W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

Edward J. Blum

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812220865
• eBook ISBN: 9780812204506
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Pioneering historian, sociologist, editor, novelist, poet, and organizer, W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the foremost African American intellectuals of the twentieth century. While Du Bois is remembered for his monumental contributions to scholarship and civil rights activism, the spiritual aspects of his work have been misunderstood, even negated. W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet, the first religious biography of this leader, illuminates the spirituality that is essential to understanding his efforts and achievements in the political and intellectual world.Often labeled an atheist, Du Bois was in fact deeply and creatively involved with religion. Historian Edward J. Blum reveals how spirituality was central to Du Bois's approach to Marxism, pan-Africanism, and nuclear disarmament, his support for black churches, and his reckoning of the spiritual wage of white supremacy. His writings, teachings, and prayers served as articles of faith for fellow activists of his day, from student book club members to Langston Hughes.A blend of history, sociology, literary criticism, and religious reflection in the model of Du Bois's best work, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet recasts the life of this great visionary and intellectual for a new generation of scholars and activists.Honorable Mention, 2007 Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Awards

CHAPTER ONE

The Hero With a Black Face

Autobiography and the Mythology of Self

Shortly before joining the Communist Party in 1961 and rejecting the United States in favor of citizenship in Ghana, the ninety-two-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois stepped into the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University in 1960. He was there to share memories from his life with William T. Ingersoll, one of oral history’s earliest pioneers. Ingersoll queried Du Bois about his family history, his battles with Booker T. Washington, and his various plans to end racial discrimination and economic inequality. Perhaps because Du Bois had expended so much energy discussing religion throughout his career and perhaps because Du Bois had produced no definitive work on faith, Ingersoll wanted to know more about religion in Du Bois’s social evaluations and personal memory. After Du Bois described the African American Methodists in his childhood home of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, for instance, Ingersoll queried, “What was your reaction to the more radical religion of the Methodists?” Later, following Du Bois’s mention of attending summer revivals in rural Tennessee as a college student at Fisk University, Ingersoll wondered, “Why did you go to that church, curiosity?” Ingersoll followed by asking Du Bois if he thought religion provided rural blacks with “a reason to knock off and relax a little.” In the most direct question about faith in the interview, Ingersoll asked, “What were your own religious experiences at this time?”¹

In Du Bois’s responses, he presented his life as one enmeshed in religious beliefs and organizations. He remembered with fondness his family’s religious heritage and the church of his youth during the 1870s and 1880s. “My grandparents were Episcopalians, but my mother grew up living near the Congregational Church, so she joined the Congregational church and I came up in the Congregational Sunday School,” he told Ingersoll. This community of faith left a deep impression, and Du Bois recalled feeling a special love for his church—one that continued throughout much of his life. “All of the activities of the church and Sunday school, I took part in,” he reminisced. “I remember when the church was burned down it was a personal calamity to me. I can remember the text of the sermon when the preacher came to dedicate the new church. Up until a very few years ago, I was in touch with the family of the preacher.” Du Bois’s adolescent faith was not one of fire and brimstone but of an overarching worldview that made sense of existence, life, and death. “We didn’t have much hellfire,” he continued, “We took our religion very calmly.”²

With far less fondness, Du Bois also recounted his numerous battles with black church leaders who taught what he deemed a closed-minded faith and who questioned his religious commitments. Of his experiences as an undergraduate at Fisk in the 1880s, Du Bois recalled feeling particular disdain and ambivalence for church regulations against dancing. “When I went South, I was very much upset,” he told Ingersoll, because “a row came about dancing. Now, I’d been dancing all my life. I loved it. It was exercise, and it had no sex provocation—I wouldn’t dream of it.... But the old deacon in this church down at Fisk wanted to put the members of the church out if they danced, and it caused me a great deal of soul-searching. They brought the old Pauline doctrine out—it may not be bad for you, but it might be for your brother, etc. I had some hard times with myself.”³

Not all of Du Bois’s religious memories from his Fisk years were troubled, however. While church orthodoxy enraged him, authentic expressions of faith were entrancing. When he taught in rural Tennessee during summer breaks, he attended revival services and had a glorious time. The experience shocked him at first, but then it seemed to make him feel part of the community. This was a black community quite unlike his in Massachusetts. “I heard my first Negro spiritual untainted by anything outside” while in Tennessee, he remembered. “I was in a church sitting on a bench when suddenly the woman beside me just shot into the air. My God! It frightened me at first. I thought they were going crazy.” His fear, however, quickly melted into admiration. “The singing, and the revival, all of the efforts and so forth, the preaching, the minister—it was a ceremonial that took in the whole community. The people brought picnic lunches and they sat around outside and gossiped and so forth, and then they went in and were converted. Oh, it was a tremendous experience.”⁴

Evaluating the faith of his newfound brothers and sisters, Du Bois suggested that it provided them with necessary explanations for their existence in a racist and exploitative country. Christianity supplied both the conviction that true justice would come one day and the ideals necessary to continue the fight of everyday living in an oppressive land. Religion, he claimed, “enabled them to rationalize life. It didn’t make any difference how hard life was, what they had been through. Or how dark the prospects were.” Church services and faith in a loving God made pain and strain bearable. “This is a rational world,” Christianity taught them, “and while we’re suffering here, after all, this is only part of life. In the long run the thing is going to be made right. The people who’ve got an unjust advantage here are going to get punished, and we who’ve had an unfair situation are going to be happy. So there’s no use giving up and getting discouraged. In the long run, the world’s coming out straight.”⁵

Du Bois’s reminiscences of his religious life at Harvard University, which he attended after Fisk and from which he earned a doctoral degree in history in 1895, were numerous and conflicted. On one occasion, he told Ingersoll, “By the time I went to Harvard, I was not orthodox at all.” Du Bois had not abandoned faith in God or Christianity, he explained. Instead, he followed a liberal Christianity that many of his mentors at Fisk abhorred, a Christianity that focused less on the supernatural elements of the Bible, such as the virgin birth or the resurrection, and more on its social ethics, such as injunctions to “love thy neighbor” or to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” “I was by no means radical,” Du Bois recalled, “I was rather on the side of the Germans who at that time were beginning to re-interpret and retranslate the Bible.” Yet Du Bois had not dumped his overarching religious worldview. “I used to jump on my fellow students who got blasphemous,” he claimed. Later in the interview, Du Bois commented of his Harvard years, “I had been pretty orthodox while I was at Harvard. I went to Church every Sunday.” To Du Bois, it was no contradiction to say that he was both “not orthodox at all” and “pretty orthodox” at Harvard. His religious self was not one particular identity or another; rather, it was a mix and match of beliefs, styles, and persuasions.⁶

As Du Bois described his adult life, he narrated it in such a way as to indicate that he was often embroiled in religious controversy. Between his Harvard experiences and his professorship at Wilberforce, Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin in Germany. He claimed of these years, “I just forgot religion, practically, and went into economics and sociology.” Then at his first professorship at Wilberforce University in the 1890s, he butted heads with church leaders over public prayer. “One of the first things” he experienced at Wilberforce was strolling “into a prayer meeting. All the students were there, because it was compulsory. Believe me, I shall never forget it.” Occupying a seat in the back to “look the thing over,” Du Bois was shocked when the group leader announced, “Dr. Du Bois will lead us in prayer.” He remembered responding, “No, I won’t.” He left the meeting and, when compelled later to explain his behavior, Du Bois told the Wilberforce bishops in the 1890s and Ingersoll in the 1960s that “in my home you didn’t ask any man to get up and lead in prayer. There were a few deacons that did. But I’m just not interested and I’m not going to.”⁷

Du Bois’s refusal to lead the prayer and his German education caused these bishops to wonder about his religious faith, and questions of belief dogged Du Bois wherever he went. When he interviewed for a position at Atlanta University in 1897, following his fifteen-month intensive study of African Americans in Philadelphia that resulted in his historical and sociological triumph The Philadelphia Negro (1899), he once again had to address the prayer issue. This time, rather than refuse to pray with his students, Du Bois and the university leadership struck a bargain. “The old president said that it was customary for the professors to lead in prayer meetings, and I told him that was a little out of my line,” Du Bois commented to Ingersoll. “But finally we compromised and I told him I agreed to read from the prayer book, and I used to improve upon the prayers now and then, reading to the students.” As Du Bois explained it, his reasons for not wishing to lead prayer in public did not stem from a lack of faith, but rather from a cultural and denominational background quite distinct from that of his Methodist colleagues. “You see,” he told Ingersoll, “in the Congregational Church, the ordinary layman doesn’t lead in prayer. He sits and listens and that sort of thing, but I mean, he doesn’t take active part in any religious exercises. As I say, I told him at prayer meetings I would read from the Episcopal Prayerbook or from any prayers that I should manufacture myself, so that we got over that.”⁸

Du Bois’s presentation of his life and experiences to Ingersoll contrasts sharply with the image of Du Bois created by his many biographers. That he remembered his childhood church affectionately, that he defended his position on public prayer as rooted in culture and not disbelief, and that he recalled rebuking his Harvard classmates for blasphemous statements suggest that historical appraisals of Du Bois as both a young man and an old man do not square with how Du Bois imagined himself or at least wanted himself remembered. According to Du Bois’s biographers, for instance, Harvard was the time of his “total dismissal of conventional faith” when he fell into a lifelong “serene agnosticism.” How could this have been a time when he attended church regularly, embraced liberal Christianity, or felt himself “pretty orthodox” in any way? His old age, again according to his biographers, was supposedly marked by a commitment to Marxist-Communism that precluded any interest in religion, other than as opium for the masses. Historian David Lewis has gone so far as to characterize Du Bois in his adult life as an atheist. “Although he called himself an agnostic,” Lewis has written, “it was an agnosticism professing such complete indifference to the hypothesis of an interactive supreme being as to be indistinguishable from atheism.” Yet when Du Bois sat with Ingersoll in 1960, he crafted himself not as an opponent of faith but as one deeply influenced by it. And he never referred to himself as an “agnostic” or as an “atheist.” Even while he prepared to leave the United States, he had memories filled with religion. He had little difficulty characterizing himself as an individual invested in the life of faith and faith communities. In short, the spiritual side of Du Bois so often dismissed or diminished was one that Du Bois earnestly sought to unveil, one that he chose to highlight before his departure.⁹

The contents of Du Bois’s oral history disclose several common religious themes that he used when writing his many autobiographies. Religious ideas shaped Du Bois’s autobiographical works and stood as constitutive elements of his shifting sense and presentation of self. He recalled a religious childhood. His church and Sunday school imbued him with Christian morals and provided the basis for a belief in communities that transcended racial alienation, where all of God’s children felt the pull of kinship and affection. He presented his education and his engagement with social issues as a holy calling, in which higher powers demanded that he speak prophetically. His memories were full of meditations on the African American “sorrow songs” and other religious music. To him, they conveyed deep religious sentiments that allowed him to tap into the heart of the divine and black America. And the adult Du Bois of his autobiographical narratives was a prophet who spoke the truth about the spiritual state of African American communities, white society in the United States, and eventually the political, economic, and moral condition of the entire world. From his memories of childhood joy in New England Sunday Schools to his decision to co-found the NAACP, from his observations of black revivals to his membership in the Communist Party, the Du Bois of his autobiographies refused to forsake religious commitment or commentary. Through his numerous autobiographical acts, Du Bois produced didactic mythologies of self to reveal the many sides of his soul and to speak sacred truths to the world.

Du Bois’s autobiographical narratives did not function merely as “metaphors of self,” to borrow literary critic James Olney’s phrase, that comprise “monument[s] of the self as it is becoming, a metaphor of the self at the summary moment of composition.”¹⁰ More specifically, Du Bois’s autobiographical acts served as “mythologies of self,” where he drew on a variety of religious allusions and symbolic structures to present his “self” as a hero-priest and a prophet-teacher. His were life journeys bursting with mythical beginnings, demonic forces, holy callings, and prophetic visions. The express intent was to expose inequality and to champion social justice. He used spiritualized language to discuss social concerns and to ruminate on the this-worldly significance of presumably other-worldly teachings.

In many ways, Du Bois’s autobiographical narratives followed the trajectory mapped by literary theorist and psychoanalyst Joseph Campbell in his now classic works on myth and mythologies. Linking hundreds of folk tales and myths from the ancient world, Campbell discerned what he called a “mono-myth,” an all-encompassing meta-narrative at the heart of mythologies that revealed the deep recesses of the human spirit and of cosmic desires. Campbell found a universal “hero with a thousand faces,” a man or woman whose adventures and ambivalences, decisions and despairs, and wisdoms and wisecracks unveiled sacred realities about human life. This hero typically emerged from unusual circumstances: birthed in a manger, found among wolves, or the progeny of a human and an animal. At a young age, the hero was “called to adventure” often by an unknown or a distant voice. Obeying the call was an “awakening of the self,” and the beginning of what would become a sacred quest. Along the adventure road, the hero encountered a series of trials and tribulations. Followers fall away; dragons or leaders stand against the hero; even nature itself can be a bulwark of opposition. Typically, the hero is entombed underground or swallowed whole by beasts or whales. Each time the hero chooses to follow the arduous path set out by the sacred voice, his or her courage is rewarded with new cosmic insights. By journey’s end, the hero becomes a god, if not greater than the gods, and returns to his people with divine knowledge for how to live better in human society.¹¹

According to Campbell, whenever folk and mythological hero narratives are interpreted as straight biography or history, the myth is killed and the hidden lessons lost. This has been the case with Du Bois’s autobiographical narratives. Historians have most often looked to them for an outline of Du Bois’s life, and only recently have scholars approached them as metaphorical texts or presentations of self and society. Even the most astute biographers have looked to them, not in the tradition of hero narratives but as historical works to find the who, what, and where of Du Bois’s life. The narratives mean so much more, however. By casting himself in the model of the hero, Du Bois revealed a spiritualized understanding of his self and also articulated a cosmic understanding of his world. His autobiographical acts, in sum, provided the religious schema by which Du Bois hoped his readers would view him and the world.

Yet the cosmic adventure tales in Du Bois’s autobiographical narratives were somewhat distinct from those described by Campbell. Du Bois’s works had a racialized twist. He was a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Rethinking W. E. B. Du Bois, Rethinking Religion and Race
• Chapter One: The Hero with a Black Face: Autobiography and the Mythology of Self
• Chapter Two: Race as Cosmic Sight in The Souls of Black Folk
• Chapter Three: A Dark Monk Who Wrote History and Sociology: The Spiritual Wage of Whiteness, the Black Church, and Mystical Africa
• Chapter Four: Black Messiahs and Murderous Whites: Violence and Faith in Literary Expression
• Chapter Five: Christ Was a Communist: Religion for an Aging Leftist
• Epilogue: The Passing of the Prophet
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments