Introduction

Wilson Moses, Pennsylvania State University

All history is “revisionism,” as W. E. B. Du Bois well knew when he turned to the Greek historian Herodotus, from the fifth century B.C.E., for both a model and a source for reconstructing the role of black folk in ancient history. Herodotus, known as “the father of history,” has also, since antiquity, been called “the father of lies.”¹ Such pejorative terms are, alas, the fate of all historians, ancient and modern, for no author has ever been without detractors. Nor has any author ever set out to write history purely for the purpose of telling the truth. Everyone who has ever undertaken the writing of history has done so in order to correct the mistaken opinions of predecessors or in order to bring to the fore those facts that previous writers have neglected, whether through honest incompetence or through malicious intent. Thus it was that Du Bois entered on his project of correcting the omissions, misinterpretations, and deliberate lies that he detected in previous depictions of the Negro’s past. But like all revisionists, Du Bois accepted certain orthodoxies. Thus he cited numerous authors, both ancient and modern, in support of his thesis that the African peoples possessed a noble heritage, and that they had made seminal contributions to the march of humanity from barbarism to civilization.²

Black Folk Then and Now (1939) represented the intermediate stage in a project destined to occupy Du Bois for the entirety of his professional life. Black Folk Then and Now reiterated—and with greater assurance—ideas that Du Bois had pondered in his 1896 pamphlet, The Conservation of Races, and it borrowed copiously from another previous work, The Negro (1915).³ The first of these efforts, The Conservation of Races, originated in a paper that Du Bois delivered at the inaugural meeting of an institution known as the American Negro Academy when he was twenty-nine years old; he spoke before a gathering of senior “race men” convened by the venerable Episcopalian minister Alexander Crummell. In this paper Du Bois had been markedly circumspect in his vindication of the Negro’s claims relating to the civilization of ancient Egypt. He was either unaware of or unconvinced by Frederick Douglass’s confident assertion in “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” (1854) that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were racially and culturally linked to the kingdoms of the pharaohs.

Following Herodotus’s reasoning, Douglass argued that the people of Colchis, who were said to be black, were a colony of Egypt, from which it might be deduced that both they and the Egyptians were black. Douglass read Herodotus as saying, “there was one fact strongly in favor of this opinion—the Colchians were black and wooly haired.” To this Douglass added another snippet of interpretive mythology:

The Pigeon said to have fled to Dodona, and to have founded the Oracle, was declared to be black, and that the meaning of the story was this: The Oracle was, in reality, founded by a female captive from the Thebiad; she was black, being an Egyptian. Other Greek writers ... have expressed themselves in similar terms.4

Where Douglass had relied on both the legend of the priestess at Dodona and the authority of professors at the University of Rochester, who recommended translations of Herodotus’s works, Du Bois relied on his own reading and reproduced the original Greek of Herodotus, who described the Egyptians as μελάγχoές εỉσι καì oλότριχες. Du Bois translated the word μελάγχρoές (melangchroes) as “black,” whereas others had translated it as “dark.” Most Victorian translators into English had preferred to view the Egyptians as “dark skinned and curly haired.” Although Du Bois neglected both Douglass and Herodotus in 1896, he mentioned Herodotus in The Negro and again in Black Folk Then and Now, and he marched into territory that the redoubtable Douglass had previously explored. Du Bois deviated slightly from Douglass by translating the key words as “black and curly-haired,” and he abbreviated Douglass’s treatment of Herodotus considerably, omitting Herodotus’s snippet of interpretative mythology concerning the Pigeon of Dodona.

Du Bois made many superficial references to the intellectual traditions of African and African American writers and speakers, but he offered no critical analysis of previous treatments of Egyptian ethnology by black authors. He overlooked the perceptive comment of Alexander Crummell that the peoples of the ancient world were “cosmopolitan thieves” who promiscuously appropriated one another’s cultural treasures and benefited from the appropriating.⁵ The bibliography of The Negro included Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887), a work by Edward Wilmot Blyden, a Liberian nationalist born in West India, who asserted that the Negro was descended from the builders of the pyramids. Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, in his Ethiopia Unbound (1911)—a work mildly critical of Du Bois⁶—had insisted that the Sphinx was the creation of black architects. Thus when Du Bois published The Negro, he was reinforcing positions that had existed among past and present generations of black intellectuals in the cultural triangle of Africa, America, and the West Indies. The historian Mia Bay, among others, has written on this antebellum tradition among black intellectuals and its survival into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.⁷

Du Bois’s lack of interest in relating his ideas to a preexisting Pan-African intellectual tradition is conspicuous. His works contain only the vaguest and most cursory allusions to black intellectual history or biography, but at no place in his voluminous works is there any systematic treatment of those literary and intellectual giants on whose shoulders he stood. It is true that he occasionally alluded to the existence of these traditions, but Du Bois was committed primarily to social history—not to intellectual history. In this respect, he may be contrasted to St. Clair Drake, whose work Black Folk Here and There (1987) was “an obvious variation” on Du Bois’s title, and Drake saw it as an extension of the project of the American Negro Academy “to defend the Negro against vicious assaults.” Thus when Drake deployed the term “vindicationist tradition,” he assigned a place of honor within it to Du Bois.8 Martin Bernal, in his Black Athena (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987, vol. 1, p. 437), likewise placed Du Bois honorably within the intellectual tradition that Du Bois inherited and advanced.

The historical content of Black Folk Then and Now was by no means restricted to ancient Africa. Du Bois addressed, as he had in The Negro, more recent developments in Africa, the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These histories are, of necessity, because of the brevity of the work, sketchily rendered. The outline history of the Negro in the United States from the inauguration of the slave trade to the Emancipation Proclamation is of great interest because it reflects Du Bois’s pioneering interpretation of social and economic history, which he had formulated in his Black Reconstruction, published in 1934. Du Bois viewed the postslavery history of Africans in the United States as a frustrated experiment in populist democratic government. The core of this interpretation had appeared in a chapter titled “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” a history of the Freedmen’s Bureau, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).⁹

With respect to indexing, we reluctantly observe the deficiencies of Black Folk Then and Now and its two revisions. Names and topics that are responsibly treated in the body of the work are difficult to retrieve because the indexes do not mention them. Thus the casual reader, one who simply tastes the works, may easily miss Du Bois’s discussions of or remarks on Melville Herskovits, Constantin Volney, Alexander Crummell, and Arthur de Gobineau. The bibliographies are also surprisingly shoddy, as well as incomplete. The entries are by category, but they are not alphabetized, and the full names and publication details are not given. The bibliographies are nonetheless useful as a guide to what Du Bois found interesting or important, and they can assist the reader in discovering what to look for, in the absence of adequate indexes.¹⁰

Neither Booker T. Washington nor Marcus Garvey was overlooked in the index, but neither was discussed in the text with any degree of complexity or detail. Washington was described as the author of a misguided attempt “to develop a Negro bourgeoisie who would hire black labor and cooperate with white capital.”¹¹ Garvey was dismissed with the curious description, “a leader of the Jamaican peasants.” There is a certain clarity in Du Bois’s perception of Washington and Garvey as figures who made abortive attempts to address the problems of the black world with economic programs. Nonetheless, each man had, in his way, some legitimacy as a Pan-Africanist—as one who, like Du Bois, sought to reshape images of Africa, to develop an African historical worldview, and to encourage a universal sense of black political consciousness. Pan-Africanism did not, however, capture Du Bois’s attention in Black Folk Then and Now. His decision not to address the Pan-African movement, or even his own involvement in it, is more clear evidence of Du Bois’s surprising lack of interest in intellectual history as a discipline.

Chapter 11 of Negro Folk Then and Now, which has the misleading name of “Black Europe,” introduces a survey of colonialism in Africa, which was the predominant concern of the book’s second half. In terms that were both economic and moral, Du Bois called for the economic liberation of Africa. He was not entirely negative in his description of the effects of colonialism, and he acknowledged the limited efforts that Belgium, France, and Great Britain had made in the areas of health, education, and welfare. Nonetheless, he presented an agenda for democratic home rule. The final chapter of Negro Folk Then and Now is entitled “The Future of World Democracy,” and as its title implies, it was concerned with integrating the movement for African liberation with a cosmopolitan worldview.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” is the final sentence of Black Folk Then and Now. Du Bois was reiterating what he called this “pert and ringing phrase,” a phrase that he had coined at the turn of the century and recycled in 1919. There is no question that the color line was one of the problems of the twentieth century, but calling it the central problem may have been premature. Du Bois delivered the corrected page proofs of the manuscript of Black Folk Then and Now to his publisher on May 2, 1939, and had copies in his possession by May 29. Within four months Hitler had invaded Poland, and for several months before that Jewish victims of Kristallnacht had already been shipped to the concentration camp at Dachau. The ensuing five years led Du Bois to reevaluate many of his perspectives on world history.

The final revision of Black Folk Then and Now appeared in 1946, under the title The World and Africa, and in it, Du Bois still viewed the world in terms of color. But some of the walls seemed to be tumbling down, and he noted laconically that several African American scientists had contributed to the “development of the atomic bomb.”¹² In a posthumous new edition of The World and Africa, we see a Du Bois who was well on the way to his conversion to communism. The views he expressed in that work, like those expressed in the captivating pastiche referred to as The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, represented the culmination of the idea that he had once referred to as “Pan-Negroism”—the idea that the heritage and goals of black folk transcended geographical limits.