This is not a work of exact scholarship; far too few studies in history and sociology are. But certainly those who write of human experience and social action today have a better ideal than yesterday for the careful establishing of fact and limitation of wish and conjecture. The kernel of this work is, I believe, a body of fairly well-ascertained truth; but there are also areas here of conjecture and even of guesswork which under other circumstances I should have hesitated to publish.
But we face a curious situation in the world attitude toward the Negro race today. On the one hand there is increasing curiosity as to the place of black men in future social development; in their relation to work, art and democracy; and judgment as to the future must depend upon the past. Yet this past lies shrouded not simply by widespread lack of knowledge but by a certain irritating silence. Few today are interested in Negro history because they feel the matter already settled: the Negro has no history.
This dictum seems neither reasonable nor probable. I remember my own rather sudden awakening from the paralysis of this judgment taught me in high school and in two of the world’s great universities. Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching history in 1906 and said to a graduating class: You need not be ashamed of your African past; and then he recounted the history of the black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted.
For instance, I am no Egyptologist. That goes without saying. And yet I have written something in this volume on the Negro in Egypt, because in recent years, despite the work of exploration and interpretation in Egypt and Ethiopia, almost nothing is said of the Negro race. Yet that race was always prominent in the Valley of the Nile. The fact, however, today has apparently no scientific interest. Or again, writers like Lugard and Reisner tell us that the Nigerians and Ethiopians were not “Negroes.” The statement seems inexplicable, until we learn that in their view most of the black folk in Africa are not Negroes. The whole argument becomes merely a matter of words and definitions. Yet upon this easily misunderstood interpretation, millions of black and brown folk today, not to speak of most educated whites, have no conception of any role that black folk have played in history, or any hope in the past for present aspiration, or any apparent justification in demanding equal rights and opportunity for Negroes as average human beings.
Because of this situation I have for the last six years interested myself in trying to promote an Encyclopaedia of the Negro; an effort to ascertain and publish the verifiable history and social condition of the Negro race, according to the best scholarship of the world, regardless of race, nation or color. I believe the time over-ripe for such encyclopaedic treatment. The trustees of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and the many men, white and black, native and foreign, who are working with me in the project have not yet been able to secure the necessary funds for its collection and publication; but we are still not without hope.
Meantime it has seemed to me not out of place to do again, and I hope somewhat more thoroughly, the task which I attempted twenty-three years ago in a little volume of the Home University Library, called The Negro. This book incorporates some of that former essay, but for the most part is an entirely new production and seeks to bring to notice the facts concerning the Negro, if not entirely according to the results of thorough scholarship, at least with scholarship as good as I am able to command with the time and money at my disposal.
The larger difficulties of this work are manifest: the breadth of the field which one mind can scarcely cover; the obstacles to securing data. Color was not important in the ancient world but it is of great economic and social significance today. Convincing proof of Negro blood in the Pharaohs was immaterial in 1900 B.C. and an almost revolutionary fact in 1900 A.D. Significant facts today are obscured by the personalities and prejudices of observers; the objects of industrial enterprise and colonial governments; the profit in caste; the assumed necessity of bolstering the amour-propre of Europe by excusing the slave trade and degrading the African.
I do not for a moment doubt that my Negro descent and narrow group culture have in many cases predisposed me to interpret my facts too favorably for my race; but there is little danger of long misleading here, for the champions of white folk are legion. The Negro has long been the clown of history; the football of anthropology; and the slave of industry. I am trying to show here why these attitudes can no longer be maintained. I realize that the truth of history lies not in the mouths of partisans but rather in the calm Science that sits between. Her cause I seek to serve, and wherever I fail, I am at least paying Truth the respect of earnest effort.
W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
ATLANTA UNIVERSITY
May, 1939