THE VALUE OF AGITATION (1907)
This is one of Du Bois’s greatest, most rousing addresses, written while he was still heading the Niagara Movement: “In the present status of the Negro it is particularly necessary that we today make the world realize what his position is—make them realize that he is not merely insisting on ornamental rights and neglecting plain duties, but that the rights we want are the rights that are necessary, inevitable before we can rightly do our duties.”
THERE ARE THOSE people who object to agitation and one cannot wholly blame them. Agitation after all is unpleasant. It means that while you are going on peaceably and joyfully on your way some half-mad person insists upon saying things that you do not like to hear. They may be true but you do not like to hear them. You would rather wait till some convenient season; or you take up your newspaper and instead of finding pleasant notices about your friends and the present progress of the world, you read of some restless folks who insist on talking about wrong and crime and unpleasant things. It would be much better if we did not have to have agitation; if we had a world where everything was going so well and it was unnecessary often to protest strongly, even wildly, of the evil and wrong of the universe.
As a matter of fact, however, no matter how unpleasant the agitator is, and no matter how inconvenient and unreasonable his talk, yet we must ever have him with us. And why? Because this is a world where things are not all right. We are gifted with human nature which does not do the right or even desire the right always. So long as these things are true, then we are faced by this dilemma: either we must let the evil alone and refuse to hear of it or listen to it or we must try and right it. Now, very often it happens that the evil is there, the wrong has been done, and yet we do not hear of it—we do not know about it. Here then comes the agitator. He is the herald—he is the prophet—he is the man that says to the world: “There are evils which you do not know, but which I know and you must listen to them.” Now, of course, there may be agitators who are telling the truth and there may be agitators who are telling untruths. Those who are not telling the truth may be lying or they may be mistaken. So that agitation in itself does not necessarily mean always the right and always reform.
Here then is some one who thinks that he has discovered some dangerous evil and wants to call the attention of good men of the world to it. If he does not persevere, we may perhaps pass him by. If he is easily discouraged, we may perhaps think that the evil which he thought he saw has been cured. But if he is sincere and if he is persistent, then there is but one thing for a person to do who wants to live in a world worth living in; that is, listen to him carefully, prove his tale and then try and right the wrong.
If we remember the history of all great reform movements, we remember that they have been preceded by agitation. Take for instance the suppression of the slave trade. It was in a day when slavery could not be successfully attacked. But there was no doubt of the horrors of the slave trade. The best and worst of people alike admitted that. Here came a young man just graduated from college. By writing a prize essay he found himself interested in this great evil. He began to know and learn of things which other people did not know. Not that they knew nothing about them, but they had not brought together all the facts. One isolated person knew that fact and one knew this fact, but no one person knew both facts in juxtaposition. When they did become acquainted with all the facts he was sure that they must be moved to act. What then must he do? He must agitate. It was not pleasant—it was putting himself in jeopardy; he was called upon to lose friends in some cases, and in all cases to make himself unpleasant, insistent, persistent, telling of things that people did not want to hear about, because they were not interested in them. He must interest people in things in which they were not interested before, which is a hard task in this busy world; and yet, nevertheless, if Clarkson1 had not persisted, we would have much less than a chance to agitate for human rights today.
So it is with all great movements. They must be preceded by agitation. In the present status of the Negro it is particularly necessary that we today make the world realize what his position is—make them realize that he is not merely insisting on ornamental rights and neglecting plain duties, but that the rights we want are the rights that are necessary, inevitable before we can rightly do our duties.
Mrs. Gilman has a poem somewhere, where she speaks of that rule which is to be laid down in the great future state, “Unless a man works, he may not eat,” and she says very aptly that “The cart is before the horse,” because “unless a man eats he cannot work.”2 So to those people who are saying to black men today, “Do your duties first and then clamor for rights,” we have a right to answer and to answer insistently: that the rights we are clamoring for are those that will enable us to do our duties. That we cannot possibly be asked to do any partial measure of our duty even, unless we can have those rights and have them now. We realize this. The great mass of people in the United States do not realize it. What then are we to do? We may sit in courteous and dumb self-forgetting silence until other people are interested and come to our rescue. But is it reasonable to suppose that this is going to happen before degeneration and destruction overtake us? This is a busy world. People are attending to their own affairs as they ought to.
The man that has a grievance is supposed to speak for himself. No one can speak for him—no one knows the thing as well as he does. Therefore it is reasonable to say that if the man does not complain that it is because he has no complaint. If a man does not express his needs, then it is because his needs are filled. And it has been our great mistake in the last decade that we have been silent and still and have not complained when it was our duty not merely to ourselves but to our country and to humanity in general to complain and to complain loudly. It is then high time that the Negro agitator should be heard in the land.
It is not a pleasant role to play. It is not always pleasant to nice ears to hear a man ever coming with his dark facts and unpleasant conditions. Nevertheless it is the highest optimism to bring forward the dark side of any human picture. When a man does this he says to the world: “Things are bad but it is worthwhile to let the world know that things are bad in order that they may become better.” The real crushing pessimism takes hold of the world when people say things are so bad that they are not worth complaining of because they cannot be made better.
It is manifest that within the last year the whole race in the United States has awakened to the fact that they have lost ground and must start complaining and complain loudly. It is their business to complain.
This complaint should be made with reason and with strict regard to the truth, but nevertheless it should be made. And it is interesting to find even those persons who were deriding complaint a few years ago joining in the agitation today.
We of the Niagara Movement welcome them. We are glad of help from all sources. We are confirmed in our belief that if a man stand up and tell the thing he wants and point out the evil around him, that this is the best way to get rid of it. May we not hope then that we are going to have in the next century a solid front on the part of the colored people in the United States, saying we want education for our children and we do not have it today in any large measure; we want full political rights and we never have had that; we want to be treated as human beings; and we want those of our race who stand on the threshold and within the veil of crime to be treated not as beasts, but as men who can be reformed or as children who can be prevented from going further in their career.
If we all stand and demand this insistently, the nation must listen to the voice of ten millions.
SOURCE: The Voice of the Negro. Volume 4. Atlanta. March 1907. [For proof copy see W. E. B. Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890–1919. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.]
1Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846) was a British abolitionist and the author of that college essay Du Bois referred to earlier.
2Charlotte P. Gilman (1860–1935) was a women’s rights advocate and author of several books.