THE PHENOMENON: W. E. B. DUBOIS

Annette Gordon-Reed

HE WAS EVERYWHERE; WRITING, THINKING, ORGANIZING, USING ANY tool he could find, any resource within him and available to him, to accomplish one goal: the destruction of the doctrine of white supremacy as it operated in the United States and throughout the world. His great biographer David Levering Lewis explains it best: “In the course of his long turbulent career, W. E. B. DuBois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation and third world solidarity.”

The first prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkramah, called DuBois, as he neared the end of his very long life, “a phenomenon.” An intellectual who wrote books, coined famous phrases, helped create the academic discipline of sociology, edited magazines, taught classes, and founded organizations—domestic and worldwide, he lived for ninety-five years. By any measure he can be described as having been a leader. But DuBois was a leader of a different sort. One of his contemporaries and admirers, William H. Ferris, pinpointed the nature of his uniqueness:

There have been many instances in history where men, through their military or political genius, through their gift of speech or the magnetism of a fascinating personality, have forged to the front, challenged the admiration and compelled the homage of their fellows. Such men were Samuel Adams, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, James G. Blaine, Theodore Roosevelt, Daniel O’Connell, Parnell, Cavour, Garibaldi, Mirabeau, Bismarck, Napoleon and Caesar. But DuBois is one of the few men in history who was hurled on the throne of leadership by the dynamic force of the written word. He is one of the few writers who leaped to the front as a leader and became the head of a popular movement through impressing his personality upon men by means of a book. He had no aspiration of becoming a race leader when he wrote his “Souls of Black Folk.” But that book has launched him upon a brilliant career.

There is much to ponder in Ferris’s view. First is his conception of writers. As he points out, writers (and we may add into this formulation intellectuals of any sort) are not typically thought of as leaders. Leaders are men and women of action, while those who spend time toiling at their desks—writing prose, poetry, and academic articles or espousing theories—are more often seen as thinkers rather than as doers. They are regarded as denizens of the ivory tower, who by the very nature of their work are removed from the rough-and-tumble of the real world. Ferris’s male-dominated list of leaders is of his time, but it does support the notion that those who lead typically put themselves before the public as individuals who desire to, and can, make politics run in some fashion. They are elected to office, or in the case of some of the men Ferris names, they took the reins of government by force.

For most of American history, blacks were in no position to exercise that type of leadership. Indeed at the time of DuBois’s birth in 1868 the overwhelming majority of blacks were living in the South, having only recently been emancipated from chattel slavery and the males given the right to vote. There was a brief period during Reconstruction, of which DuBois later wrote brilliantly, when a handful of black men rose to formal leadership in state government in the South. Of course the story of how that turned out is well known. By the time young “Willie” DuBois of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was all of nine years old, the so-called Redeemer governments in the South had put a stop to the progress of Reconstruction and positioned themselves to reassert white supremacy in the region. By the end of the 1880s the process had culminated in the establishment of segregation and legalized second-class status for African Americans. For decades to come, black voting rights were effectively vitiated by the political machinations and outright violence of southern whites.

What kind of leadership could blacks of DuBois’s era exercise? There had been black leaders before, in the eighteenth century, people like Prince Hall, who formed the first black Masonic Lodge; Bishop Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia; and a businessman from that same city, James Forten. These men and others stepped outside attending to their own lives and tried to make life better for African Americans as best they could under the tremendous constraints of the society they lived in.

The most important and famous black leader in America before DuBois’s birth was Frederick Douglass. The former slave and tireless abolitionist made his mark with the written word, publishing his astounding memoirs detailing his life under the cruelty of slavery, and editing a newspaper, the North Star, that inspired many and furthered the cause of black liberation. While Douglass did serve in government for brief periods, this was long after he had established himself as the preeminent black leader of his day through his determined and intelligent efforts to speak on behalf of the millions of blacks who had no voice. Black leadership, in his era and for a long time to come, fell to those who, by their good fortune, managed to escape the systematic oppression under which blacks lived. And for most of Douglass’s life that system was legalized southern slavery. Anyone with any pretense of being a “race leader” understood that his or her principal task was to work for the immediate and total elimination of slavery in America. Things could proceed from there. The only tool available to Douglass was moral suasion, speaking out on the question and hoping to bring people to his side. War eventually achieved what moral suasion could not. There was, however, no black Bismarck or Napoleon to make the decision to go to war, although when it came, blacks threw themselves into the conflict energetically.

By the time DuBois arrived on the scene the landscape had shifted. Legalized chattel slavery was dead, replaced for many by debt peonage and vigilante violence that maintained slavery in the South in all but name. Not everything remained the same. For the first time there were organized efforts through the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide education for blacks at the primary through college levels. Access to education brought the hope that blacks would one day take their place as full citizens of the United States. These times were perfectly suited for DuBois’s singular talents and capacity to become a race leader.

DuBois’s New England origins were central to the development of his character and capacity for leadership. His memories of those early days in Great Barrington, perhaps softened by age, were of a period without knowledge of or dwelling upon the issue of what he came to call “the veil,” the racism that blighted the lives of black Americans, whether they had been born free or enslaved. DuBois went to public school with white boys and girls and excelled, surpassing his classmates. There was no occasion for him to develop the idea that his descent from African people meant he was inferior to whites. He claimed that the racial idyll came to an end when he was around ten years old. While he was playing a game of cards with his friends, a white girl who was visiting the town refused to accept a card from him because he was black. That, along with later social slights, brought fully home to him the fact that he was different. Being different, however, does not mean that one is inferior. DuBois’s early academic success proved the point. Lewis writes of young Willie DuBois’s impatience with the other black boy in his school who failed to do well in his studies, reacting as if the young man had let down the side. Early on he believed there was, in fact, a “side” (read “black people”) that could be let down when one among their number who had the opportunity to achieve failed to do so. Black students had duties to people and ultimately to an idea (black advancement) that went beyond themselves and their immediate families.

Because he stood out so much in this small late-nineteenth-century New England town, DuBois’s teachers encouraged him to stretch himself, giving him books to read and sending the signal that education was a route to advancement. Again, none of this would have had quite the same effect without all the social changes that were taking place at the same time. There were now more black newspapers being published. So a fifteen-year-old DuBois could begin to write regularly for the Globe, a New York–based black newspaper that “spoke for the forward-looking members of the race.” With legalized slavery gone, there were now other imperatives to attend to. At an early age DuBois became part of a progressive vanguard, separated from his white classmates who had other interests. He was now self-consciously connected to people like the editor of the New York Globe, Timothy Thomas Fortune, who took an uncompromising stance on the question of the rights of black people.

Later observers noted DuBois’s tendency to conflate himself with the entire black race. There is no evidence that he ever wholly deviated from this notion, and it appears that this way of thinking began as early as his childhood. Each educational triumph was a triumph for black people. It is easy to see why he would want to think that way. His preternatural confidence in himself translated into confidence about the eventual prospects of blacks overall. That confidence later brought charges of haughtiness, as he was totally convinced that he was part of an aristocracy of talent destined to be in the leadership class of the black community. But how would that leadership be carried out and what would be the animating principle of the effort?

During DuBois’s first phase, academic excellence and achievement were the main order of business. He went on to Fisk University and the University of Berlin and became the first black person to receive a Ph.D. at Harvard University. He considered these distinctions to be examples of the ways black people could become leaders in their communities. Through these achievements blacks showed others that such things were possible. If there was a first, there could be a second, third, and so on.

It was DuBois’s classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, however, that established his place in the forefront of black leadership. He was speaking directly to an audience with a voice unlike any other that had been heard until that point. Throughout the many twists and turns in his thinking about his role as a leader and the direction black advancement should take, The Souls of Black Folk stands as the core of his philosophy that never changed. He wrote as if it were eminently clear that black lives contained all the capabilities, promises, and weaknesses of other human beings and that they mattered. Blacks’ humanity was on full display with firm conviction and not the barest hint of hesitation. This reflected DuBois’s lifelong belief that true progress for blacks, in the United States and abroad, required a full-scale assault on the doctrine of white supremacy. It was not enough—was not even possible—to secure the dreams he had for people of African descent so long as that doctrine held sway. Ameliorating blacks’ circumstances, improving whites’ behavior toward them, was not the main goal. Those things could be done while the racial hierarchy remained firmly in place. DuBois was demanding far more: that white people abandon both the belief that they were inherently superior to blacks and the social and political system built upon that idea.

It may be difficult from this remove to appreciate how audacious and problematic DuBois’s critique of white supremacy was in the early twentieth century. In his time the assumption of white supremacy was so deeply ingrained that few whites questioned it. Even the people who saw themselves as the friends of blacks and supported the interracial organizations and efforts in which DuBois was involved were discomfited by frank, no-holds-barred attacks upon white supremacy. They wanted to help blacks, and some even worked hard to lessen the most egregious forms of racial prejudice. But that did not mean they believed that blacks and whites existed on an equal plane of humanity. It was also significant, and unprecedented, that this message was coming from a man to whom whites could not condescend. He had been born free. He was a college graduate whose classical education was capped by a Ph.D. from Harvard. He had traveled widely and published scholarly works.

There is no question that The Souls of Black Folk was a transformative event for black people and therefore for whites as well. But can a book really change a society or alter the course of history? In response people often cite Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a work that had a tremendous impact on the politics and ultimately the course of American history. Lincoln, when greeting her for the first time, purportedly said, “So this is the little lady who started this big war.” But Stowe is remembered today as an author, not as a leader. After writing Souls, DuBois entered the arena in a different, more active way. Because he believed that the doctrine of white supremacy was at the root of the problems blacks faced, he understood early on that racism was a global problem that had to be confronted at all levels. He was among the few African Americans who attended the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, and he continued to be a prominent leader of the movement for as long as these congresses were held. Black rights were human rights. What was going on in Georgia was connected to the situation in the Belgian Congo and other places.

DuBois’s famous disagreement with Booker T. Washington, which he aired in The Souls of Black Folk, about the correct course for black advancement was not merely an argument about the pace of change (gradualism versus more immediate transformation). It was a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the problem blacks were facing. Washington’s approach to black leadership suggested that he had no interest in launching attacks upon the doctrine of white supremacy. He described moves for social equality as “folly.” Indeed his 1895 address at the Cotton States and International Exposition, which has been called the Atlanta Compromise speech, was his bid to assure whites that neither he nor any blacks under his sway had any intention of challenging the basic racial order of the day. “In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” That is why the audience of southern white businessmen, many of whom most likely had either personally enslaved blacks or came from families who did, leaped to their feet in thunderous rapture when Washington finished his speech. Blacks could cast down their buckets where they were, form their own organizations, and maintain a largely separate existence in the United States. The fact remained, however, that what was “purely social” covered a lot of territory. Washington was accepting that white Americans could relegate black Americans to second-class citizenship for as long as they wanted.

As with all historical events, it is essential to consider the context. Washington was speaking to members of a society that had shown itself to be willing to use, or acquiesce in the use of, terrorism as a means of social control. During the 1890s only Mississippi topped Georgia in the number of lynchings of black people. There is strong evidence that the prevalence of racially motivated violence and the constant threat of it were at least one of the factors prompting the Great Migration to the North, which began in earnest in 1910. Consider the numbers. In 1900, just five years after Washington’s speech, 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South; 10 percent, in the rest of country. By 1930 those percentages were exactly reversed. In other words, within fifteen years of Washington’s announcement of his plan for racial accommodation in the South, blacks began to vote on southern society with their feet. They escaped in droves. There were other reasons for their decision to leave: changes in the economy brought on by World War I, and a boll weevil infestation that devastated farming communities. But those events didn’t send everyone fleeing from the South in even relatively large numbers. It was the black outmigration that was the most conspicuous. If Washington’s program had brought about a change (an improvement?) in white attitudes, and if he had actually convinced many blacks of the rightness of accepting second-class citizenship until some distant time when they would come to “deserve” better, one doubts if so dramatic a population shift would have occurred. Blacks of the early twentieth century were eager for something more than this vision of accommodation.

DuBois of course was having none of this. He knew that black people in the South were under the gun metaphorically and actually. He attended college in the region and taught in Atlanta. He agonized over the reports of lynchings and other forms of racial violence. The threat of violence whether from official sources or vigilantes required blacks to fear for the physical safety of their families. Too much assertiveness by blacks would come at a tremendous cost. Since the rest of the country, by and large, accepted the white South’s marginalization of blacks (and actually had its own ways of doing the same), there was no guarantee that they would be at all supportive if mass violence were to break out.

At the same time, DuBois understood that openly acquiescing to inferiority in any form would only buttress the idea of white supremacy and bring further contempt. That he could not abide. Just as DuBois could not concede that there were many, if any, whites who were superior to him, so he could not concede that whites as a race were superior to blacks. He understood that beliefs about black inferiority centered most often on their supposed mental inferiority. Blacks were not smart enough to create civilizations that could be admired, to invent useful products, to create poetry or beautiful music, all achievements that were said to be the province of Europeans and, perhaps, Asians. As DuBois put it, “Everything black was hideous. Everything Negroes did was wrong.” Booker T. Washington’s program for black advancement did not address these canards but merely justified and strengthened them. Industrial education would leave the most pernicious and damaging ideas about blacks in place. DuBois was not totally opposed to the Tuskegee model, but he knew it would not be enough. He also came to realize that educational achievement and writing books would not solve the problem of race either. It was much bigger than the life and experiences of any one person; indeed it was bigger than what was going on just in the United States. Washington’s program would affect not just blacks in America, but around the world.

For that reason, the “success” of Booker T. Washington’s program alarmed DuBois and many others. More specifically it was Washington’s influence and support among whites that concerned DuBois. While his chief audience may have been blacks, DuBois was addressing whites as well, hoping to change their minds. To counter the seductive nature of Washington’s appeal to whites, DuBois and about thirty other African Americans, including the volatile William Monroe Trotter, decided to organize against it. Another book, another sharply worded essay, was not enough. The group assembled on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls came to be known as the Niagara Movement. Its manifesto, which bears the clear mark of DuBois, was a direct challenge to the doctrine of white supremacy and stated clearly that blacks would never give in to the notion. The chosen location for the second meeting drove the point home: It met at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of John Brown’s raid.

Although the Niagara Movement was short-lived, the core of its founders joined with a number of prominent white liberals in 1909 to create an organization that still exists today, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This group, consisting of black and white members, seemed to fulfill DuBois’s vision of people of substance and intellect (of all colors) working together for the cause of black advancement and against racism. The organization itself, however, replicated some of the problems of the society as a whole. The first president was white, and DuBois was the sole black person at the executive level of the organization.

So he then turned to another weapon in his arsenal, journalism. DuBois founded the Crisis magazine in 1915, and the publication became a vehicle for a very potent form of direct intellectual leadership. It was in many ways the perfect showcase for his talents and interests, another way to lead his community. Not aimed at an academic audience and not bound by scholarly convention, it was nonetheless completely serious and substantive. The Crisis published the leading poets and writers of the day, as well as opinion pieces. Most important of all, an increasingly educated and stable black community was ready and eager to hear what DuBois had to say about all subjects that touched on black life and interests and to see the examples of black excellence displayed in the magazine. Using humor when needed, preaching when required, or employing his razor-sharp analytical abilities, DuBois in the Crisis became a “must read” for every black person and, broadly, any progressive person between 1915 and 1934. At one point the circulation topped one hundred thousand, making it more widely read than the Nation and the New Republic. There had never been anything like it, and there has been nothing like it since the heyday of DuBois’s editorship.

Just as the postwar years brought greater numbers of people who could appreciate what DuBois offered in the way of leadership, so they also brought new ideas about what was to be done. It is startling to think of it, but by the 1920s DuBois had entered his sixties. A younger generation was seeking new answers to the problems facing blacks; some, particularly those involved in the Harlem Renaissance, were impatient with the somewhat prudish “uplift the race” strategy to which DuBois and older members of the leadership class were wedded. He had already had an earlier, more serious brush with another movement for black advancement, one that was not nearly so well financed and organized as Washington’s Tuskegee Machine but that had powerful appeal nevertheless. In the tradition of some black leaders in the eighteenth century, like Martin Delany, who saw no hope for true black equality so long as blacks lived in a predominantly white nation, Marcus Garvey’s call for black nationalism and return of blacks to Africa gained enormous attention during the same time that the NAACP was gaining ground between 1915 and 1920. With the reemergence of this back to Africa appeal, the three positions about the best method of advancement were openly competing for adherents.

Booker T. Washington died just as Garvey was arriving on the scene. But Washington’s plan for blacks to accommodate themselves to their situation in America was still very much alive. Garvey occupied the opposite end of the spectrum on the question of how American blacks could reach their fullest potential. “Where is the black man’s Government? Where is his king and kingdom? Where is his President, his country, his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?” he asked, knowing that they were not in the United States. If they wanted to have these things, blacks would have to leave America altogether, a bit of advice that many refugees from the South were ready to accept. They had come north seeking a promised land and found instead that they were shunted away into northern ghettos. It was better than the South, but it was still not a place where they could feel as though they were free citizens of the country. This was galling after many black men had gone to war in Europe to help “make the world safe for democracy.” Now they were home, and democracy wasn’t safe for them on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. DuBois had actively urged blacks to support American intervention in World War I, as if this way of showing patriotism would win support for them and help erase discrimination. That didn’t work, and there was never a real reason to think it would. Blacks had fought in every conflict in America since the Revolutionary War, and it had made no difference to their treatment. In addition, to many working-class blacks, DuBois’s NAACP was “a snob affair.” Although Garvey had gone to college and was very well read, he had more in common with the working class than did the ultrapatrician DuBois.

DuBois did not totally discount Garvey’s views. After all, he was sympathetic to the notion of ties between Africans and blacks in the diaspora. By the 1930s he had begun to advocate a form of voluntary self-segregation as a way of developing cultural and economic strength. Many of his colleagues at the NAACP were appalled. They believed the idea ran counter to everything the organization had stood for up until that time. Integration was the goal. But DuBois saw no conflict, saying that leaders had to pursue different strategies as the situation warranted. With blacks suffering disproportionately in the Great Depression, a focus on economic development (shades of Booker T. Washington) made sense. The dispute led DuBois to resign as editor of the Crisis in 1934. But his vision of nationalism, a nation within a nation, was very different from Garvey’s brand. He simply did not believe that a return to Africa was the answer for the nearly eleven million black inhabitants of the United States. There was no way that any but a fraction of them would ever get on the Black Star Line to start life over again on the African continent. Even if such a thing were possible, DuBois simply did not think that Garvey and his compatriots could pull it off. Then, when Garvey, who had not grown up in America, openly made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan, the group that had murdered and terrorized scores of blacks from the days of Reconstruction on, DuBois became convinced that rather than being a mere nuisance, Garvey had become an actual menace to the black community. In the end Garvey’s movement, under attack from whites, DuBois, and other mainstream black leaders, faltered. However, his theme of black nationalism has continued to remain a potent part of the black intellectual tradition even today.

Having decided early on that the destruction of white supremacy was the key to transforming the lives of blacks in America and around the world, DuBois became convinced that this many-headed hydra would not be slain with one sword. His victories had not led to the kind of transformation he longed for. By the 1940s the warrior for black equality had come to realize that his Enlightenment-influenced notion that the diffusion of knowledge would solve the race problem was flawed. The worldwide crisis of capitalism radicalized many people in the 1930s, and DuBois was among those who were led to think deeply about the meaning of the economic collapse. Washington had not been wrong in promoting economic self-sufficiency. The problems lay in thinking that it was even possible in a South where whites were determined to keep blacks down and in proposing that this method of advancement should be pursued at the expense of demanding the rights of American citizenship. DuBois was not wrong to focus on establishing blacks’ civil rights, but a basic level of economic self-sufficiency for blacks was important too. He was led by pessimism to adopt some aspects of Washington’s program.

There was another avenue open to him, one that he came to champion until the end of his life: socialism. When DuBois first read Marx, he was not impressed. The German theorist, he wrote, “did not envisage a situation where, instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers.” At the same time, the international bent of Marxism attracted him. From the earliest days of his involvement with the Pan-African Congress, he had sought to make connections with people all over the world who were interested in human progress. During his final two decades of life, he became ever more an internationalist, adapting his dream of a talented tenth of blacks who would uplift the race to “a World conception of human uplift.” Although important, race was no longer at the center of his philosophy. The group to be uplifted was the world’s working class, and that included people of every race, creed, and color.

The timing of DuBois’s transformation could not have been more unfortunate for him personally. The 1940s and 1950s, with World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, were not a time in the United States to advocate international class warfare to bring about socialism. Already long under the scrutiny of the FBI, DuBois’s speeches and participation in international peace conferences made him increasingly suspect during the period of Red hysteria. It was not just the government that recoiled. His ever more strident denunciations of the United States put him in conflict with mainstream black civil rights organizations as they went about the process of dismantling legalized segregation in the United States. People like Thurgood Marshall, who was to help put an end to segregation, DuBois’s own cause for decades, had absolutely no use for communism and socialist agitation. They respected all that DuBois had done for blacks. But many suspected that the old man had lost touch.

He was, however, “DuBoisian” until the end. His last years were spent being what he was to his very core, a scholar and a teacher. In 1961 the prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, invited him to Accra to work on his dream project, the completion of the Encyclopedia Africana. When the U.S. government refused to give him a new passport, he became a Ghanaian citizen (shades of Garvey). He died in Ghana in 1963, on the day before the fabled March on Washington, when a new generation of black leaders was making its mark in the fight for black equality. It is especially fitting that DuBois’s last days on earth were spent working on scholarship that would detail the voluminous contributions that African people had made to the world, and that he would be buried in the soil of the continent whose honor he had defended so assiduously.