W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture

Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, James B. Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136048708
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Interpreting Du Bois' thoughts on race and culture in a broadly philosophical sense, this volume assembles original essays by some of today's leading scholars in a critical dialogue on different important theoretical and practical issues that concerned him throughout his long career: the conundrum of race, the issue of gender equality, and the perplexities of pan-Africanism.

The
Question
of Pan-Africanism

The Pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois	9
Manning Marable

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is generally accorded by black scholars and political leaders alike the title “Father of Pan-Africanism.” Trinidadian historian and Marxist activist C.L.R. James writes that “more than any other citizen of Western civilization (or of Africa itself) [Du Bois] struggled over many years and succeeded in making the world aware that Africa and Africans had to be freed from the thralldom which Western civilization had imposed on them.” Du Bois was “from start to finish … the moving spirit and active organizer” of five Pan-African congresses—in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945.¹ Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the Gold Coast independence movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, and subsequently Prime Minister of Ghana, referred to Du Bois as “a treasured part of Africa’s history,” and recounted his unique contributions to the evolution of Pan-Africanism in several works.²

Even social scientists who are openly hostile to Du Bois recognize, in a distorted manner, the rich Pan-Africanist legacy of the black scholar. Harold R. Isaacs criticized Du Bois as never having been “a successful leader or organizer or even a popular public figure.” His Pan-Africanism was simply a type of “romantic racism” which “got nowhere.” Nevertheless, Isaacs acknowledged grudgingly that modern black leaders recognize Du Bois as the “father of Pan-Africanism,” and that his militant words on Africa now “ring in the air all around us.”³

Du Bois’s biographer, Francis S. Broderick, declared that none of his subject’s books “except The Philadelphia Negro, is first-class.” Du Bois’s voluminous studies on African culture, history, and politics, which include The Negro and The World and Africa, “all possess some information, but nothing which indicates the mind or hand of an original scholar.” The Pan-African congresses of the 1920s, Broderick adds, accomplished, if anything, less than the failed Niagara Movement of 1905–1909. Yet even Broderick, blinded by racism, must stand in awe of Du Bois’s prophecy of African and Asian nationalism which swept the Third World in the 1950s and afterwards. “After the Asian-African conference at Bandung in 1955,” Broderick admits, “who had the last laugh, Du Bois or his critics? Du Bois was a generation ahead of his time. The leaders of at least two [African nations] have publicly made explicit acknowledgment of their debt to Du Bois’s inspiration.”⁴

This essay is not a comprehensive analysis of Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism, but rather an examination of his role in the evolution of the Pan-Africanist political movement from 1900 to 1945. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between Du Bois’s sponsorship and the development of political programs at the Pan-African congresses during these years, and his overall political life and activities within the United States.

Perhaps the clearest point of departure in the study of Du Bois’s Pan-Africanist thought is provided by his literary executor, Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker. In a 1968 essay, Aptheker suggests two basic factors which oriented Du Bois’s intellectual endeavors. Aptheker rejects the nearly universal thesis that Du Bois’s central conception of black liberation varied from decade to decade. Indeed, his philosophical orientation or method of analysis reveals a startling consistency. “Du Bois’s extraordinary career manifests a remarkable continuity,” Aptheker states. First, “all his life Du Bois was a radical democrat; this was true even with his ‘Talented Tenth’ concept which held that mass advance depended upon leadership and service from a trained minority.” Certainly the black scholar’s “political affiliations or affinities varied as times changed, as programs altered.” At various historical moments Du Bois was a reform Republican, a Democrat, a Socialist, a Communist, and a supporter of the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. “These were, however, political choices and not defining marks of philosophical approaches.” At the root of his politics was a commitment to a democracy defined by the realization of racial equality and social justice for all social groups and classes within the society.

Second, as Aptheker notes:

[Du Bois’s] penetrating observation, first offered in 1900 and twice repeated in a significant article published the next year—“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”—was fundamental to his vision of the unity of all African peoples (to grow, as Du Bois advanced in years, to the idea that this itself was preliminary, to the unity of all the darker peoples of the earth and that was part of the process of the worldwide unification of all who labor) and was, indeed, first enunciated as the Call of the original Pan-African Conference. This insight forms the inspiration for and thesis of his The Negro (London: Home Library, 1915), Black Folk, Then and Now (New York: Holt, 1939), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), (and] The World and Africa (New York: Viking, 1947).⁵

Throughout his adult life, Du Bois never identified racism as a purely American phenomenon. He understood that the resolution of the color line could occur only within the international political context, and that racism was tied directly to economic exploitation and the domination of the white West over peoples of color across the globe. Pan-Africanism then was merely the concrete political expression of Du Bois’s intellectual commitment to eradicate racism, colonialism and all structures of exploitation.

DU BOIS AND THE PAN-AFRICAN VISION

What shaped Du Bois’ evolving philosophy of Pan-Africanism? In Dusk of Dawn, he repeats Countee Cullen’s memorable lines:

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track

Strong bronzed men, or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?⁶

“What is Africa to me?” Du Bois pondered. “Neither my father nor my father’s father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for it. My mother’s folk were closer and yet their direct connection, in culture and race, became tenuous; still, my tie to Africa is strong.”⁷ As a child, Du Bois heard an African melody that his great-grandmother Violet Du Bois had brought from the continent, which over generations had become a “tradition in his family.”⁸ There were no books on Africa in Great Barrington’s modest library. Yet even as a child, he had become annoyed with the crude racial stereotypes depicted in his classroom textbooks. In his 1959 interview with Isaacs, Du Bois reflected that he encountered pictures of the races of man in his earliest texts, “a white man, a Chinese mandarin, and a savage Negro. That was what the class got, and it made me especially sensitive. I did not recognize those pictures in the book as being my people.”⁹

It was his undergraduate experience at Fisk University which first awakened Du Bois’s lifelong identification with African culture. Fisk had the beginnings of an African museum, and young Will examined the small selection of African carvings and artifacts with fascination. Continuing his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, he encountered the pseudo-science of racial dogma, presented as if it were a consequence of the new theory of evolution. And no courses on African, Chinese, or Indian history were offered at Harvard. Returning from a period of study at the University of Berlin, Du Bois applied to the doctoral program in social science at Harvard in the spring of 1890. His topic was “the social and economic rise of the Negro people.”¹⁰

For two years, Du Bois was preoccupied with thousands of hours of research in the Congressional Record, colonial and state documents, and secondary literature pertaining to the African slave trade. Simultaneously, he participated in the larger cultural and social life of Boston’s black community, taking part in church plays and drafting a comprehensive program to improve and expand local black libraries, lectures, literary societies, and Chautauqua circles.¹¹ The final product of his labor was his thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, which was the initial volume published in the Harvard Historical Studies series in 1896. The importance of this pioneering study, published at a period of rising racial violence, political disfranchisement, and historiographical revision of the role of the Negro in American democracy, cannot be overemphasized. It provided the first serious examination of the impact of the Haitian revolution upon the domestic slave political economy. The chapter on the South’s frenzied political attempts to rescind the 1808 ban on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, “The Final Crisis,” was not equaled in historical research for decades.¹² The white academic establishment offered grudging praise: one review in the American Historical Review applauded the work as a “valuable review of an important subject,” but added that Du Bois occasionally used phrases which “characterize the advocate rather than the historian.”¹³ For Du Bois, of course, that was the entire point: scholarship served to advance racial interests. Any anti-racist research which emphasized the humanity of African people and denounced the profit motive of white slaveholders contributed to the immediate struggle of destroying the color line and expanding democracy to include the Negro.

As Du Bois pursued an academic career, teaching briefly at Wilberforce University and the University of Pennsylvania before settling at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 as a professor of economics and history, other black intellectuals became more preoccupied with the cultural and political image of Africa. One of the most ambitious and visionary of this new generation was a young Trinidadian lawyer, Henry Sylvester Williams. Born in 1869, Williams traveled to the United States in 1891, and two years later went to Canada to attend law school. In 1896, Williams moved to London, and within a year he had organized a Pan-African Association. Gradually he established the basis for a political formation which would embrace blacks in the West Indies, the United States and Africa. Its unambiguous goals were “to secure to Africans throughout the world true civil and political rights” and “to ameliorate the conditions of our brothers on the continent of Africa, America and other parts of the world.”¹⁴ In this effort, assistance was provided by a curious benefactor, the conservative Afro-American educator Booker T. Washington. In one of history’s little ironies, Washington in 1899 promoted the projected Pan-African conference as a “most effective and far-reaching” activity during a London visit. The president of Tuskegee Institute “beg[ged] and advise[d] as many of our people as can possibly do so” to take an active role in Williams’s conference.¹⁵

Du Bois and approximately thirty other West Indian and Afro-American intellectuals attended the Pan-African Association’s conference in July 1900. The meeting attracted minor attention in the press, and the delegates were welcomed by the Lord Bishop of London. Queen Victoria even forwarded a note through her minister Joseph Chamberlain, promising not to “overlook the interests of the natives.” The conference drafted “An Address to the Nations of the World” which urged the democratic treatment of black people in majority white nations and the ultimate emancipation of Africa itself. Du Bois penned the most memorable statement of the assembly: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” The net results of this gathering, in the short run, were unfortunately minimal. In his The World and Africa (1947), Du Bois noted that “this meeting had no deep roots in Africa itself, and the movement and the idea died for a generation.”¹⁶ Williams soon returned to the Caribbean to establish branches of his Pan-African Association. In Jamaica he won the support of radical journalist Joseph Robert Love, while visiting the island in March, 1901.¹⁷ But failing to build a viable organization, Williams returned to Trinidad in 1908, and died there in 1911.

The failure of this early attempt to forge an international forum for Pan-African opinion did not diminish Du Bois’s interest in Africa. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, he was one of the few American scholars who encouraged others to take an active interest in the cultural, economic, and political history of African people. In 1903, Du Bois wrote a review of Joseph A. Tillinghast’s The Negro in Africa and America in the Political Science Quarterly. The review is noteworthy in that Du Bois emphasized the centrality of African culture in the evolution of black American life and history.¹⁸ Several years later, writing for The Nation, Du Bois review...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ Introduction
• THE QUESTION OF RACE
• THE QUESTION OF WOMEN
• THE QUESTION OF PAN-AFRICANISM
• Afterword