It is my view, after considerable reflection, that we, all of us: Black, white; male, female; gay, straight, bi or tri –; Hispanic, Pacific Islander, African born – of whatever complex human stew, dwell in Dubois Country.
Why do I say this?
Because William Edward Burghardt DuBois, undoubtedly the premier Black scholar-activist of the 20th century, with the sheer power of his brilliance, and his advocacy, shaped the thinking of generations with his presence, his performance and his persistence.
Simply put, DuBois, at every significant phase of his near-century of life, grappled with, grasped, and utilized the most progressive, forward thinking and indeed, controversial ideas of his era, and, to the best of his ability, pushed them further, no matter the cost. His work therefore, moved movements, and sharpened contradictions – and thereby sparked struggles both here and abroad, for freedom, for national liberation, for women’s equality, for Black excellence, for socialism – and for a deeper meaning and definition of democracy.
In these brief moments before us, I shall seek to pinpoint and example his many contributions to the gargantuan global and national movements raging throughout the 20th century – and ones which continue to beckon us in the 21st, for DuBois was many things – not least, a man of the future, which he faced with hope, but a hope leavened by that prodigious intelligence, critical, unblinking, hones, reflective – ever urging us onward over the mountains of ignorance.
Although it is certain that DuBois had an enormous influence on the 20th century, it is also true that, as a man born in 1868, a few dozen months after the smoke cleared from the blood-soddened fields of Antietam, Gettysburg and Shiloh, DuBois grew to manhood in the 19th century, and some of its age, its promise and its betrayals, its terrors and its triumphs, never left him. Indeed, his formal prose, rich and evocative, had a style and rhythm that quite distinguished him from his contemporaries.
That’s because DuBois, in my view, was ever an optimist. He believed in logic, in reason, in argument, in light over prejudice, bias, hatred and narrow-mindedness. Part of this was the legacy of Harvard, a college of the elites which prized intellect above all. Part of it was DuBois, who saw the slow, yet relentless struggle of his people, and the working toilers of the world, pushing the world to a better, higher ground.
But part of it was bigger than this remarkable man: it was the evidence of all around him from his birth to his impending death, of such social and scientific transformations as few human generations have ever seen.
When DuBois was but a boy, most Americans used horses, or a horse and buggy for transportation. DuBois’s lifetime saw it go to the locomotive, the auto, the plane and rockets to the moon. He saw World Wars I and II, and other such imperialist adventures as “the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal” and dehumanize dark people. World War P (called “The Great War” by DuBois and many of his generation before the rise of the 2nd World War) he termed a “jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting the darker races” (DuBois 1920, 48,9)
He could hardly do otherwise, for the wars were for a scramble of colonies in Africa and Asia, from which militarized colons from various European countries suctioned out wealth in unprecedented quantities, sums not seen since the heights (or perhaps more accurately, depths) of slavery.
The wars convinced DuBois that the dark peoples of the world, the billions in China, India and throughout Africa and the Latino/Caribbean regions, would indeed inherit the earth – and would be free.
DuBois and Dark World
W.E.B. DuBois meditated on the hundreds of millions of people outside of the U.S., who were the vast majority of humanity. In his 1941 essay, “The Future of the Negro State University” [published in ‘The Education of Black People (1972)]; DuBois makes this explicit, stating, “Most men in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men” (DuBois 1972:138). (And lest we make invisible that vast segment, indeed, majority of humanity that is female, doubt not that he was inclusive of that number, as shall be seen below)
For DuBois, his firmest hope was that the oppressed millions of Africa, Asia and the Latino/Caribbean world would make common cause with their Black American relatives (then known as Negroes) and that thee forces would people and remake the world.
It was in this spirit that he published his first major work of fiction in 1928, his 60th year of life: Dark Princess: A Romance.
Here, DuBois imagines a love match between a Black American and an Indian royal, who join not only in love but in struggle against British conquest and imperialism. It is, by any measure, a remarkable work, as it gives scope to DuBois’s erotic life, and his love of the beauty of dark women.
It is, also, propaganda in the long war against oppression, for under the eroticism lies the union of two dark peoples, ones held in thrall to Britain and the Americans, and who resent and struggle against this binding, repressive grasp.
When mainstream reviewers attacked the work as ‘propaganda’, DuBois could offer a ready retort. In The Crisis (1926) (which he edited from 1910 – 1934 and then 1944 – 48) he explained his position, one which could hopefully find fruit in today’s rap and hip-hop artists and producers:
[A]ll art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of
The purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever
Art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for
gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.
Not content with that general statement of his position, DuBois slammed down the exclamation point: “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (Berry/Blassingame 1982: 354-55.
One needs to look far and wide today for such an expression of art’s role, driven, as it is, by corporatism and gluttony for profit.
For the Dark World, near and far, Dubois’s pen was at its service, in fiction, editorials, in essays, and criticism – for generations.
From 1900, intermittently to 1945, DuBois helped organza Pan-African Congresses which drew some of the finest minds and stalwart hearts from the continent and diaspora. He, by the 1940s, saw the beginnings, the stirrings of a unity of mind that could support liberation movements to come. In an address to Black college students, DuBois explained his views:
There is as yet no great single centralizing of thought or unification of
Opinion, but there are centers which are growing larger and touching
Edges. The most significant centers of this new thinking are, perhaps
Naturally, outside Africa and in America; in the United States and in
the West Indies; this is followed by South Africa and West Africa and
then, more vaguely, by South America, with faint beginnings in East
Central Africa, Nigeria and the Sudan.
The Pan-African movement when it comes will not, however, be merely
a narrow racial propaganda. Already the more far-seeing Negroes sense
the coming unities: a union of the working classes everywhere; a unity
of the colored races; a new unity of thinking men. (DuBois 1972: 137)
[Emphasis added]
Now, what precisely did DuBois mean regarding ‘a unity of the colored races’? He explains:
In a conscious sense of unity among colored races there is today only
a growing interest. There is a slowly arising not only a curiously strong
brotherhood of Negro blood throughout the world, but the common
cause of the darker races against the intolerable assumptions and insults
of Europeans has already found expression… The future world will, in
all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it (ibid.).
Thus we see, DuBois saw the emergence of the Dark World as the antidote to colonialism, imperialism and as a necessary ingredient in the Black Liberation movement. He worked long and hard to bring it into being.
DuBois: Feminist
W.E.B.DuBois, much like his distinguished predecessor, Frederick Douglass, believed firmly, one may say, deeply, in the equality of women. Indeed, reading his work, we find an adoration, a deep love of Black women, and other dark women for their beauty, strength and character.
In Darkwater (to this reader his finest, most passionate and most militant non-fiction work), DuBois writes extensively of women’s oppression by backward social forces and ideas. In this “proto-feminist” essay, “The Damnation of Women”, DuBois writes:
….[I]n microcosm and with differences emphasizing sex equality, is the
industrial history of labor in the 19th and 20th centuries. We cannot abolish
the new economic freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again
in a home or require them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers.
…The Uplift of Women is, next to the problem of the color line and the
peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these
movements – women and color – combine in one, the combination has
deep meaning. (DuBois 1920).
Again, in Darkwater, DuBois writes of “the primal black All-Mother of men down through the ghostly throng of mighty womanhood, who walked in the mysterious dawn of Asia and Africa” (id.).
DuBois then does a roll-call of dark female eminence, from antiquity to the 20th century, thus:
…[F}rom Neith, the primal mother of all, whose feet rest in hell, and whose
almighty hands uphold the heavens; all religion, from beauty to beast, lies
on her eager breasts, her body bears the stars, while her shoulders are
necklaced by the dragon, from black Neith down to
“That starr’d Ethiop queen who strove
to set her beauty’s praise above the sea-nymphs,”
through dusky Cleopatras, dark Candaces, and darker, fiercer Zinghas, to our own day and our own land – in gentle Phillis; Harriet, the crude Moses; the Sybil, Sojourner Truth; and the martyr, Louise De Mortie.
The father and his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa (DuBois 1920)
Here, then, is DuBois, at the apex of his middle life, writing of women with a rare, uncommon voice; with reverence. He doubtless foresaw the rise and emergence of women as a liberating force of social power to truly transform society.
A DuBoisian Future?
DuBois was far more than a scholar; he was an activist; a revolutionary, who used his considerable gifts to bring a new future into being, through ceaseless agitation and critique of the State, its political representatives and his contemporaries whom he thought in error of betrayal of the highest aspirations of the Dark World.
He therefore thought seriously about the future of Black Americans and what role they would, or should, play in the world to come.
At the dawn of the 1960s, in the shattering aftermath of World War II, many of Europe’s former colonies had slipped her grasp, and begun the long trek toward independence.
Internally, then-American Negroes were moving toward their long coveted citizenship almost a century after constitutional promises.
For DuBois this presented as many problems as opportunities, for what did citizenship really mean for Black folk in the heart of a White Empire? In many ways, these are issues we have still not resolved.
For DuBois viewed U.S. Blacks as an “inter-national” people; part of America, to be sure; but part of Africa too.
What would he make of a dark President, son of a continental African, unleashing death and destruction on dark lands, indeed, on African soil itself?
DuBois, in his bones, was a “race man”, in that he ever saw the world, as he put it, “through the veil”, i.e., through Black eyes.
But he also was, especially in his later years, a staunch anti-imperialist who opposed U.S. adventures abroad for its unmitigated violence against dark nations.
In the last decade of his life he took up the mantle of world peace, chairing the Peace Information Center in New York, where he fought for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
In one of his last essays, written 3 years before his death, he makes clear that citizenship of Black folks doesn’t mean surrender of one’s racial identity, one’s views or one’s political convictions.
In “Wither Now and Why” (1961), DuBois asks what does this new, legal citizenship mean, and answers, through his own tortured experience. For 45 years, on and off, DuBois organized and supported Pan-African Congresses, but by 1960 he admitted that he “could get little support and cooperation [from] American Negroes” (DuBois 1972; 150)
Among his people, he found “resentment” and weariness of what such global struggles could entail. Interestingly, this was not the response one found among the most enlightened segments of African thinkers.
Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of an independent Ghana, as early as 1958, could name two major figures in Black America as instrumental and inspirational in the African freedom movements: Marcus M. Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois. Said Nkrumah; “Long before many of us were conscious of our own degradation, these men fought for African national and racial equality: (Berry/Blassingame 1982; 410-11)
As Pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist, socialist, communist and internationalist, it is inconceivable that DuBois, where he alive today, would or could support the Iraq wars, the Afghanistan invasion, or the U.S./NATO bombings of Libya. (Of course, if he were alive today, he’d be about 144 years old! – but….)
A DuBoisian future would see less wars, less imperial adventures into the dark world, and of course, less colonialism.
DuBois saw the rise of dark world – of China, of India – and hoped for far more African progress in economic and political spheres.
In this age, marked by the emergence of the Occupy Movement against imperial wars, and the rapaciousness of capital, DuBois would be right at home. Consider his pungent critique of U.S. rulers, who were, he said, “Instead of being individuals are organized corporations who suppress freedom, by monopolizing wealth” (DuBois 1872: 157)
Are you disturbed or angered at the vast sums of money raised for national presidential elections? DuBois was too – and scored the Eisenhower election for wasting between $100 to $200 million dollars in pursuit of power. Although these sums are today seen as almost infinitesimal, DuBois’s questions are as relevant today as they were ½ a century ago:
Why does America need such an election fund? A democratic election
doesn’t need it and the United States needed and used it only for bribing
voters directly and indirectly or frightening men from acting and
thinking. (DuBois 1972: 157)
Decades ago, DuBois saw the looming deficits of the American public school system, which, although “the gift of black folk” in the Reconstruction South, in later years would drop out incredible numbers of dark children, many of whom would live miserable half-lives, with college not even a serious consideration (DuBois 1972: 151).
And, as far back as 1938, DuBois would boldly call for “socialized medicine”, and condemn the American Medical Association which “fights with huge funds every effort to bring free government-supported social medicine to the service of the people” (DuBois 1972: 125, 153).
Imagine what his stance would be on today’s so-called ‘health-care controversy’!
Across the ocean of time, we see DuBois; a fighter for the poor, the oppressed, the Dark World, the Black World; fighting for a better, larger future.
The DuBoisians
Since his passage into the realm of ancestor in 1963, DuBois has had his fair share of spiritual descendants (of course, his son, David DuBois has been an author, scholar and activist). Perhaps none has more fully embraced that role as has Angela Y. Davis.
Her life, as scholar, activist, revolutionary, communist leader, radical icon, political prisoner and prisoner abolitionist may indeed exceed his, in its rich depth and intensity of dissent.
A study of her work reflects the deep influence of DuBois, the indentation of a trail that Davis has trod, and taken further.
The same may be said of Cornel West ,who, like DuBois, a Harvard man, writes, speaks and acts in social movements far beyond the ivied towers of academia. An though West may depart from DuBois in his expressions of religiosity (West is, among other things, a theologian), his use and embrace of culture is a classic hallmark of DuBois.
What brings West closest to DuBois, however, is his disposition for dissent, both in his public and principled critique of the Obama administration’s foreign, domestic and economic policies, and his willingness to contrast contradictions in the realms of academia.
The late Manning Marable also had some of the flair and panache of DuBois, for, as an administrator of a major American, ivy league university, he established African American and African study programs that touched and expanded many Black, dark and American lives. He was also a scholar of the first rank, who lived a life both of scholar-activism and Black academic excellence.
His work (some consider this his masterpiece) How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983), although an homage to West Indian scholar, Walter Rodney, was a DuBoisian task in spirit, if not in name.
And last, and certainly not least, your professor, Tony Monteiro, is as DuBoisian as they come. From his youth as a radical activist, to his political opposition and candidacy during the dark days and nights of the Rizzo era, to this very hour – indeed – this very even in this university –we see the potent influence of DuBois.
And there are men and women, laboring in the vineyards of academia and beyond, who are continuing DuBoisian work, as independent scholars, committed activists, bearers of an ancient flame that continues to give light in the darkness.
The Undiscovered Country
There is a saying: ‘No man (nor woman) knows what tomorrow may bring.’
DuBois, as brilliant as he obviously was, as historian, sociologist, scholar-activist, journalist, columnist, editor, critic and revolutionary, did not know the future, yet he tried to turn its tide to his will.
He sought, with all his heart, his magnificent mind, and his fearsome will, to turn time’s trajectory in favor of the Dark World – the vast majority of humanity.
To that end, his pen and his tongue were weapons, to protect and defend the Black, Brown and Yellow worlds from assault and attack from the West.
Yet ,’it takes two to tango’.
And if you attack the empire, the empire strikes back.
When noting the DuBoisians, I remarked on Angela Y. Davis’s “deeper”, “richer” experience, in large part because of her political imprisonment and hounding (by the FBI, for example), stemming from the San Rafael Courthouse shoot-outs of 1970, in which the younger brother of George Jackson, Jonathan, and several other Black revolutionaries were killed. Although acquitted of all charges, she experienced imprisonment, which DuBois did not.
Yet, this was not for lack of the State trying.
I have said DuBois led the International Peace Center in New York in 1950, an anti-nuclear weapons group. From his acceptance of that role he was targeted by the Justice Department, and had his passport seized for nearly a decade.
He was indicted on charges of being an agent of a foreign government and tried in 1951. And although acquitted, the trial cost him over $30,000 in legal and court costs. As DuBois writes, “this sum I and my wife had to beg from state to state.” of the case itself and its aftermath, DuBois added:
The court threw the case out for lack of proof. Despite this, I was
refused a passport for travel abroad until the Supreme Court finally
decided that the Department of State had no legal grounds to refuse
me a passport. (DuBois 1972: 155)
I have said DuBois did not suffer the pains of imprisonment as had Dr. Davis, yet, for this global figure and world traveler, the denial of a passport led to what DuBois described thusly: “….[F]or nine years I was imprisoned in the confines of the United States by the unauthorized dictum of those who were ruling” (id.)
So, it seems, there are various kinds of imprisonment.
That said , the experience taught DuBois who his real friends were. Hounded by the government, battered by the press, in the midst of the Red Scare, his fair-weather ‘friends’ of rank, wealth and class deserted him, virtually en masse.
for working people, for the poor but literate people, who read him in barber shops and taverns, DuBois was their hero, and they loved him. They raised the money that he needed to battle in court.
Among many of us, radicalism is the emblem of youth, and conservatism is the preserve of elders.
Not so DuBois, who became more radical as his life lengthened.
His legal struggles radicalized him as it distanced him from polite society. Like his colleague, Paul Robeson, their names appeared less and less in both the corporate and Negro press.
Yet, DuBois marched on.
In his 1933 essay “The Field and Function of the Negro College”, Dubois ended with the challenge: “Let us be insane with courage!”
He put his money where his mouth was.
In 1961, he moved to Nkrumah’s Ghana, in West Africa, and renounced his American citizenship. He became a citizen of Ghana in 1963, the same year he joined the Communist Party.
And even though it was the year of his transition to Ancestor, it marked his courage and his willingness to join and merge with the Dark World.
His life became a prodigious example of radical and revolutionary commitment to the building of a new day and a new world against Empire.
Rightly has his work continued to influence and inform us to this late age.
We dwell in a world that he labored for and dreamt of.
There are many, many struggles left un-won, but in DuBois we have much more than mere inspiration.
For he was the ‘black’ –print.
Thank you,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A.
Works Cited
Berry, Mary Frances and John Blassingame (1982). Long Memory: The Black Experience in America. New York/London. Oxford University Press.
DuBois, W.E.B. (1920) Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
DuBois, W.E.B. (1928) Dark Princess: A Romance.
DuBois, W.E.B. (1972) The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906: 1960. New York. Monthly Review Press.
Marable, Manning. (1983) How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America.
Cambridge, MA, South End Press.