W. E. B. Du Bois

Black Radical Democrat

Manning Marable

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594510182
• eBook ISBN: 9781317249504
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Marable's biography of Du Bois is the best so far available.' Dr. Herbert Aptheker, Editor, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois 'Marable's excellent study focuses on the social thought of a major black American thinker who exhibited a 'basic coherence and unity' throughout a multifaceted career stressing cultural pluralism, opposition to social inequality, and black pride.' Library Journal Distinguished historian and social activist Manning Marable's book, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, brings out the interconnections, unity, and consistency of W. E. B. Du Bois's life and writings. Marable covers Du Bois's disputes with Booker T. Washington, his founding of the NAACP, his work as a social scientist, his life as a popular figure, and his involvement in politics, placing them into the context of Du Bois's views on black pride, equality, and cultural diversity. Marable stresses that, as a radical democrat, Du Bois viewed the problems of racism as intimately connected with capitalism. The publication of this updated edition follows more than one hundred celebrations recently marking the 100th anniversary of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Marable broadens earlier biographies with a new introduction highlighting Du Bois's less-known advocacy of women's suffrage, socialism, and peace and he traces his legacy to today in an era of changing racial and social conditions.

1

A Great Ambition

My boyhood seems, if my memory serves me rightly, to have been filled with incidents of surprisingly little importance.… In early youth a great bitterness entered my life and kindled a great ambition. I wanted to go to college because others did. I came and graduated and am now in search of a Ph.D. and bread. I believe, foolishly perhaps but sincerely, that I have something to say to the world.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 3 October 1890

The greatest casualty of racism is democracy. Afro-Americans have understood this for many decades, and their leaders have attempted to redefine the American political system for the benefit of all citizens, regardless of race, gender, and social class. Most of the pivotal figures in the black experience who pursued the goal of multicultural democracy were charismatic leaders and orators—from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer. But the most complex social theoretician of this black tradition was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. A social scientist who reluctantly entered politics, Du Bois was preoccupied with the relationship between race, class, and democracy throughout his long and productive life. He was an intellectual driven by his Calvinist upbringing and deep democratic ideals, who frequently opposed the dominant currents of his times. A cultural pluralist and Pan-Africanist who expressed “a New England conscience on a tropical heart,” Du Bois embodied the tensions and paradoxes within America’s cultural fabric.¹ His career was a long sojourn toward the aim of black cultural integrity, political emancipation, and democratic freedom for every sector of American society.

Du Bois was bom “by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills,” in the village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on 23 February 1868.² His mother, Mary Burghardt Du Bois, was thirty-six years old, the youngest of at least ten children. The Burghardt extended family, located in the Berkshires for nearly 150 years, was responsible for young Du Bois’s Negro identity. The family patriarch, Tom, had been born in West Africa and brought as a slave into the region by a Dutch family. During the American Revolution, Tom enlisted into the ranks of the Berkshire County regiments. One of his sons, Jack Burghardt, was a participant in Shays’ rebellion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Burghardt clan was a well-established part of the community. Some family members worked as housemaids, waiters, and small farmers; one industrious cousin in nearby Lenox ran a laundry, and another owned the only barbershop in West Stockbridge. Mary’s father, Othello, the owner of a modest farm on Egremont Plain near Great Barrington, was later described by his grandson as a “good-natured but not energetic” black man, “strong-voiced and redolent with tobacco.” Othello’s wife, Sally, was a “thin, tall, yellow and hawk-faced woman” with some Dutch and perhaps native American ancestry. Both tended to be overly protective toward their youngest child. Mary Burghardt had an affair with her first cousin, John Burghardt, that led to the birth of a son, Idelbert. The parents broke up the relationship, and Mary went to work in Great Barrington as a household domestic. The daughter had become a “silent, repressed woman” when Alfred Du Bois came to town early in 1867.³

The Du Bois heritage was traced to a physician and Bahamian plantation owner, James Du Bois. His eldest son by a black woman, Alexander, had been educated in a private school in Connecticut and lived for a time in Santo Domingo. Something of an entrepreneur, Alexander Du Bois eventually settled in New Haven, and managed a small grocery store while also working as a steward on a passenger boat serving New York City. A strict and domineering man—who eventually married four times—Alexander Du Bois refused to accept any form of racial discrimination. When black communicants at the Trinity Episcopal Church in New Haven were confronted with white hostility, Du Bois helped to create an all-black church, St. Luke’s. His only son, Alfred, unfortunately shared many of his father’s worst traits. Born in Haiti in 1825, Alfred was a romantic yet stubborn individualist, who constantly challenged parental authority. After a stint as a private in the Union army, he drifted into Great Barrington with little money, few skills, and no job. The Burghardts instantly disliked him, and questioned his itinerant background and lack of family ties. Without permission, Du Bois and Mary Burghardt were married, and the rebellious couple “carried on a more or less open feud” with the Burghardts until the birth of their son. About one year after Will’s birth, Alfred Du Bois left town in search of permanent employment. Although he lived for a time only thirty-six miles from Great Barrington, he never returned to his wife and child.⁴

Mary Burghardt Du Bois and her infant son lived for several years on her parents’ farm and later moved into a small house in town. Life was difficult, and frequently Mary suffered from severe depression. During Willie’s childhood, Mary was partially paralyzed by a stroke that crippled her left leg and hand. Yet she still continued to work occasionally as a maid in the households of local white families. Despite the care and assistance by Mary’s many sisters and brothers, she focused her hopes and aspirations on her young child. Perhaps, she may have thought, her son would have all the opportunities she had not found for herself. Despite her physical handicap and near penury, she wanted Willie to obtain a good education and to have a childhood without hunger and deprivation. With quiet determination, she consciously reinforced the boy’s desire to excel.

In most respects, Mary Burghardt Du Bois’s son had a pleasant childhood. He was enrolled in the local public school at the age of five or six and quickly became a favorite of his teachers. Will was obedient and highly motivated, and he soon advanced to upper grades. Usually he was several years younger than his classmates, and the boy soon sensed his intellectual superiority. “Art Benham could draw pictures’’ better, Du Bois reflected years later, but as a boy Will “could express meaning in words better than he. Mike Gibbons was a perfect marble player, but dumb in Latin.’’ Will was not particularly good in football, and was one of the few children in town not permitted to ice-skate, since his “mother was afraid of the water.” But he won praise as a fine singer and among his peers was usually the leader of intricate games, mountain climbing, and cave expeditions. Will had many friends, virtually all from middle-class, white households. George Beebe, a child of an affluent family, was one close companion, “because with all his clothes he was rather dumb in class and knew it, while I was bright and just this side of shabby, so that we balanced each other.” Mary worked occasionally for the farm family of Will Beckwith, and the two boys frequently played together over weekends. Perhaps Will Du Bois’s closest friend, Louis Russell, was the mentally retarded child of the mill owner. Most of the girls in Will’s class made few impressions on him. His stem mother, and local opinion in general, frowned upon social affairs such as school dances, and juvenile dating was nonexistent. Even older boys did not escort girls to school or walk together on streets. Will had virtually no serious contacts with any females other than his mother. Friends commented about Will’s close companionship with Mary, but he had no apologies. “This seemed quite normal to me; my mother was lame, why should I not guide her steps?” Du Bois later wrote, “And who knew better about my thoughts and ambitions?” After a day’s household work at a white residence, Mary found her son frequently waiting at the front door to assist her to their home. Mother and son, walking slowly together, were a familiar sight to town residents.⁵

As Will entered high school, he began to shoulder a greater share of the burden for maintaining their small family. He had learned from the Burghardts that no self-respecting individual could accept public charity, and he sought out odd jobs wherever work needed to be done. On Saturday mornings, he split wood and did chores for two elderly women. Every morning before walking to school he shoveled coal into the stove of the millinery shop. During afternoons he worked as a tea salesman for the A & P store, and in the summers he mowed lawns. Despite these tasks, Will continued to do well in his academic work, and he even found time to engage in other activities. He was briefly the coeditor of the high school newspaper, the Howler. With his mother, Will regularly attended services at the local Congregational church and participated in its social events. White teachers and neighbors provided important support for Will’s future development. When Mary Du Bois lacked the funds to purchase her son’s textbooks for Greek, Louis Russell’s mother promptly paid for them. Johnny Morgan, a Welshman who ran the community bookstore, permitted Will to read his periodicals and books. Morgan secured for young Du Bois an appointment as Great Barrington correspondent to the Springfield Republican, and several of his articles and notes may have been published in 1884 and 1885. Frank Hosmer, the high school principal, also took charge of the young man’s curriculum, recommending a college preparatory course including Latin, algebra, and geometry.

The stolid citizens of Great Barrington took pride in their local government, and here Du Bois received his first lessons in democracy. Every spring a town meeting was held to discuss expenditures for public education, street maintenance, and other issues of general concern. Will Du Bois began to attend these meetings by the age of thirteen, and took a distinct interest in the political process. Occasionally he became annoyed with the lengthy debates concerning the extravagance of high school appropriations, but gradually he came to conclude that the “essence of democracy” was in “listening to the other man’s opinion and then voting your own, honestly and intelligently.” Great Barrington had no “conscious socialist tendencies,” but it owned its own water supply, which freely serviced all residences; the poor had little difficulty in obtaining private contributions, and health care was “mainly a matter of friendly charity among relatives and neighbors.”⁶ New England politics was cast largely in Calvinist terms, especially in small towns like Great Barrington. Few made any distinctions between the strict moral code that governed personal life and the duties and obligations of the political process. Perhaps here Du Bois began to draw the correlations between politics and ethics that would inform his entire career.

However, even as a high school pupil, Du Bois sensed the subtle distinctions of social class and political power that functioned within the village’s democratic system. “Certain well-known and well-to-do citizens were always elected to office,” Du Bois observed, “not the poorest or the Irish Catholics.” Almost all citizens were Republicans, with the prominent exception of one local attorney: as a Democrat, he was suspected “of low origin and questionable designs.” A small private school was maintained only for the children of prosperous families. Great Barrington’s social outcasts were not blacks, but the Irish Catholics who dwelled in slums in the upper section of town near the woolen mills. Irish workers were casually made “the basis of jokes and ridicule in town.” Young Irish women comprised almost all domestic workers, and their husbands and fathers were contemptuously described as “sloven,” habitually drunken, unreliable laborers. Another oppressed group were women. None were permitted to vote, and with few exceptions, most working women were “housekeepers.” Female students were not expected to engage in academic competition, and few in Du Bois’s circle went beyond high school. At that time such gender and class categories remained vague to Du Bois, because he still subscribed to the hegemonic ideology of the town’s middle class. He believed that “wealth was the result of work and saving and the rich rightly inherited the earth. The poor, on the whole, were themselves to be blamed.”⁷ Democracy was, in the context of Great Barrington, structured upon a hierarchical social order, and only those with talent, education, and property merited the right to voice opinions. As in Calvinist dogma, only the elect had the moral and intellectual capability to direct public discourse and policies.

As a child, Will Du Bois had little experience of racial discrimination, even though almost all his playmates were white. He recognized that the Burghardt clan was certainly less affluent than most of the town’s established families and that they owned little property. But they were not as impoverished as the Irish working class. One of Du Bois’s cousins married a young white woman, but the Burghardt family’s major criticism was that her family history was unknown. There were about twenty-five Afro-American families who lived in Great Barrington out of a population of five thousand, and some were intermarried with whites. “The colored folk were not set aside in the sense that the Irish were, but were a part of the community of long-standing.” Nevertheless, young Du Bois always sensed a degree of racial alienation and isolation. On one occasion, when students decided to exchange visiting cards, a white girl curtly rejected his gift. After other incidents, he became aware that his color permanently separated him from his friends. At first Du Bois reacted with a mood of “exaltation and high disdain. They were the losers who did not ardently court me, and not I, which seemed to be proven by the fact that I had no difficulty in outdoing them in nearly all competition, especially intellectual.”⁸ Adding to his isolation was the absence of his father and the depressed condition of his mother. As a Harvard graduate student, Du Bois later reflected that he could claim “no line of distinguished ancestors—indeed I have often been in a quandary as to how those revered ones spent their time.” He had come to prefer friendships with men “who have no grandfathers.… In early youth a great bitterness entered my life and kindled a great ambition.”⁹ To discover himself, Will Du Bois gradually began to turn toward race.

A small number of Afro-Americans migrating from the South arrived in town and in the fall of 1884 established a small African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The Burghardts took no part in initiating this all-black congregation, but both Mary and Will Du Bois occasionally attended Sunday services and the ladies’ monthly suppers. Will organized a literary and “social improvement” club, the “Sons of Freedom,” which was dedicated to the “advancement of the colored race” in the town. The “Sons of Freedom” held debates, scheduled lectures, and studied the history of the United States. Somewhat earlier, Du Bois had been named local correspondent for the Afro-American weekly, the Globe, published in New York. Globe editor T. Thomas Fortune, then a leading black radical, wrote Du Bois “an encouraging letter,” and the journalist’s “fierce, brave voice” inspired him to provide some direction to the small black community of Great Barrington.¹⁰ In the pages of the Globe, Du Bois criticized blacks for not participating in local town meetings, noting that “they do not take as much interest in politics as is necessary for the protection of their rights.”¹¹ Like Fortune, who urged blacks to initiate political actions outside both major parties, Du Bois urged his elders to do the same. “Colored men of the town should prepare themselves” to contest for public office. We “hold the balance of power,” Du Bois asserted. If Afro-Americans “will only act in concert, they may become a power not to be despised.”¹² By the age of sixteen, Du Bois had reached an insight that would help to shape his political activities in future years: black Americans could not exercise their full democratic rights unless they organized themselves within a race-conscious bloc. In later decades, this observation would be expanded to include other sectors of society that experienced structural inequality. Democracy could not be colorblind in a racist society, nor could it extend full rights to workers or women when the state was dominated by a narrow elite. Group cooperation was essential to advance democratic reforms.

Du Bois’s racial identity was reinforced during the summer of 1883, when he experienced his “greatest boyhood trip.” The fourth wife of Alexander Du Bois invited her grandson to visit his paternal grandfather, then living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Alfred Du Bois had died several years before, and Mary hoped that the Du Bois family might provide funds for her son’s education. With some difficulty she raised the funds for the “great excursion.” When Will arrived at the train station, no one was there to welcome him. After a few frantic inquiries, the young man finally found the house. Alexander Du Bois proved to be rather intimidating at first. Still stern, “always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was not a ‘Negro’; he was a man!”¹³ Will was rather put off by his grandfather’s ceremonious behavior and pretensions. But in a letter to his mother he confided, “I like him better than I thought I would. He says very little but speaks civily when I say anything to him.”¹⁴ More profound was Will’s sojourn at a black festival on Narragansett Bay at Rocky Point, Rhode Island. Afro-Americans from three states gathered there annually for a picnic. Du Bois was deeply stirred by the event: “I viewed with astonishment ten thousand Negroes of every hue and bearing, saw in open-mouthed astonishment the whole gorgeous gamut of the American Negro world; the swaggering men, the beautiful girls, the laughter and gaiety, the unhampered self expression.”¹⁵ Reporting his travels in Fortune’s newspaper, Du Bois was filled with black pride. But in keeping with his Calvinist upbringing, he duly noted areas in which Afro-Americans needed improvement. He had been “pleased to see the industry and wealth” of many blacks, but regretted the “absence of literary societies” in their communities.¹⁶

The next spring Du Bois graduated from high school with high honors and delivered his oration on the abolitionist, and later, socialist leader Wende...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A Great Ambition
• 2 The Ivory Tower of Race
• 3 Tuskegee and the Niagara Movement: From Scholar to Activist
• 4 The Crisis and the NAACP: Social Reform in the Progressive Era
• 5 Pan-Africanism, Socialism, and Garveyism
• 6 The New Negro
• 7 The Great Depression and World War
• 8 The Politics of Peace
• 9 Stern Prophet, Flaming Angel
• Chronology
• Notes and References
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author