Du Bois and Education

Carl A. Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317280989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

One of the most prominent African American intellectuals of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois continues to influence the understanding of race relations in the United States. In this deeply personal introduction to the man and his ideas, esteemed scholar Carl A. Grant reflects on how Du Bois's work has illuminated his own life practices as a Black student, teacher, assistant principal, and professor. Sharing the story of a brilliant man's life contribution to teaching about race and the ideologies and methodologies of racism in education and social and political thought, Grant begins his narrative with a broad overview of Du Bois's life and scholarship, before turning more specifically to Du Bois's theory of an educational system. The book concludes with an examination of Du Bois's curriculum model, predicated upon the work of the NAACP, the Harlem Renaissance, and Du Bois's own writings, as well as a discussion of the lasting legacy of Du Bois's educational and social theory in the present day. Ideal for graduate-level courses in curriculum theory, educational foundations, and education history, Du Bois and Education provides an in-depth examination of Du Bois's scholarship, social criticism, and political thought as they relate to his educational theory.

1
Growing up in the Sunshine of W. E. B. Du Bois

Our lives are about the stories we hear, the stories we tell about ourselves and about others, and the narrative thread that results when they are intertwined. Telling, leading, and participating in the story of the social and political development of African Americans was the primary focus of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s life. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois became a teacher, philosopher, sociologist, scholar, and political activist. His first book, The Philadelphia Negro, was the first case study of a Black community in the United States. Filled with graphs and statistics, it was an early and innovative example of statistically based social science. His next book, The Souls of Black Folk, combines ideologies, methodologies, histories, and critiques of race and racism. Souls introduced important ideas and concepts and terms that illuminated the thinking of Du Bois’s generation about theorizing about race and racism, and it continues to be relevant to the discussion of race and race relations today, and it will likely remain so in the future. When one considers America’s greatest intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois must be on the short list.

Writing Du Bois and Education was presented to me by my editor and my publisher. The idea was not to regurgitate Du Bois’s scholarship and ideas, but to address the effects his work and life had on me personally and professionally. I was humbled by the invitation, but it brought with it challenges that I needed to consider. How had this great fighter for racial equality affected my life? I had never thought about it directly. I had learned about Du Bois as a child and read his publications in college. I found his writing illuminating and informative, and much of what he said about race was in line with my own thinking and action, and that of my immediate and extended family. I drew on his work as a professional, and in some cases expanded on, responded to, and critiqued his ideas. I knew writing Du Bois and Education would also be a challenge, because Du Bois and I lived at different times, grew up in different locations, experienced different personal and professional opportunities, held different thoughts about the development of Black leadership, and had different values about recognizing and supporting women as equals in scholarship and humanity. Also, I knew from reading Du Bois that race and racism are best understood in their proper historical context and in their appropriate geographical context. Groups, classes, ideas, values, and political systems produce their space at particular historical moments (Lefebvre, 1991; Wilson, 2002) That said, Du Bois and I were two of a kind in thinking about the value of education and the role education can play in one’s life, and how it can and should be used to serve others.

Du Bois was born midway through the nineteenth century, and I was born decades into the twentieth century. Du Bois’s formative years (before he went to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee) were in the small New England town of Great Barrington. Du Bois was the only Black student in his high school graduating class of 16. He did not meet and exchange ideas with a large group of educated Black male and female students on a regular basis until he attended Fisk at the age of 17. Throughout his education (including Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin), he was taught by White teachers and faculty. He did not experience Blacks in leadership positions during his formative years. His primary, and probably only, role model of Black manhood and progress when he was young was his grandfather, Burghardt. Du Bois (1925) describes his grandfather in the following way: “Always he held his head high, took no insults, made few friends. He was not a ‘Negro’; he was a man!” (p. 18). About his father, Du Bois states,

My father, bent before grandfather, but did not break—better if he had. He yielded and flared back, asked forgiveness and forgot why, became the harshly-held favorite, who ran away and rioted and roamed and loved and married my brown mother.

During his early childhood, Du Bois (1925) states his father “began his restless wanderings … [and] soon faded out of our lives into silence” (p. 19).

I was taught by Black and White teachers in elementary school and high school, and by an all-Black faculty as an undergraduate at Tennessee State University (TSU) in Nashville, Tennessee. My years before heading off to college were spent in Bronzeville, a seven-mile-long and one-mile-wide striving Black community in Chicago. Bronzeville is noted for numerous Black leaders, male and female, who set up a bank, hospital, shops, grocery stories, insurance company, women’s hair product company, library, art center, newspapers, restaurants, housing, and other establishments to be self-sufficient and enterprising. It was after high school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, while working on my MA at Loyola University in Chicago and my PhD at UW, that I experienced being taught by an all-White faculty. Unlike, Du Bois, I was blessed to have numerous role models of Black men and women: The Grants, as they were collective called, according to formal and informal accounts, were good, friendly, caring people. Most of the family members were educated: professionally trained in medicine, dentistry, engineering, and the arts. Although they had different takes on life as Blacks and on the way to actualize their humanity, the one common goal they all had was education, which anchored their lives and Du Bois’s life.

Episodic Memory: I Am Still, “Going Backward to Move Forward”

Significant to writing and reading Du Bois and Education is understanding that the stories I tell took place at different points of time in my life, and I am drawing on different pieces (e.g., events and places) of Du Bois’s life and writings that may not necessarily match up (time-wise) with my own, but they do speak to and illuminate my experiences and the experiences of others who grew up doing my time. No chronological comparison is intended. In addition, I draw on Du Bois to point out (1) how people were talking about Du Bois during my childhood and how their discussion shaped my thinking then and/or how Du Bois’s theorizing permeated a lot of the discourse and ways of thinking at the time in explicit and implicit ways and (2) how Du Bois’s theorizing and insights about race, racism, and activism guided my understandings about who I am and what I have experienced regarding race and racism in America. Stories of Du Bois that I heard when I was young in many ways served as the outside validation of race and racism, as well as the potential of American democracy I was hearing about in my home.

Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, emotions, and other contextual who, what, when, where, and why knowledge that can be explicitly stated) (Tulving, 1972). It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place. Tulving (1972) argues that there are three key properties of episodic memory recollection: subjective sense of time (or mental time travel), connection to the self, and autonoetic consciousness. Autonoetic consciousness refers to a special kind of consciousness that accompanies the act of remembering, which enables an individual to be aware of the self in a subjective time (Tulving, 1972).

“Digging up” my own history stirred up old emotions and memories. I recalled tensions or disagreements I had with Du Bois’s ideas, such as the “Talented Tenth,” and his professional relations with women colleagues. “Digging up” required often phoning relatives and friends in Chicago to discuss the times when we were growing up and the conservations we had about race. I would ask when and where they first heard of Du Bois and in what context. Some friends’, and my two older brothers’, phones rang much more often than usual and at the oddest times. Relatives and friends helped me flesh out context and recall incidents and events. Shelby, the historian in the family, who has all the family’s archives, remembers some events in my life far better than I do. My friend Bob migrated to Chicago with his family from Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he was young, but he remembered the migration. I asked Bob to tell me about his experiences, if any, with racism in the North and South, and when he first heard of Du Bois and in what context. I contacted historians who specialize in the history of Bronzeville and the study of Chicago urban realism. I reread Black Metropolis, A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago) by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (1945/1962/1970), which addresses in its 857 pages the development of a great Black metropolis and describes the relationship between Blacks and Whites, and the civic, economic, and social development of Blacks living in an isolated, segregated, urban community as well as the impact of this twin configuration upon the social, intellectual, and political well-being, as well as institutional structure, of African Americans in Chicago. In addition, I read and reread many of Du Bois’s publications and visited online archives that house his work.

I spoke to friends who lived in Madison about life and conditions in the city and on the University of Wisconsin campus for people of color during the time I arrived to begin graduate school in 1969. Madisonians, whom I have gotten to know over the years, were helpful with information about the history of Madison and life, policies, and practices on the UW campus. Retrieving documents at the Wisconsin State Historical Society archives helped me too and enabled me to “return” to the time of my arrival on the Madison campus in 1969 via newspaper articles and film footage. Also, the information librarians at MERIT helped me to locate publications when I didn’t have the complete citations.

Four places of episodic memory are my home at 3133 Prairie Avenue, the South Side Community Art Center, George Cleveland Hall Library, and the YMCA at 3763 South Wabash. In these places, I engaged with Du Bois consciously and without my knowing how he was influencing me as a person and what I have now become.

Beginning the Story

I was a child of parents who were a part of the Great Migration (1915–1970) to Chicago from the South. My mother, Nellie, came to Chicago from Huntsville, Alabama, during the 1920s to join her two older sisters, Alice and Gussie. Alice did “day work” for a White family on the north side of the city, and Gussie (we called her Tish) worked as a maid in the Stevens Hotel (now the Hilton Hotel) on Michigan Avenue. Upon arriving in Chicago, Nellie enrolled in Wendell Phillips High School to complete her high school education. Phillips is also the high school that three of her four sons would attend. Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), an abolitionist and fighter for the rights of American Indians, was the person featured in Du Bois’s high school graduation address. About his valediction address, Du Bois (1920) posits, “This was my first sweet taste of the world’s applaud time” (p. 7).

My father, Alvin Grant, was a migrant to Chicago from Bainbridge, Georgia. He was drafted into WWI shortly after he arrived. In the army, Alvin served in France as part of a machine gun squad in a Black battalion. He was in the Battle of Argonne Forest in France, which lasted from September 26 to November 11, 1918, when the Armistice to end the war was signed. Dad told me he was on the front line of battle in Argonne Forest, which historians describe as the bloodiest operation of WWI, and believed he would have been killed on November 11 if the Armistice had not been signed. When I asked him why he thought that way, he said, “I was a machine gunner, and my squad was under orders to advance on November 11, and the German troops always wanted to take out the machine gunners as soon as possible.” The Battle of Argonne, I believe, through the stories Dad told, influenced his view of life. It made him less uptight than his older brothers, but at the same time, the experience made him hold firm to the goal to pursue his education and to do good for others in remembrance of his soldier buddies who were killed or severely wounded. My father attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta, followed by Meharry Dental School in Nashville, Tennessee, after his honorable discharge. His older brothers, James and William, attended Wilberforce College followed by Meharry Medical School. Both James and William modeled Du Bois in dress, including the wearing of spats, but they did not carry canes. My father, unlike his brothers, didn’t dress in a Du Boisian style, which was the style of the day. His clothes were less formal and his manner was easygoing. When I asked my father why he too didn’t choose medicine like his two brothers, he told me, “At first I had planned to become a doctor like your uncles James and William, but during the war, I saw too much blood and death, so I decided to go dental school instead.” In 1923, after his graduation from Meharry, my father moved back to Chicago.

My father’s sister, Cloe Ezelle, graduated from Fisk University, which was the same college Du Bois attended and across the street from Meharry Medical and Dental College. She was proud of her matriculation at Fisk, in part because it was considered the academically top-ranked university for Blacks to attend. She also sung with the Fisk Jubilee singers and traveled nationally and internationally with its world-famous choir. Cloe Ezelle taught piano professionally, and she taught my two older brothers how to play. I had no interest in learning to play the piano, and at times today, I still regret not taking advantage of the opportunity.

Between James, William, Alvin, and Cloe Ezelle, the latter was the one I describe as outwardly promoting the idea of the “Talented Tenth.” However, Cloe Ezelle would have taken Du Bois to the woodshed for not including women in the “Talented Tenth.” I know she and many of her Fisk friends that I met over the years had to wonder about Du Bois’s reasoning because, according to her and her friends, many, many smart women attended and graduated from Fisk. The students Cloe Ezelle taught piano were predominately girls of varying ages. Many times, I heard her encouraging them to go to college. “Don’t think about marriage after high school,” she would say. “Go to college.”

My father’s parents, Leah and Alvin, arrived in Chicago in 1917. Alvin senior worked on the railroad, while Leah worked to take care of the house and her children and grandchildren. She was a quiet force, who encouraged her children to get an education. The Grants believed, like Du Bois (1944), that “the secret of life and the loosing of the color bar … lay in excellence, in accomplishment” (p. 33). However, they did not believe, as Du Bois said his mother did, that “there was no discrimination because of color—it was all a matter of ability and hard work” (Du Bois, 1944, p. 33).

My father met my mother in Chicago after he returned from dental school. They were married in 1924. A year later, my brother Alvin was born; three years later, Shelby was born; and five years later, I came screaming into the world. Ernest was born four years after that. My brothers and I grew up in a very happy family. We ate dinner together every night. On Sunday, we often had oysters for breakfast—a favorite of my father’s. Ernest couldn’t stand the smell of oysters, so he would retreat to the front porch. Then it was off to Sunday School for the sons and church for my mother and father. However, my father attended a Methodist church, for that was the church he’d attended growing up. My mother attended Pilgrim Baptist church, for that was the church she’d attended growing up. After church, besides preparing a Sunday dinner, we made homemade ice cream: a different flavor each week.

Bob, a good friend I will introduce in the next chapter, once said to me when we were in college discussing Du Bois and the “Talented Tenth,” “Carl, that’s your family.” I recall just looking at Bob, not knowing what to say, being shy, and not wanting to reply directly. I understood what Bob was saying about my family, but Du Bois’s elitism, some of his harsh but honest language from his perspective about Blacks, I didn’t want to identify with. It was not in line with what my brothers and I had learned from my mother about speaking about people, both Black and White. That said, Du Bois’s belief in an academic education, racial uplift, racial equality, a strong belief in the humanity of Blacks, Pan-Africanism, and service to others was my daily bread. I never consciously acknowledged or spoke directly to my friends about it, but I ate it daily at 3133 Prairie, and it went down easy.

The house where we lived up through my high school years was in Chicago’s Bronzeville. Between 1915 and 1940, thousands of Blacks migrated to Chicago and into Bronzeville to escape violence and segregation in the South. Bronzeville was earlier ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 Growing Up in the Sunshine of W. E. B. Du Bois
• 2 The Color Line at Work and in Graduate School
• 3 Multiculturalists in the Sunshine of Du Bois
• 4 Research and Arguments: Against the Color Line
• INDEX