more to emulate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cornell William Brooks, former president of the NAACP, is a visiting professor at Boston University School of Theology and Boston University Law School.
NOTE: The following comment is from one of the readers of this article:
no-name-02/23/18 11:30 AM
"A few facts about the Hose lynching":
While he was still alive,his face was skinned, all his body parts were cut off. then, he was burned alive. A white mob in the thousands cheered as all this was done. All the major atlanta newspapers wrote approving articles. Not satisfied, two other African Americans were also lynched. Another African-American was lynched soon after because he was complaining about the lynching of Afro-Americans. No one was ever charged in these murders.
The white woman who Hose was accused of sexually assaulting gave interview in which she acknowledged that she was never assaulted and that Hose killed her husband in self-defense after her husband pulled a gun on hose because hose was asking for wages that were due to him.
Can't help wondering where all the comments are from those who are always writing in support of the "southern way of life" and segregation as being part of the local culture"
W.E.B. DuBois Speaks!
"Socialism and the American Negro"
April 9, 1960
Astonishingly DuBois was 92 years old at the time of this speech!
Published on May 25, 2015
W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro. The venerable W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), historian and activist, gives an address to the Wisconsin Socialist Club in Madison on socialism and the struggle of Black people in America. This speech was given on April 9, 1960 when DuBois was over 90 years of age and just months before his removal to Africa where he died in Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95.
In the speech Du Bois asserts that African Americans must learn the truth about socialism that they may "preserve their culture, get rid of poverty, ignorance and disease, and help America live up at least to a shadow of its vain boast as the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Audio sections from "Socialism and the American Negro":
0:00 Anecdote about learning meaning of Democracy
0:40 McCarthyism vs. Socialism, Robert Lafollette vs. monopolized wealth, W.E.B. DuBois work
1:35 Collapse of capitalism, socialism, "The New Deal"
3:00 Negro analysis of their condition in America, solutions, and results
4:19 Negro suffrage
5:46 Demands made at Niagra movement meeting in Niagra Falls June 1905
6:13 NAACP organized in 1909 and 1954 supreme court decision on segregation
7:46 Democracy failing in America 9:31 Rising costs of elections ("monopoly", "propaganda", "deception")
9:46 Travel to Europe and Asia as a catalyst for the adoption of socialist views
11:49 "Degeneracy of Capitalism" and personal experience with socialized healthcare in Britiain
12:51 European colonialism, exploitation of colored people, end of colonialism
13:50 Western Europe and American negligence regarding wealth disparity and being impressed with Socialism
15:24 China vs.The West, "spread of socialism and communism", and predictions for 21st century
16:32 NAACP, Necessity for economic foundation in addition legal rights
18:02 Migration to urban, metropolitan areas as a remedy for poverty and its problems
18:42 "The center of the problem", wealth, monopoly, allocation of money for war
19:46 DuBois attends Soviet Peace Conference
24:48 Sun Yat Chen
28:54 W.E.B.DuBois speaks on hypocrisy of Americans regarding prison, mass incarceration, national war debt
30:00 What America must do
33:24 What American Negroes must learn
33:36
https://news.harvard.edu/…/radcliffe-fellow-retraces-du-bo…/
Arts & Humanities
Retracing Du Bois’ missteps
Radcliffe fellow Chad Williams is working on a book about what he considers one of W.E.B. Du Bois’ greatest missteps: “The Black Man and the Wounded World,” an unfinished history of the African-American experience during World War I.
by Colleen Walsh
Harvard Staff Writer
February 22, 2018
Harvard Gazette
https://youtu.be/8hpiK7gUf_c
By any measure, W.E.B. Du Bois was an intellectual giant. A historian, writer, editor, teacher, sociologist, and Civil Rights activist, he was also the first African-American to receive a Harvard Ph.D., co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and author of several groundbreaking books, including “Black Reconstruction in America” (1935).
But according to historian Chad Williams, Du Bois was also a failure.
As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Williams is writing a book about what he considers one of Du Bois’ greatest missteps: “The Black Man and the Wounded World,” an unfinished history of the African-American experience during World War I. Unlike many Civil Rights crusaders of the time, Du Bois urged African-Americans to join the war effort. But when acts of loyalty and heroism in Europe failed to translate to the societal change he’d envisioned back home, he began documenting the results of his misjudgment.
“Du Bois as a failure … that’s a framework for thinking about him that I would never have really considered,” said Williams, chair of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University.
Williams came across Du Bois’ incomplete manuscript at UMass Amherst in 2000 while researching the Ph.D. dissertation that would become his 2010 book, “Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era.” His years spent poring over Du Bois’ archives and records helped Williams understand the professional and personal dimensions to Du Bois’ failings. The inability to finish the book was a source of deep frustration, while his support of the war and his belief in what the conflict could have meant for equality in America haunted Du Bois till his death.
“The war was one of the most consequential and traumatic moments in his life as far as his wrestling with what it meant to be an African-American,” said Williams. “What he talks about in his 1903 book, ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ — the ‘double consciousness,’ the twoness of being a Negro and being an American, these two warring ideals. Du Bois thought that the war would be able to, at least temporarily, reconcile those two conflicting aspects of black identity more broadly, but also personally, and that didn’t happen.”
More than 350,000 African-American soldiers served in segregated units during World War I. Most of the black troops stationed in France were assigned to ditch digging or the bearing of dead bodies. In time, the Army created two African-American combat units, the 92nd division made up of draftees, and the 93rd that comprised black national guardsmen. While the 93rd “compiled a stellar combat record,” the 92nd floundered.
PHOTO: Cover page of W. E. B. Du Bois' Harvard dissertation " The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States of America, 1638-1871."
PHOTO: W. E. B. Du Bois photograph from the Harvard College Class of 1890 Class Book, 1890.
Image 1: Cover page of Du Bois' Harvard dissertation " The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States of America, 1638-1871." Image 2: Du Bois' photograph from the Harvard College Class of 1890 Class Book.
Courtesy of Harvard University Archives; (2) Pach Bros., New York, New York, United States [photographer] ca. 1890
“Racist white commanders and deliberate neglect from the War Department doomed the performance of the division from the start, while its black officers … endured humiliation after humiliation,” Williams said in a Radcliffe talk in the fall.
Du Bois initially saw “Wounded World” as way to stem the outcry over “Close Ranks,” an editorial he’d written in July 1918 for the NAACP monthly journal The Crisis in which he called for African-American soldiers to temporarily put aside their grievances and join up with the Allied forces in the name of democracy. Critics branded him a traitor to his race. Du Bois was shaken by the rebuke.
“He viewed writing this book as a form of personal and political redemption … that he would be able to rehabilitate his credibility through writing the history of the black experience in the war,” said Williams.
But the project took on an even deeper meaning when Du Bois interviewed African-American soldiers in France after the fighting. They recounted the “horrific racism and discrimination they had endured,” at the hands of fellow servicemen, said Williams. From that moment on the project became one of “reclamation.”
PHOTO: African-American soldiers fighting in WWI pose for a company photo. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
“Du Bois is aware that the official historical record is going to marginalize the contributions and sacrifices of African-American soldiers and officers in particular, and that it’s necessary to tell this history correctly.”
Yet that effort led to another failed opportunity, and a breach of trust. In his drive for accuracy, Du Bois sent out a call for African-American veterans to send him material related to their experiences. Letters, diaries, and other documents poured in. Their willingness to share information showed they were “investing their hopes and historical visions in Du Bois,” said Williams. “In the end, those untold stories are part of the real tragedy of this project.”
Du Bois’ disillusionment with the war reached its peak in 1930s during travels in Russia, China, Japan, and Germany. The rise of fascism and militarism in Europe and elsewhere convinced him that the condition of the world “was almost irredeemable,” said Williams. Any lessons his book could offer would be “almost too late,” he decided.
While Williams referenced Du Bois’ World War I material in his 2010 book, he knew the manuscript, 800 pages written over the course of 20 years, was something to which he “would inevitably turn back.” In an increasingly polarized U.S., Williams thinks a closer examination of Du Bois’ unfinished work can offer important lessons not only to scholars but also to the wider public.
Table of Contents, 1936, The Black Man and the Wounded World (unpublished), W. E. B. Du Bois.
Image 1: Williams holds a photo of a WWI African-American soldier from Du Bois' collection. Image 2: Table of Contents for "The Black Man and the Wounded World" (unpublished, 1936).
(1) Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer; (2) W.E.B. Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University
“One hundred years later we are still reckoning with the legacies of World War I, particularly in terms of race and democracy — the same challenges that Du Bois wrestled with,” he said. “What does it mean to be African-American? That’s still the fundamental question for many people, along with how we try to heal the wounds of our still very wounded world.”
And though Williams ultimately calls the story of the unfinished manuscript “a tragedy,” he sees hope in Du Bois’ failure.
“I think it’s instructive for us and for me as a historian to know that Du Bois, for all of his brilliance and clairvoyance, was genuinely confused by this moment, and to the end of his life was unsure if he made the right decision in supporting the war.
“If there is any hope to take from it, it’s the struggle that Du Bois was engaged in and the commitment that he had, which I think is a commitment that we all must have — especially today, when we see democracy itself being undermined and attacked and we see white supremacy resurgent and being legitimized at the highest levels of our democracy.”
https://www.npr.org/…/the-enduring-lyricism-of-w-e-b-du-boi…
Book News & Features
The Enduring Lyricism Of W.E.B. Du Bois' 'The Souls Of Black Folk'
4:54
AUDIO:
by Lynn Neary
February 23, 2018
National Public Radio
It was no accident that W.E.B. Du Bois called his book The Souls Of Black Folk, says Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas In America. Du Bois wasn't looking for a catchy title — he was reacting to the reality of his times.
"Racist Americans were making the case that black people did not have souls," Kendi says. "And the beings that did not have souls were beasts."
Friday is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Du Bois, the great African-American thinker and writer. To celebrate, The Souls Of Black Folk has been republished. It's a collection of essays on black life and race relations in the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
In his introduction to the new edition of The Souls Of Black Folk, Kendi writes that Du Bois wanted the world "to know the humanity of black folk." Some of the essays, like one about his time as a teacher in the rural South, vividly depict what it was like to be black. Others address the ongoing debates of the time about the best way to improve black lives. Taken as a whole, the book reads like one long poem.
"It's deeply lyrical, but not just lyrical in the sense that he had, sort of, beautiful language," Kendi says. "It's lyrical in the sense that he was able to really capture the complexities and multiplicities of life."
A central metaphor in the book is the idea that a veil separates white and black America. Blacks can see through the veil, says Kendi — whites either can't or won't.
"In many ways black people could see the opportunities through the veil that white people were privileged to have," Kendi says. "White people could not see through the veil the opportunities that black people were denied."
Many of the ideas that Du Bois outlined in the book still endure. Dana Williams, head of the English department at Howard University, has taught the book many times.
"It doesn't matter where the student is in his or her learning experience," Williams says. "There's always something in The Souls Of Black Folk that students can identify with."
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois, Donald B. Gibson and Monica M. Elbert
Paperback, 247 pages
Nnyla Lampkin is a freshman at Howard. She and several other students gathered recently to discuss the book.
"It was amazing to me to hear somebody from the past speaking the way that some of us think today," Lampkin says.
One idea that seemed to resonate with the group was Du Bois' concept of "double consciousness," which describes how difficult it was to be both black and American — at a time when being American essentially meant being white. Freshman Hadiyah Cummings says this duality can still be a struggle.
"It's definitely hard having to know I love being black and I love what I represent, and also knowing that if I want to get a job that I have to look a certain way or speak a certain way," Cummings says. "And so having to fight this constant battle of choosing which side of me am I going to show today and also just wanting to be able to be unapologetically me and be accepted in both spaces is definitely hard to deal with."
In The Souls Of Black Folk, Du Bois outlines his ideas about the need for higher education for blacks. He lays the groundwork for a later essay, "The Talented Tenth," which is also included in this new edition. This is one of his best known ideas — that "the Negro race," as he called, it would "be saved by its exceptional men."
Though Du Bois later revised some of his thinking, this idea has been criticized as elitist. Howard senior Sadiya Malcolm doesn't see it that way.
"To me the proposition is not elitist," she says. "It's a responsibility — it's a task. It's about creating opportunities so that when my nieces or my little brothers and sisters are going to school, it looks possible — so they have somebody in their community to go to to say 'well, what's the college process like?' It's about realizing collectively how we can contribute to our betterment as a people."
At the start of each essay Du Bois includes a bar of music. These are "The Sorrow Songs" that Du Bois writes about in his final essay. They are the spirituals and folk songs that emerged from slavery to become a gift to America — what Du Bois calls the "singular spiritual heritage of the nation." It is the story of these that touched Asan Hawkins most deeply.
"I don't think any of us have escaped our childhoods without hearing at least one of these songs," Hawkins says. "And for him to weave them into each and every one of these chapters — he lit up our spirits. He gave us something that we could relate to throughout time. Each song spoke to somebody, each chapter spoke to somebody."
In his introduction, Ibram Kendi notes that when The Souls Of Black Folk was first released, a black newspaper in Ohio declared that it should be read "by every person." Kendi believes that advice still holds today for anyone who wants to understand America and to see what's on the other side of that veil.
Read an excerpt of The Souls of Black Folk (1903):
Excerpt: The Souls Of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
— Arthur Symons
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked bysome through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightlyframing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead ofsaying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellentcolored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not theseSouthern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, orreduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the realquestion, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is inthe early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one,all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards— ten cents a package — and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, atall newcomer, refused my card, — refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from theothers; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from theirworld by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in aregion of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I couldbeat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade;for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs,not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I wouldwrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, byhealing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, — someway. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youthshrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world aboutthem and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry,Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades ofthe prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to thewhitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who mustplod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, orsteadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian,the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with secondsight in this American world — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the otherworld. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense ofalways looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soulby the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feelshis twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciledstrivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alonekeeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longingto attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better andtruer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. Hewould not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world andAfrica. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, forhe knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to makeit possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursedand spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closedroughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom ofculture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powersand his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past beenstrangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro pastflits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there likefalling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged theirbrightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man'sturning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made hisvery strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, likeweakness. And yet it is not weakness, — it is the contradiction of double aims.The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan — on the one hand to escapewhite contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and onthe other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde — couldonly result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart ineither cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister ordoctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of theother world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge hispeople needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledgewhich would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. Theinnate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the blackartist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which hislarger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of anotherpeople. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciledideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of tenthousand thousand people, — has sent them often wooing false gods and invokingfalse means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make themashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the endof all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half suchunquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so faras he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, thecause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to apromised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of weariedIsraelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain — Liberty; in his tearsand curses, the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,— suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood andpassion came the message in his own plaintive cadences: —
"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then, — ten, twenty, forty; forty years ofnational life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthyspectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry tothis our vastest social problem: —
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet foundin freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years ofchange, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, — adisappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unboundedsave by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, theboon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, theterrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpetbaggers, the disorganization ofindustry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewilderedserf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for itsattainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. Theballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he nowregarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which warhad partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipatedmillions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to apower that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal tovote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired.Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually toreplace the dream of political power, — a powerful movement, the rise ofanother ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after aclouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born ofcompulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters ofthe white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discoveredthe mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law,steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only thosewho have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dullunderstandings of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, howpiteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statisticianwrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here andthere a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, thehorizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim andfar away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place,little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure forreflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to theyouth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In thosesombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,— darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation ofhis power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain hisplace in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time hesought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of socialdegradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt hispoverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he hadentered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor manis hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom ofhardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, — not simply of letters, but oflife, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking andawkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was hisburden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuriesof systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meantnot only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight ofa mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois,
1903
[Audiobook]
Published on January 22, 2016:
Listen to an unabridged recording of W.E.B. Du Bois' classic work of African-American literature The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903, Du Bois begins his collection of essays on race with the statement that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." The essays that followed were instrumental to the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. This audio book is read in a straightforward manner by Torias Uncle at Librivox along some brief musical interludes.
Download this audiobook at: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audi...
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. DuBois
1903
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0:00:00 Forethought 0:03:06
Chapter 1 Of Our Spiritual Strivings 0:25:23
Chapter 2 Of the Dawn of Freedom 1:11:54
Chapter 3 Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others 1:44:34 Chapter 4 Of the Meaning of Progress 2:09:18
Chapter 5 Of the Wings of Atalanta 2:31:54
Chapter 6 Of the Training of Black Men 3:07:33
Chapter 7 Of the Black Belt 3:51:41
Chapter 8 Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece 4:42:55
Chapter 9 Of the Sons of Master and Man 5:25:38
Chapter 10 Of the Faith of the Fathers (low volume) 6:00:11 Chapter 11 Of the Passing of the First Born 6:17:25
Chapter 12 Of Alexander Crummell 6:42:08
Chapter 13 Of the Coming of John 7:19:08
Chapter 14 Of the Sorrow Songs
https://www.bostonglobe.com/…/Grzxw0bwxRr3Q08JeS…/story.html
Opinion | Cornell William Brooks
W.E.B. Du Bois offers lessons to this generation of citizen activists
by Cornell William Brooks
February 23, 2018
The Boston Globe
In 1899, the life of the still young scholar Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was radicalized by a single act of horrific violence. As the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, Du Bois was then a 31-year-old Atlanta University professor. This already distinguished professor was walking to a meeting with the editor of The Atlanta Constitution to discuss the case of Sam Hose, a black laborer who was accused of murdering his white employer and raping his wife. Du Bois was all too aware that African-Americans were often falsely accused of crimes and then, without judge or jury, lynched by mobs. While walking to meet the editor, Du Bois was informed that Sam Hose had already been lynched. Indeed, Du Bois learned that Hose’s knuckles were already being sold as a gruesome souvenir in an Atlanta store.
During this tumultuous time in America, the youngest Americans are being inspired to become advocates by the most American of tragedies — violence. From the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., to last week’s school schooting in Parkland, Fla., younger Americans by the millions have been energized to advocate against persistent police brutality, rising hate crime, and pervasive gun violence. In the wake of the violent deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Heather Heyer, and of numerous school shootings, America has witnessed a generationally unprecedented level of activism. On Friday, the 150th anniversary of the birth of a global citizen and son of Great Barrington, W.E.B. Du Bois, offers a few lessons to this generation of citizen activists.
In 1899, the life of the still young scholar Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was radicalized by a single act of horrific violence. As the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, Du Bois was then a 31-year-old Atlanta University professor. This already distinguished professor was walking to a meeting with the editor of The Atlanta Constitution to discuss the case of Sam Hose, a black laborer who was accused of murdering his white employer and raping his wife. Du Bois was all too aware that African-Americans were often falsely accused of crimes and then, without judge or jury, lynched by mobs. While walking to meet the editor, Du Bois was informed that Sam Hose had already been lynched. Indeed, Du Bois learned that Hose’s knuckles were already being sold as a gruesome souvenir in an Atlanta store.
Du Bois later wrote that the lynching of Hose inspired him to forgo the cool detached logic of an academic for the heated arguments of advocate. Over the course of his 95 years, Du Bois founded the NAACP; launched and led the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, served as a progenitor of Pan-Africanism, wrote voluminously against racism and colonialism, raged against lynching and the wanton taking of black lives, and defied racism. These are a few lessons for the citizen activists of this Twitter-age civil rights movement:
First, our heroes and heroines need not demonstrate an uncritical patriotism for their contributions to demand American recognition and gratitude. After having been arrested by the American government at age 82 for being a communist, Du Bois left America and lived out his remaining years in Ghana. He died estranged from the land of his birth, believing the ideal of American equality, in the words of scholar David Levering Lewis, to be a “mirage.” And yet on his deathbed, he sent a telegram of support to attendees of the 1963 March on Washington. The writings of Du Bois both painfully castigated and powerfully inspired America to end Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations with the Civil Rights Act, grant African-Americans fuller access to the franchise through the Voting Rights Act, end lynching, and reexamine the white-washed American history that erased the contributions of African-Americans.
Du Bois and today’s citizen activists cannot be judged by whether they kneel before or wave the American flag with uncritical enthusiasm but to the degree they compel America to fulfill her promises to all her citizens. By this measure, no one has researched, written, spoken, or advocated more over so many decades for American racial justice. Du Bois is a heroic figure not for the absence of his criticism but for the excellence and enduring relevance of his critique and analysis of American racism.
Second, DuBois’s life and legacy make clear that activism must not be a plaything of the young. Some older Americans have suggested that activism is a passing phase that millennials and Gen Xers will grow out of. Du Bois stood against injustice until the edge of his death bed. True, his world view and writings evolved over the decades. That said, the protean intensity of his advocacy is reflected at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which houses the Du Bois collection of nearly 300 boxes, or 100,000 items, of correspondence, speeches, plays, short stories, book reviews, nonfiction books, fables, and poetry.
Lastly, the tools needed to address the challenges before the country must be interdisciplinary and globally informed. Du Bois is a role model for today’s generation of activists. He examined the American and global injustices of his age through the lens of sociology, economics, literature, poetry, policy, and politics. It is hard to think of a tool available to him that he did not use during his long life. The diversity of Du Bois’s advocacy suggests not only the breadth of his brilliance as one activist but also the variety of reform opportunities for today’s activists.
As we observe the birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois, there is much for Massachusetts and America to celebrate. There is far more to emulate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cornell William Brooks, former president of the NAACP, is a visiting professor at Boston University School of Theology and Boston University Law School.
NOTE: The following comment is from one of the readers of this article:
no-name-02/23/18 11:30 AM
"A few facts about the Hose lynching":
While he was still alive,his face was skinned, all his body parts were cut off. then, he was burned alive. A white mob in the thousands cheered as all this was done. All the major atlanta newspapers wrote approving articles. Not satisfied, two other African Americans were also lynched. Another African-American was lynched soon after because he was complaining about the lynching of Afro-Americans. No one was ever charged in these murders.
The white woman who Hose was accused of sexually assaulting gave interview in which she acknowledged that she was never assaulted and that Hose killed her husband in self-defense after her husband pulled a gun on hose because hose was asking for wages that were due to him.
Can't help wondering where all the comments are from those who are always writing in support of the "southern way of life" and segregation as being part of the local culture"
W.E.B. DuBois Speaks!
"Socialism and the American Negro"
April 9, 1960
Astonishingly DuBois was 92 years old at the time of this speech!
Published on May 25, 2015
W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro. The venerable W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), historian and activist, gives an address to the Wisconsin Socialist Club in Madison on socialism and the struggle of Black people in America. This speech was given on April 9, 1960 when DuBois was over 90 years of age and just months before his removal to Africa where he died in Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95.
In the speech Du Bois asserts that African Americans must learn the truth about socialism that they may "preserve their culture, get rid of poverty, ignorance and disease, and help America live up at least to a shadow of its vain boast as the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Audio sections from "Socialism and the American Negro":
0:00 Anecdote about learning meaning of Democracy
0:40 McCarthyism vs. Socialism, Robert Lafollette vs. monopolized wealth, W.E.B. DuBois work
1:35 Collapse of capitalism, socialism, "The New Deal"
3:00 Negro analysis of their condition in America, solutions, and results
4:19 Negro suffrage
5:46 Demands made at Niagra movement meeting in Niagra Falls June 1905
6:13 NAACP organized in 1909 and 1954 supreme court decision on segregation
7:46 Democracy failing in America 9:31 Rising costs of elections ("monopoly", "propaganda", "deception")
9:46 Travel to Europe and Asia as a catalyst for the adoption of socialist views
11:49 "Degeneracy of Capitalism" and personal experience with socialized healthcare in Britiain
12:51 European colonialism, exploitation of colored people, end of colonialism
13:50 Western Europe and American negligence regarding wealth disparity and being impressed with Socialism
15:24 China vs.The West, "spread of socialism and communism", and predictions for 21st century
16:32 NAACP, Necessity for economic foundation in addition legal rights
18:02 Migration to urban, metropolitan areas as a remedy for poverty and its problems
18:42 "The center of the problem", wealth, monopoly, allocation of money for war
19:46 DuBois attends Soviet Peace Conference
24:48 Sun Yat Chen
28:54 W.E.B.DuBois speaks on hypocrisy of Americans regarding prison, mass incarceration, national war debt
30:00 What America must do
33:24 What American Negroes must learn
33:36
https://news.harvard.edu/…/radcliffe-fellow-retraces-du-bo…/
Arts & Humanities
Retracing Du Bois’ missteps
Radcliffe fellow Chad Williams is working on a book about what he considers one of W.E.B. Du Bois’ greatest missteps: “The Black Man and the Wounded World,” an unfinished history of the African-American experience during World War I.
by Colleen Walsh
Harvard Staff Writer
February 22, 2018
Harvard Gazette
Radcliffe
fellow Chad Williams is working on a book about what he considers one of
W.E.B. Du Bois’ greatest missteps: “The Black Man and the Wounded
World,” an unfinished history of the African-American experience during
World War I. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the History of WWI | Chad L. Williams || Radcliffe Institute
Published on November 30, 2017:
The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois, African Americans, and the History of World War I
As part of the 2017–2018 Fellows’ Presentation Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Chad L. Williams RI ’18 tells a story that spans almost two decades, from one world war to the next, and features as its central character arguably the most significant black intellectual in American history, W. E. B. Du Bois.
Williams is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the 2017–2018 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/peo....
For information about the Radcliffe Institute and its many public programs, visit https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/.
As part of the 2017–2018 Fellows’ Presentation Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Chad L. Williams RI ’18 tells a story that spans almost two decades, from one world war to the next, and features as its central character arguably the most significant black intellectual in American history, W. E. B. Du Bois.
Williams is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the 2017–2018 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/peo....
For information about the Radcliffe Institute and its many public programs, visit https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/.
By any measure, W.E.B. Du Bois was an intellectual giant. A historian, writer, editor, teacher, sociologist, and Civil Rights activist, he was also the first African-American to receive a Harvard Ph.D., co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and author of several groundbreaking books, including “Black Reconstruction in America” (1935).
But according to historian Chad Williams, Du Bois was also a failure.
As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Williams is writing a book about what he considers one of Du Bois’ greatest missteps: “The Black Man and the Wounded World,” an unfinished history of the African-American experience during World War I. Unlike many Civil Rights crusaders of the time, Du Bois urged African-Americans to join the war effort. But when acts of loyalty and heroism in Europe failed to translate to the societal change he’d envisioned back home, he began documenting the results of his misjudgment.
“Du Bois as a failure … that’s a framework for thinking about him that I would never have really considered,” said Williams, chair of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University.
Williams came across Du Bois’ incomplete manuscript at UMass Amherst in 2000 while researching the Ph.D. dissertation that would become his 2010 book, “Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era.” His years spent poring over Du Bois’ archives and records helped Williams understand the professional and personal dimensions to Du Bois’ failings. The inability to finish the book was a source of deep frustration, while his support of the war and his belief in what the conflict could have meant for equality in America haunted Du Bois till his death.
“The war was one of the most consequential and traumatic moments in his life as far as his wrestling with what it meant to be an African-American,” said Williams. “What he talks about in his 1903 book, ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ — the ‘double consciousness,’ the twoness of being a Negro and being an American, these two warring ideals. Du Bois thought that the war would be able to, at least temporarily, reconcile those two conflicting aspects of black identity more broadly, but also personally, and that didn’t happen.”
More than 350,000 African-American soldiers served in segregated units during World War I. Most of the black troops stationed in France were assigned to ditch digging or the bearing of dead bodies. In time, the Army created two African-American combat units, the 92nd division made up of draftees, and the 93rd that comprised black national guardsmen. While the 93rd “compiled a stellar combat record,” the 92nd floundered.
PHOTO: Cover page of W. E. B. Du Bois' Harvard dissertation " The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States of America, 1638-1871."
PHOTO: W. E. B. Du Bois photograph from the Harvard College Class of 1890 Class Book, 1890.
Image 1: Cover page of Du Bois' Harvard dissertation " The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States of America, 1638-1871." Image 2: Du Bois' photograph from the Harvard College Class of 1890 Class Book.
Courtesy of Harvard University Archives; (2) Pach Bros., New York, New York, United States [photographer] ca. 1890
“Racist white commanders and deliberate neglect from the War Department doomed the performance of the division from the start, while its black officers … endured humiliation after humiliation,” Williams said in a Radcliffe talk in the fall.
Du Bois initially saw “Wounded World” as way to stem the outcry over “Close Ranks,” an editorial he’d written in July 1918 for the NAACP monthly journal The Crisis in which he called for African-American soldiers to temporarily put aside their grievances and join up with the Allied forces in the name of democracy. Critics branded him a traitor to his race. Du Bois was shaken by the rebuke.
“He viewed writing this book as a form of personal and political redemption … that he would be able to rehabilitate his credibility through writing the history of the black experience in the war,” said Williams.
But the project took on an even deeper meaning when Du Bois interviewed African-American soldiers in France after the fighting. They recounted the “horrific racism and discrimination they had endured,” at the hands of fellow servicemen, said Williams. From that moment on the project became one of “reclamation.”
PHOTO: African-American soldiers fighting in WWI pose for a company photo. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
“Du Bois is aware that the official historical record is going to marginalize the contributions and sacrifices of African-American soldiers and officers in particular, and that it’s necessary to tell this history correctly.”
Yet that effort led to another failed opportunity, and a breach of trust. In his drive for accuracy, Du Bois sent out a call for African-American veterans to send him material related to their experiences. Letters, diaries, and other documents poured in. Their willingness to share information showed they were “investing their hopes and historical visions in Du Bois,” said Williams. “In the end, those untold stories are part of the real tragedy of this project.”
Du Bois’ disillusionment with the war reached its peak in 1930s during travels in Russia, China, Japan, and Germany. The rise of fascism and militarism in Europe and elsewhere convinced him that the condition of the world “was almost irredeemable,” said Williams. Any lessons his book could offer would be “almost too late,” he decided.
While Williams referenced Du Bois’ World War I material in his 2010 book, he knew the manuscript, 800 pages written over the course of 20 years, was something to which he “would inevitably turn back.” In an increasingly polarized U.S., Williams thinks a closer examination of Du Bois’ unfinished work can offer important lessons not only to scholars but also to the wider public.
Table of Contents, 1936, The Black Man and the Wounded World (unpublished), W. E. B. Du Bois.
Image 1: Williams holds a photo of a WWI African-American soldier from Du Bois' collection. Image 2: Table of Contents for "The Black Man and the Wounded World" (unpublished, 1936).
(1) Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer; (2) W.E.B. Du Bois Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University
“One hundred years later we are still reckoning with the legacies of World War I, particularly in terms of race and democracy — the same challenges that Du Bois wrestled with,” he said. “What does it mean to be African-American? That’s still the fundamental question for many people, along with how we try to heal the wounds of our still very wounded world.”
And though Williams ultimately calls the story of the unfinished manuscript “a tragedy,” he sees hope in Du Bois’ failure.
“I think it’s instructive for us and for me as a historian to know that Du Bois, for all of his brilliance and clairvoyance, was genuinely confused by this moment, and to the end of his life was unsure if he made the right decision in supporting the war.
“If there is any hope to take from it, it’s the struggle that Du Bois was engaged in and the commitment that he had, which I think is a commitment that we all must have — especially today, when we see democracy itself being undermined and attacked and we see white supremacy resurgent and being legitimized at the highest levels of our democracy.”
https://www.npr.org/…/the-enduring-lyricism-of-w-e-b-du-boi…
Book News & Features
The Enduring Lyricism Of W.E.B. Du Bois' 'The Souls Of Black Folk'
4:54
AUDIO:
by Lynn Neary
February 23, 2018
National Public Radio
PHOTO: W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls Of Black Folk has been
re-published in a new edition for the author's 150th birthday
anniversary.. C. M. Battey/Getty Images
It was no accident that W.E.B. Du Bois called his book The Souls Of Black Folk, says Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas In America. Du Bois wasn't looking for a catchy title — he was reacting to the reality of his times.
"Racist Americans were making the case that black people did not have souls," Kendi says. "And the beings that did not have souls were beasts."
Friday is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Du Bois, the great African-American thinker and writer. To celebrate, The Souls Of Black Folk has been republished. It's a collection of essays on black life and race relations in the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
In his introduction to the new edition of The Souls Of Black Folk, Kendi writes that Du Bois wanted the world "to know the humanity of black folk." Some of the essays, like one about his time as a teacher in the rural South, vividly depict what it was like to be black. Others address the ongoing debates of the time about the best way to improve black lives. Taken as a whole, the book reads like one long poem.
"It's deeply lyrical, but not just lyrical in the sense that he had, sort of, beautiful language," Kendi says. "It's lyrical in the sense that he was able to really capture the complexities and multiplicities of life."
A central metaphor in the book is the idea that a veil separates white and black America. Blacks can see through the veil, says Kendi — whites either can't or won't.
"In many ways black people could see the opportunities through the veil that white people were privileged to have," Kendi says. "White people could not see through the veil the opportunities that black people were denied."
Many of the ideas that Du Bois outlined in the book still endure. Dana Williams, head of the English department at Howard University, has taught the book many times.
"It doesn't matter where the student is in his or her learning experience," Williams says. "There's always something in The Souls Of Black Folk that students can identify with."
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois, Donald B. Gibson and Monica M. Elbert
Paperback, 247 pages
Nnyla Lampkin is a freshman at Howard. She and several other students gathered recently to discuss the book.
"It was amazing to me to hear somebody from the past speaking the way that some of us think today," Lampkin says.
One idea that seemed to resonate with the group was Du Bois' concept of "double consciousness," which describes how difficult it was to be both black and American — at a time when being American essentially meant being white. Freshman Hadiyah Cummings says this duality can still be a struggle.
"It's definitely hard having to know I love being black and I love what I represent, and also knowing that if I want to get a job that I have to look a certain way or speak a certain way," Cummings says. "And so having to fight this constant battle of choosing which side of me am I going to show today and also just wanting to be able to be unapologetically me and be accepted in both spaces is definitely hard to deal with."
In The Souls Of Black Folk, Du Bois outlines his ideas about the need for higher education for blacks. He lays the groundwork for a later essay, "The Talented Tenth," which is also included in this new edition. This is one of his best known ideas — that "the Negro race," as he called, it would "be saved by its exceptional men."
Though Du Bois later revised some of his thinking, this idea has been criticized as elitist. Howard senior Sadiya Malcolm doesn't see it that way.
"To me the proposition is not elitist," she says. "It's a responsibility — it's a task. It's about creating opportunities so that when my nieces or my little brothers and sisters are going to school, it looks possible — so they have somebody in their community to go to to say 'well, what's the college process like?' It's about realizing collectively how we can contribute to our betterment as a people."
At the start of each essay Du Bois includes a bar of music. These are "The Sorrow Songs" that Du Bois writes about in his final essay. They are the spirituals and folk songs that emerged from slavery to become a gift to America — what Du Bois calls the "singular spiritual heritage of the nation." It is the story of these that touched Asan Hawkins most deeply.
"I don't think any of us have escaped our childhoods without hearing at least one of these songs," Hawkins says. "And for him to weave them into each and every one of these chapters — he lit up our spirits. He gave us something that we could relate to throughout time. Each song spoke to somebody, each chapter spoke to somebody."
In his introduction, Ibram Kendi notes that when The Souls Of Black Folk was first released, a black newspaper in Ohio declared that it should be read "by every person." Kendi believes that advice still holds today for anyone who wants to understand America and to see what's on the other side of that veil.
Read an excerpt of The Souls of Black Folk (1903):
Excerpt: The Souls Of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
Of Our Spiritual Strivings
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
— Arthur Symons
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked bysome through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightlyframing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead ofsaying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellentcolored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not theseSouthern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, orreduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the realquestion, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience — peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is inthe early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one,all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse,something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards— ten cents a package — and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, atall newcomer, refused my card, — refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from theothers; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from theirworld by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in aregion of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I couldbeat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade;for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs,not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I wouldwrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, byhealing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, — someway. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youthshrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world aboutthem and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry,Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades ofthe prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to thewhitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who mustplod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, orsteadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian,the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with secondsight in this American world — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the otherworld. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense ofalways looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soulby the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feelshis twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciledstrivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alonekeeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longingto attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better andtruer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. Hewould not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world andAfrica. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, forhe knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to makeit possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursedand spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closedroughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom ofculture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powersand his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past beenstrangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro pastflits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there likefalling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged theirbrightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man'sturning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made hisvery strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, likeweakness. And yet it is not weakness, — it is the contradiction of double aims.The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan — on the one hand to escapewhite contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and onthe other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde — couldonly result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart ineither cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister ordoctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of theother world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge hispeople needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledgewhich would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. Theinnate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the blackartist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which hislarger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of anotherpeople. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciledideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of tenthousand thousand people, — has sent them often wooing false gods and invokingfalse means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make themashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the endof all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half suchunquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so faras he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, thecause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to apromised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of weariedIsraelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain — Liberty; in his tearsand curses, the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,— suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood andpassion came the message in his own plaintive cadences: —
"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then, — ten, twenty, forty; forty years ofnational life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthyspectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry tothis our vastest social problem: —
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet foundin freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years ofchange, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, — adisappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unboundedsave by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, theboon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, theterrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpetbaggers, the disorganization ofindustry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewilderedserf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for itsattainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. Theballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he nowregarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which warhad partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipatedmillions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to apower that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal tovote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired.Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually toreplace the dream of political power, — a powerful movement, the rise ofanother ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after aclouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born ofcompulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters ofthe white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discoveredthe mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law,steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only thosewho have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dullunderstandings of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, howpiteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statisticianwrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here andthere a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, thehorizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim andfar away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place,little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure forreflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to theyouth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In thosesombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,— darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation ofhis power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain hisplace in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time hesought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of socialdegradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt hispoverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he hadentered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor manis hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom ofhardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, — not simply of letters, but oflife, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking andawkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was hisburden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuriesof systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meantnot only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight ofa mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois,
1903
[Audiobook]
Published on January 22, 2016:
Listen to an unabridged recording of W.E.B. Du Bois' classic work of African-American literature The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903, Du Bois begins his collection of essays on race with the statement that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." The essays that followed were instrumental to the intellectual argument for the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. This audio book is read in a straightforward manner by Torias Uncle at Librivox along some brief musical interludes.
Download this audiobook at: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audi...
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. DuBois
1903
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0:00:00 Forethought 0:03:06
Chapter 1 Of Our Spiritual Strivings 0:25:23
Chapter 2 Of the Dawn of Freedom 1:11:54
Chapter 3 Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others 1:44:34 Chapter 4 Of the Meaning of Progress 2:09:18
Chapter 5 Of the Wings of Atalanta 2:31:54
Chapter 6 Of the Training of Black Men 3:07:33
Chapter 7 Of the Black Belt 3:51:41
Chapter 8 Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece 4:42:55
Chapter 9 Of the Sons of Master and Man 5:25:38
Chapter 10 Of the Faith of the Fathers (low volume) 6:00:11 Chapter 11 Of the Passing of the First Born 6:17:25
Chapter 12 Of Alexander Crummell 6:42:08
Chapter 13 Of the Coming of John 7:19:08
Chapter 14 Of the Sorrow Songs
