Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois

Alford A. Young, Jerry Gafio Watts, Manning Marable, Charles C. Lemert, Elizabeth Higginbotham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317251668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This work marks the recent passing of the 100th Anniversary of Du Bois' classic of African American literature. More than fifty events and celebrations were held in cities and universities around the country. It poignantly explores the relationship of Du Bois, the man, to his writings. It is written by expert team of authors including the prominent Manning Marable. "The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois" explores the relationship of W. E. B. Du Bois' seminal book, "The Souls of Black Folk", to other works in his scholarly portfolio and to his larger project concerning race, racial identity, and the social objectives of scholarly engagement. Prominent authors consider why the classic book remains so relevant today.

1

Celebrating Souls Deconstructing the Du Boisian Legacy

Manning Marable

It was unquestionably the social event of the year. Even one reporter from the Detroit News characterized the audience that evening as being “splendidly attired.”¹ There were thousands of well-groomed black men striking poses in tuxedos and dark business suits. Thousands of African-American women graced the auditorium in splendid evening gowns and sparkling jewelry. The vast Cobo Hall, Detroit’s largest indoor arena, was literally overflowing with the elite group once described by W. E. B. Du Bois as the “Talented Tenth”—the most affluent, best-educated sector of Black America. On the evening of April 27, 2003, more than eight thousand people paid a minimum of $150.00 each to attend the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) “Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner.” At the central dais—the Cobo Arena was so cavernous that there were actually four daises—were seated Michigan’s governor, one senator, several congressmen, the chief executive officer of Daimler Chrysler Corporation, and the nation’s leading hip hop mogul, Russell Simmons. The purpose of the night’s historic celebration was to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. The gala’s organizers, planning carefully to make sure that Du Bois’ celebrated text was at the center of the festivities, placed a complimentary copy of The Souls of Black Folk at each individual place setting.

As the evening’s keynote speaker, I had been assigned the task of explaining, over the clatter of silverware and the background music of the Motown sound, the central ideas advanced by Du Bois in his classic work, and linking the book’s significance to the particular challenges confronting black Americans in the twenty-first century. From my vantage point on the dais, sitting next to Russell Simmons, I couldn’t help but reflect on black history’s many ironies. Representatives of corporate America and transnational capitalism were prominently present that evening to finance what the Detroit press proudly announced was the “largest sit-down banquet” in the country. Du Bois was repeatedly projected in the local Detroit media as among the pantheon of America’s greatest thinkers and as the political architect of the Civil Rights Movement. Few in the audience probably knew that in 1951 the U.S. Justice Department had arrested and tried Du Bois unsuccessfully on the grounds of being an unlicensed representative of a foreign power, namely the Soviet Union. During the “Great Fear” of McCarthyism, The Souls of Black Folk and other works by Du Bois were frequently removed from libraries as examples of Communist-inspired propaganda. Black America’s poet laureate Langston Hughes, after giving humiliating witness before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee, removed Du Bois from a revised edition of Famous American Negroes. At the public celebration of Du Bois’ ninetieth birthday in 1958, which attracted an audience of over one thousand at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, the NAACP chose not to sponsor the event. The hostility and fear once attached to Du Bois’ name was still so strong that even at the moment of his death on August 27, 1963, he remained highly problematic to the mainstream leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, at the historic August 28, 1963, March on Washington, DC, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins announced Du Bois’ recent demise to the mass demonstration, emphasizing “the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path.”²

Wilkins’ words of admonition were either forgotten or ignored forty years later by a new generation of NAACP leaders at The Souls of Black Folk centennial celebration. Yet the gala event occurred at the same time that U.S. troops had launched a military invasion of Iraq, a Third-World conflict Du Bois certainly would have opposed. The celebration occurred as the Bush Administration aggressively sought to quell domestic protest and civil dissent by implementing measures of the Patriot Act—provisions that possibly would have defined an activist like Du Bois as a “subversive.” Little of this, however, was part of the orchestrated agenda for the evening, aside from my own remarks. Other speakers, in a mantra of repetition, framed their acknowledgements of Du Bois’ greatness around two key phrases, both drawn from Souls: that the “Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil” and gifted with a “double consciousness” or a kind of “two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings … ”; and, that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”

The official literature produced for the occasion offered little in the way of interpretation concerning the lasting significance of Souls and its relationship to contemporary African-American issues. In the banquet brochure, “The Souls of Black Folk: 100 Years Later,” Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick suggested that the dinner’s theme was truly relevant in 2003, as “African-Americans continue to face many of the same challenges our community faced a century ago.” The lessons of Souls and the continuing work of the NAACP were dedicated to encouraging “all people of color to work together to level the playing field and ensure equal opportunity for everyone.” More complex and also problematic was the statement of congratulations from Kweisi Mfume, NAACP president and chief executive officer. “Du Bois’ epic work described aspects of an existence too often unrecognized or regarded without sympathy by the majority of Americans a century ago,” Mfume observed. “He also offered empathy for those who oppressed African-Americans, even while describing the cruelties committed due to the divisiveness of the color-line.” Mfume’s curious construction made Du Bois seem more like Martin Luther King, Jr., than the author of Souls. The real goal of Du Bois, according to Mfume, was the achievement of “mutual respect … as a necessary prelude to harmonious coexistence” between racial groups. Du Bois “reviled” racial hatred, “but not those who espoused or acted upon it. Our association’s commitment to its mission of enlightenment, empowerment, and peaceful integration has not strayed, and for all our setbacks, much has been gained.”³ Thus fifty-five years after he was fired from the NAACP, and forty years his death in involuntary exile in Ghana, both Du Bois and his most famous text are comfortably reassimilated into the current mission statement of the civil rights establishment.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Du Bois himself would have thought about this multi-million dollar fête in his honor. Being the careful social scientist that he was, Du Bois would probably ask what was really being celebrated. There was certainly a superficial familiarity with passages from Souls by most of the evening’s speakers, but virtually no mention of the repressive, brutal context of life under Jim Crow segregation in the South that was the immediate environment for the writing of this collection of essays. The metaphor of the “color-line” provided useful connections with the realities of structural racism in the post-civil-rights era—the continuing burdens black Americans endure in the form of lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, lower rates of college enrollment and graduation, and high rates of imprisonment. Then, sitting high above the Talented Tenth, I finally understood the deeper meaning of the celebration. Du Bois had given the emerging black middle class a lyrical language of racial reform. Souls was to the black American petit bourgeoisie what The Communist Manifesto had once been for sectors of the European proletariat under industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth cenutury: a framework for understanding history, a philosophical statement establishing group identity and social location within society’s unequal hierarchy, and an appeal for collective action and resistance to oppression and exploitation. But the black elite, and its corporate sponsors, weren’t interested in “class struggle” or in Du Bois’ Marxist politics after World War Two. The black elite was there largely to celebrate itself and the general advancement of the race within U.S. society as it exists. Du Bois was being honored for giving that rising class a language of its own.

The Detroit NAACP chapter’s massive celebration of Souls was the largest single event of its kind during the book’s centennial year, but there were at least several hundred other such public programs. The most ambitious was sponsored by the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, July18–27, 2003. Its self-described mission of “Searching for Soul … in all the right places” coyly combined the “spotlight on W. E. B. Du Bois” with a wide-ranging series of cultural performances and conversations. A number of the cultural festival’s panels did focus on various interpretations of the book and included noted scholars and writers such as Thulani Davis, Sheila S. Walker, and Richard Long. Other panels, however, on topics such as “Afro Futurism” and “Post-Black Visual Arts,” seemed to have at best a slim connection with Souls. The huge extravaganza was coordinated through the Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Commissioners and its Arts Council, but it was financed primarily by corporate America. Atlanta has become the South’s capital for globalization, so it was only appropriate that both local and transnational corporations were on hand to celebrate Du Bois. A short list of prominent funders included Coca-Cola, Wachovia Bank, American Express, Lincoln Mercury, Delta Airlines, AT&T, Georgia Power, Turner Broadcasting Systems, and Altria Corporate Services. Once more, I was invited to give a lecture at the festival, this time on “The Politics of W. E. B. Du Bois and Global Consciousness.” But it became clear after talking with one conference planner that no exhaustive critique of the text itself or the political context that had motivated Du Bois in the first place, was desired.⁴

In New York City, several public events honoring The Souls of Black Folk were arranged. On April 7, historian Robin D. G. Kelley participated as a narrator during dramatic readings of excerpts from Souls, staged by author/playwright Thulani Davis. The dramatic readings, presented at the City University of New York Graduate School, also featured actors Danny Glover, Phylicia Rashad, and Jeffrey Wright. Funds for the event were donated by Trans-Africa, the premier black-American lobby on behalf of African and Caribbean countries.⁵ On October 17–18, 2003, the New York Historical Society sponsored a two-day symposium, “The Souls of Black Folk in the Twenty-First Century,” featuring a keynote address by Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis. The conference’s panel discussion on “the legacy of the book and its relevance to twenty-first century America” included prominent American historians Nell Painter, Eric Foner, and Patricia Sullivan.⁶

Harvard’s highly esteemed African-American studies program, named in honor of Du Bois, as expected, orchestrated a major event around Souls—a series of readings from the text held at Boston’s Memorial Church on April 25, 2003. Celebrating “the centennial of the landmark work” were speakers Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael Dawson, Homi Bhabha, Anthony Appiah, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Du Bois’ stepson, David Graham Du Bois. What was most significant about this event, however, was Gates’ effort to reframe the meaning of both Du Bois and his book. “No one did more to place the American Negro in the world as a full-voiced speaking subject than did W. E. B. Du Bois,” Gates noted in his opening remarks. Du Bois must be remembered for two principal contributions, Gates argued, “one political and one literary.” Du Bois’ major political accomplishment was his role in creating the NAACP and being “one of the fathers of the Civil Rights Movement.” His second major contribution was the invention of the literary “metaphors for the black condition” employed throughout Souls, which would be incorporated into the work of several generations of African-American writers. Gates was defining the quintessential Du Bois as a literary artist and liberal pragmatist, in effect cutting off from critical discussion the final forty years of Du Bois’ public life.

The news media coverage and the public programs generated by the Souls centennial also emphasized a few key phrases or ideas expressed in the text. The most prominent was, of course, the most famous sentence Du Bois ever wrote in his long career—“the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” “Du Bois could not have known when he wrote these words in 1903 that they’d remain an indelible part of the nation’s discussions on race 100 years later,” observed Anica Butler in the Hartford Courant. “Yet The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’ influential, if not prescient, book of essays, has indeed endured and possibly has become even more relevant as an ever-shifting color line affects more than just black Americans.”⁷ Washington Post writer Lynne Duke led her story with Du Bois’ famous quote, but not to praise it: “Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for the color line. Would you know where I can find it?” Duke claimed that Du Bois’ formulation, while true enough a century ago, was an anachronism today. “Since Du Bois’ day, the color line has gone undercover. No signs. No laws. No night riders in white sheets. And it’s no longer a black-white thing,” Duke added to distinguish the rigid racial context of the Jim Crow South from the multicultural, post-civil-rights America of the twenty-first century. Duke’s main point, that immigration and globalization have added “new shades of complexity to the color line,” was fully anticipated by Du Bois and is actually central to his formulation of the problem.⁸ The “color-line” for Du Bois was never just black vs. white, but also “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the seas.”

Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness—that the African-American was simultaneously “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”—garnered equal attention and commentary. Felicia Lee’s New York Times article began with the double consciousness quotation, and described Souls as “both a depiction of black life in America and a meditation on the meaning of blackness.”⁹ Other frequently mentioned themes were Du Bois’ bold advocacy of full civil rights and equality for blacks, his opposition to the conservative “accommodationism” of black educator Booker T. Washington, and his promulgation of the role of the “Talented Tenth”—college-educated, middle-class African-Americans who were expected to lead the uplifting of the race. For Nashville City Paper staff writer Ron Wynn, Du Bois was a “role model” who “felt that those blacks who are most gifted—he called them the ‘talented tenth’—should not only receive the best training and preparation but also be equally willing to use their newly acquired skills to help others attain freedom.” It was a shame, Wynn added, that “Du Bois became so disillusioned at his native land’s treatment of African Americans that he renounced his U. S. citizenship” and died in Ghana.¹⁰ Wynn’s assertion was wrong on several counts. After Du Bois’ indictment and subsequent legal vindication in federal court in 1951, his passport was nevertheless seized by the U. S. State Department, and it was withheld until 1958. The late Herbert Aptheker, Du Bois’ literary executor, explained to me on several occasions that when Du Bois left the United States to travel to Ghana on October 5, 1961, it was with the expectation that he would eventually return to the United States. As David Levering Lewis also notes in his biography, “Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana” on his ninety-fifth birthday “largely because the American embassy refused to renew his passport.”¹¹

Much of the media focused on Du Bois’ confrontation with black educator Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most powerful African-American political leader of the early 1900s. On Tavis Smiley’s syndicated program on National Public Radio on April 17, 2003, two readers representing the views of Washington and Du Bois were alternated.¹² One widely reprinted United Press International column by Dallas journalist John Bloom grossly oversimplified the positions of both Washington and Du Bois, characterizing “Tuskegeeism” as “training up the black race in trades so they could be of economic value to the nation,” with Du Bois holding “the opposite view.” That explains, added Bloom, why African-American college students at Du Bois’ alma mater Fisk University “were more likely to be carrying French grammars and Latin-inscribed chapbooks than textbooks on agriculture.”¹³

To their credit, many scholars made determined efforts to set the historical record straight, to explain the meaning of Du Bois’ work without turning it into what journalist Lynne Duke described as an “almost sacred tex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Celebrating Souls: Deconstructing the Du Boisian Legacy
• 2 Searching for the Souils of Black Women: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Contribution
• 3 The Soul of The Philadelphia Negro and The Souls of Black Folk
• 4 Cultural Politics in the Negro Soul
• 5 Reflections on The Souls of Black Folk and Afro-American Intellectual Life
• Notes
• About the Author