Du Bois, W.E.B.

DU BOIS, W. E. B. (1868–1963). Undoubtedly the most influential Black intellectual of the twentieth century and one of America’s finest historians, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois maintained an ambiguous relationship with Marxism and the Left throughout much of his career. An advocate of elite dominion in Black politics of the so-called Talented Tenth, he initially mistrusted mass movements and Left appeals. Yet he eventually emerged a peerless voice in Western Marxism, the original exponent of Pan-Africanism, an adversary of Cold War cultural assumptions, and a vocal advocate for peace. He died a dedicated Communist.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the descendant of a well-established Berkshire Black family and a Bahamian plantation owner, he grew up with an impoverished and crippled mother utterly dedicated to her only offspring. He had few bouts with racism as a child and graduated from high school a promising scholar. After two years at Fisk University (Du Bois’s first introduction to the world of southern Black culture and religion), he went on to graduate cum laude from Harvard, where he worked closely with William James, and advanced his study of German philosophy at Fredrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1892. Although he studied more of Hegel than Marx and Engels, Du Bois occasionally attended rallies of the German Social Democratic Party, displaying an early interest in socialism. He then returned to receive his PhD from Harvard. His prodigious dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870,” whose detached empiricism barely veils its ringing moral condemnation of slavery, was published as the first in the Harvard Historical Series volumes. In 1896, after a teaching stint at Wilberforce University, he was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania to undertake a study of Black Philadelphia, resulting in the classic sociological treatise The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899).

This book, in which he suggested that the Black elite had an obligation to uplift the race, marked an important stage in his political evolution, essentially planting the seeds for his Talented Tenth thesis. Though still wedded to the idea that education and scientific inquiry were liberating, during his tenure at Atlanta University, beginning in 1897, Du Bois began to reassess the complexity of Black consciousness in light of widespread racial violence and segregation. Although indifferent to religion, he grasped the significance of Black faith as a response to American racism. And in an 1897 essay entitles “Strivings of the Negro People,” he articulated the concept of double consciousness, the need to reconcile the African American’s quest for assimilation with his/her African identity. First published in Atlantic Monthly, it became the basis for a series of essays published as The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which not only developed Du Bois’s early ideas on cultural pluralism but presented unique perspectives on Black religion, culture, politics, and history, positing the color line as the great question of the dawning century.

Du Bois’s prominence as much as his political orientation automatically made him a rival of reigning Black elites, such as those represented by Booker T. Washington and T. Thomas Fortune, who had placed their stake in accommodation. Searching for like-minded allies in his fight against lynching, segregation, and the “Tuskegee Machine,” Du Bois teamed up with Boston Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter, whose militancy contributed to Du Bois’s prolonged shift away from enlightened leadership to self-activity and open rebellion. Together they established the short-lived Niagara movement in 1905, comprised of Black educated men opposed to Booker T. Washington. Hardly a movement of radicals, it did attract a few Black socialists, such as the Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom. More important, Du Bois was moving toward socialism independently. He began reading the works of Henry George, Jack London, and John Spargo, and by 1907 had described socialism as the “one great hope of the Negro in America.”

The collapse of the Niagara movement coincided with growing white liberal and radical concern over American racism (sparked by racial violence in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908), thus opening doors for Du Bois to build new alliances with white progressives. He joined Socialists William English Walling, Mary White Ovington, and several other progressives to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. Appointed director of publicity and research, Du Bois agreed to edit its journal, the Crisis (whose name Walling had suggested). Although in no sense avowedly radical, the Crisis was regarded as inflammatory by white southerners and by the Bureau of Investigation, predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under Du Bois’s strong editorial guidance it spoke primarily to the Talented Tenth, but attracted many white socialists and liberals. Meanwhile, Du Bois began to contribute to an array of radical periodicals, joined the editorial board of the New Review, and devoted an entire issue of the Crisis to woman suffrage.

When Du Bois joined the Socialist Party in 1911, his ideas did not change significantly. He viewed the party as another vehicle for racial and economic emancipation and remained close to his moderate Socialist coworkers in the NAACP, namely Walling, Ovington, and Charles Edward Russell. He left the party after a year, however, prompted partly by racism within the organization and primarily by his decision to endorse Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 presidential bid, though he continued his contributions to the socialist press and remained an independent socialist.

World War I fixed Du Bois’s pacifism, deepened his anti-imperialism, and intensified his Pan-African sentiments. His 1915 essay “The African Roots of War” recognized the critical role European imperial designs played in the conflict. Although he initially opposed the war and viewed it as an opportunity for increased agitation for civil and political rights, in 1918 he joined his familiar (and now ex-socialist) allies around the New Republic in championing the US entry. He was so sure that Black participation would make a claim for democracy that he actually requested federal support for the coming 1919 Pan-African Congress. But his call to “close ranks,” for which he was sharply criticized by contending Black radicals, did not lead to the intended results. As he learned, even the most modest Pan-African proposals for a moderated colonialism aroused racist suspicions, and postwar “race riots” revealed the true fruit of international conflict. At the war’s end, Du Bois urged Blacks to defend themselves against racial attacks and became a more assiduous proponent of Pan-Africanism—the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921 displaying a greater militance than the previous meeting.

By the early 1920s, Du Bois’s public prominence was clearly on the decline. He sustained attacks from several circles, ranging from rising Black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey to Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay. Militant Black Socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen dismissed Du Bois as virtually another Booker T. Washington, and the revolutionary African Blood Brotherhood assailed him for ignoring Black workers in favor of the Talented Tenth. An advocate of pragmatic, Fabian socialism, Du Bois was initially skeptical of the Russian Revolution, which made him a target of criticism from the emerging Communist movement. Although a visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 inspired Du Bois to proclaim it “the most hopeful vehicle for the world,” he still regarded Communism as inappropriate for African Americans. He won even fewer allies by preaching social tolerance in the intolerant 1920s, and his assault on racism in the American Federation of Labor prompted counterattacks from white labor leaders.

The Great Depression threw the Crisis into economic peril, and Du Bois’s preliminary proposals for Black survival irked most NAACP leaders, both of which contributed to his resignation as the journal’s editor in 1934. In a series of articles in 1934–1935, he had advocated a form of urban Black self-determination, based on the creation of economic cooperatives, in which communities could wrest control of and collectivize local economies. It was a kind of Talented Tenth-tainted socialism, revealing Du Bois’s belief that Black petit-bourgeois leadership could implement socialist strategies in urban America. While considered too radical for NAACP tastes, Du Bois’s vitriolic attacks upon the International Labor Defense’s role in the Scottsboro case made him an adversary of the Communists. Seemingly isolated from the world of politics, he returned to Atlanta University’s Sociology Department.

Du Bois quickly immersed himself in the works of Marx and Engels (and even taught a course in 1933 on “Karl Marx and the Negro”), thus laying the foundation for what could be described as the most important Marxist work on U.S. history, Black Reconstruction (1935). Adopting a truly independent approach to Marxism, Black Reconstruction antedates the works of Eric Williams, Oliver Cox, and Immanuel Wallerstein by placing American slavery and emancipation at the center of the emergence of world capitalism and imperialism. If the Southern revolution had been successful, it would have shaken the power of Northern capital, democratized America, and obliterated prevailing racist notions—notions that justified colonial expansion. It was no coincidence, therefore, that direct colonialism replaced American slavery as the principal generator of primitive accumulation. The failure of American labor to support Black reconstruction, Du Bois argued, had been a calamity for all of humankind, for it could have altered the balance of social and economic democracy across the planet if it had succeeded.

Aside from its general thesis, Black Reconstruction contributed startling insights into the nature of revolutionary consciousness. First, Du Bois recognized that the Black elite not only betrayed the movement but advocated only political solutions for fundamentally economic problems. It was ex-slaves, in fact, who forced the land issue to the fore. As C. L. R. James would repeat three years later, Du Bois demonstrated that slaves and agrarian workers displayed even greater revolutionary force than urban industrial workers or their elite leaders. Second, Du Bois’s narrative suggested that the development of revolutionary consciousness did not precede the revolution but was the result of it. Moreover, this consciousness was not, in Marx’s sense, a “mirror of production,” but rather a partial reflection of religious and cultural traditions derived from an African past—hence, it was a consciousness outside the logic of bourgeois thought.

Black Reconstruction was not entirely well received in Communist circles, but it did cause a stir, some Party leaders actively preferring the more orthodox Marxism of Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy by James S. Allen (Sol Auerbach). Nevertheless, by the late 1930s Du Bois found himself more and more in agreement with Communist positions. He defended the Nazi-Soviet Pact, called for American intervention when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, and read more deeply about communism as a world movement. After retiring from Atlanta University in 1944, and returning to the NAACP, he focused his attention on colonialism and imperialism as the basic causes of war. He also participated in the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England (1945), which had attracted Africa’s most prominent nationalist leaders. Stung by the Western powers’ unwillingness to relinquish their colonial (and neocolonial) claims, Du Bois turned sharply left for the last time.

Dismissed from the NAACP in 1948 for his views, he became honorary vice-chair, under Paul Robeson, of the avowedly anti-imperialist Council on African Affairs and actively raised funds for the council’s African Aid Committees. As an early advocate of the Progressive Party, a delegate to the Paris World Congress for Peace (1949), and chairman of the antinuclear, anti-Cold War Peace Information Center (1950), he became a prime victim of McCarthyism and endured attacks from a panoply of Black leaders who had been drawn into the Cold War campaign. He refused to cower in the face of political repression and emerged a staunch opponent of McCarthyism, contributing numerous critical essays to such Left publications as Jewish Life, Freedom, and the National Guardian. His stand exacted a heavy price: among other things, he and his second wife, Shirley Graham, had their passports revoked by the State Department in 1953 for refusing to submit anticommunist affidavits.

In 1950 the eighty-two-year-old scholar-activist made his first bid for public office. A candidate for Senate on the American Labor Party ticket, he received more than 200,000 votes from New Yorkers, concentrated mainly in Harlem. Although he grew steadily closer to the Communist Party and less tolerant of Black anti-Marxist intellectuals, Du Bois remained independent very late in his life. In 1958, for example, he joined a number of Trotskyists, ex-Communists, and independent radicals to propose a united left-wing coalition for the New York State elections. Nonetheless, he became increasingly dedicated to the promises of socialism as a worldwide system, and to existing communism as a stage toward its evolution.

In 1961, three years after his passport had been reinstated, Du Bois accepted Kwame Nkrumah’s offer of citizenship in Ghana, to produce a project conceived decades earlier but long abandoned, the Encyclopedia Africana. He died in 1963, the encyclopedia unfinished, but Freedomways magazine (with his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, at the helm) was founded to carry on his work. He had joined the Communist Party just prior to his departure for Africa, and that act became his final political testament.

The growing distance in time since McCarthyism and the widespread teaching of his works within higher education, as well as popular Black history projects of many kinds, have together re-established Du Bois as a crucial figure within American life, and not only African-American life. His works, appearing in many new editions, have become standards. As Jonathan Scott Holloway, the first Black president of Rutgers University, wrote in his introduction to a new edition of Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois “the agitator of the nation’s conscience…still speaks to us, to our condition, and to our humanity. It is critical that we listen.”

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers, 1968.

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. “Introduction,” to The Souls of Black Folk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Lewis. David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963. New YorkL Owl Books, 2001.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press, 1983.

W.E.B. Du Bois Papers. 1803- 1999. Overview. University of Massachusetts Amherst Special Collections and University Archives. https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums312

W.E.B. Du Bois Collection. Archives at Yale. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/988

Recording. W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKXglS90qn4