Protest and Propaganda

W. E. B. Du Bois, the CRISIS, and American History

Amy Helene Kirschke, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Amy Helene Kirschke, Phillip Luke Sinitiere

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780826274328
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, "We condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year." Since its founding by Du Bois in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.

As the magazine's editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America's intractable color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.

Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today's global era.

Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.

CHAPTER 1

W. E. B. Du Bois and Positive Propaganda

A Philosophical Prelude to His Editorship of The Crisis

Robert W. Williams

W. E. B. Du Bois, after more than a decade at Atlanta University as a researcher, conference organizer, fund-raiser, and public intellectual, departed the city and school in order to become the director of Publications and Research at the newly organized NAACP. Some years later Du Bois characterized that change in the following words: “my career as a scientist was to be swallowed up in my role as master of propaganda.”¹

Du Bois’s stated reasons for leaving Atlanta University are well known. In later years he indicated that distributing data and analyses to whites proved inadequate as a primary means of seeking social reforms. Historical events such as the Springfield race riot in 1908 indicated that whites generally were unconvinced by the research or else ignored it. Among the whites not persuaded by the research were presumably some philanthropists in general and at least some Atlanta University board members in particular, especially those who considered Du Bois too radical. Their failure to appreciate Du Bois’s ideas made it difficult for him to garner sufficient funding for Atlanta University and its annual conferences, as Du Bois wrote in his posthumous 1968 Autobiography.² Du Bois believed that more money would be forthcoming to Atlanta University if he were to leave the school. He also believed that he could better advance the cause of justice and democracy at home and abroad in his role as the editor of The Crisis.

In this chapter I will argue that there was also a philosophically informed rationale for his decision to become an editor of a mass-circulation periodical. This philosophical justification can be reconstructed from his later critique of the practical limitations of social research vis-à-vis activism. Furthermore, the practical critique that Du Bois made in the 1940s and beyond implicated, I will argue, philosophical concerns that were made in a number of his circum-1900 texts. The philosophical rationale for The Crisis editorship specified that another method was needed to supplement the empirically oriented methods that he already had been using to wide acclaim. The new method would need to address two concerns directly associated with activism for social justice: namely, the role of subjectivity and an inclusive conception of humanity. Those concerns were not fully actualized in the research of his day, yet Du Bois considered them of sufficient importance to mention them, often in an almost apologetic manner, in several early works.

This chapter proceeds as follows. In section 2 I sketch Du Bois’s understanding and practice of research in relation to activism. In section 3 I specify Du Bois’s practical critique of social research as conveyed in texts of the 1940s and beyond, especially “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” Dusk of Dawn, and his 1968 Autobiography. In section 4 I contend that Du Bois’s critique of social research was also a critique of the epistemological limitations of empirically oriented social research methodologies. Moreover, Du Bois’s understanding of such limitations was contained within several circum-1900 texts in which he expressed at least two philosophical concerns: the significance of subjectivity and the importance of a more inclusive and egalitarian idea of humanity. Lastly, in section 4 I briefly outline the phenomenological method that he put forth in “The Individual and Social Conscience” as a way to theorize a role for those two philosophical concerns in the battles for social change. Du Bois’s editorship of The Crisis thus can be interpreted as both an outcome of intellectual critique and also of pressing historical events and personal decisions.

Du Bois on Research and Activism

Du Bois’s research projects were often noticed in his day and are lauded in ours. His notable works included The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, The Philadelphia Negro, and the many volumes of the Atlanta University Studies.³ The early social-scientific research that Du Bois conducted and then lectured and wrote about could ascertain the progress, regress, or stasis of African Americans in many different areas of social and political life. His historical research discovered the developmental trends over time and discerned the actions of human agents as well as the context for their actions.

Du Bois considered both research and activism to be vital for racial uplift, the former providing data and analyses for the latter. However, the relationship between the two was characterized in a manner consistent with many of the empirically oriented research practices of the era. Du Bois distinguished research from activism in terms of their differing goals. Research sought objective knowledge about society, while activism promoted a normative vision of a just society, along with its attendant values and ideals.⁴ By the early 1900s Du Bois was more of an activist in the mold of what we would call today a public intellectual. He published his research results in newspapers and periodicals. He gave public speeches and lectures. He provided data and analyses to the U.S. government (e.g., via his studies published by the U.S. Department of Labor).⁵

During his Atlanta University years Du Bois generally adhered to the teachings of the German Historical School in which he was educated.⁶ Du Bois rigorously collected data and analyzed it, especially with regard to trends over time and cross-national comparisons (e.g., in The Philadelphia Negro). Such analyses might then be used, following the tenets of the German Historical School, to inform and guide government policy makers.⁷ Via the Atlanta University conferences, Du Bois convened scholars and opinion makers, all the while the Atlanta University Studies were published for scholars and policy makers.⁸ The hope was that such persons would be able to suggest and support more progressive public policies. Moreover, Du Bois wrote that the collected data guided the actions of many Atlanta University graduates “as a basis of concrete efforts in social betterment.”⁹

Du Bois wrote in his 1968 Autobiography that he “put no special emphasis on reform effort, but increasing . . . the collection of a basic body of facts . . . ”¹⁰ As he indicated in later writings, Du Bois believed that presenting those analyses to a receptive America (including whites) would have some positive effects.¹¹ All of this was based on scholarly tenets that he specified in “The Study of the Negro Problems” (1898), among other works. In that programmatic statement, Du Bois indicated that research and activism had opposing, even contradictory, goals, with the latter potentially biasing the former. In Du Bois’s words, “the aim of science itself is simple truth. Any attempt to give it a double aim, to make social reform the immediate instead of the mediate object of a search for truth, will inevitably tend to defeat both objects.”¹² He added, “Only by such rigid adherence to the true object of the scholar, can statesmen and philanthropists of all shades of belief be put into possession of a reliable body of truth which may guide their efforts to the best and largest success.”¹³ Accordingly, researchers would gather data first without regard to the goal of effecting social change, and then afterward they and/or policymakers might utilize the data to craft solutions. Otherwise, the scientific findings could be tainted if the values inspiring activism led scholars to compromise the research process or to misinterpret the research findings.

By such statements Du Bois characterized his early years of social research. Nevertheless, in the midst of his own positive words on the value of research, Du Bois apparently also thought about several problems with the research he was conducting and the effects of the research on the intended audiences when he conveyed the information as a public intellectual. In later works Du Bois expressed his concerns over problems with the role of research in relation to activism. To that we now turn.

Du Bois’s Practical Critique of Social Research

In “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom” and in the “Postscript” to his novel The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Du Bois wrote of the limitations of social research with regard to activism.¹⁴ In particular, he focused on research’s lack of timeliness in the face of oppression and the “social death” of lynching. He also wrote of the lack of complete and reliable data on which to base actions. In addition, he asked: for what social law was he searching? Such a pointed question tells us that, for Du Bois, something significant about humans might elude inquiries into the parsimonious determinants of human actions. Indeed, social research might not grasp, from the perspective of individual humans themselves, what was important and meaningful about being a human.

As a consequence, social research and its empirically based methodologies, while necessary and never repudiated by Du Bois, were not fully sufficient as the sole or even primary tool to use in the struggles for social justice. Scholars have indicated that Du Bois, while at Atlanta University in the 1900s, came to criticize social research and have said, in the words of Ronald Judy, that Du Bois “began to question the validity of any procedure of rational justification that claimed to derive its legitimacy from determinate knowledge.”¹⁵ Consequently, Du Bois in 1910 chose to become editor of The Crisis and to embark on a mission of (positive) propaganda.

In his own words, Du Bois’s departure from Atlanta University meant that he “changed from studying the Negro problem to propaganda—to letting people know just what the Negro problem meant in what the colored people were suffering and what they were kept from doing.”¹⁶ During his twenty-four years as editor of The Crisis, Du Bois placed no emphasis on conducting original research. Rather, he emphasized the interpretation of events.¹⁷ For white audiences, Du Bois conveyed African American thoughts about racial discrimination, as well as delineated the consequences of racism in everyday living. For black audiences, Du Bois suggested courses of political and social actions in a racist United States: e.g., presenting his choices for U.S. presidents during election cycles, promoting boycotts of the film Birth of a Nation, and advocating for anti-lynching legislation.

Before 1910 Du Bois had already begun efforts at what he would later call positive propaganda, including attempts to publish two short-lived periodicals, The Horizon and The Moon Illustrated Weekly. Du Bois had regarded as propagandist his own organizational efforts to create the Niagara Movement in 1905, writing, “Now the fat was in fire and my career as a scientist was beginning to be swallowed up in my role as propagandist.” In the next paragraph Du Bois described that propagandist role as “a new and different mode of expression.”¹⁸

Across his life Du Bois used the term “propaganda” in at least two senses. He regularly employed the negative sense of propaganda when he referred to distortions, lies, and the manipulation of truth. Examples wherein he admonished against negative propaganda included his “On the Objectivity of the Proposed Encyclopedia of the Negro . . .” an unpublished memorandum, as well as the last chapter in Black Reconstruction in America, entitled “The Propaganda of History.”¹⁹

There was, however, a positive dimension to propaganda. Propaganda was also that which focuses on the yet-to-be or perhaps the yet-could-be, as I will interpret this Du Boisian version of propaganda. In his “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) Du Bois wrote, Science seeks the truth (lowercase t) of what is, while artists seek Truth (capital T) “as the highest handmaid of imagination.” Two paragraphs later he uttered, “Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be.” Du Bois argued that art qua propaganda was “always . . . for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.” The “positive propaganda”—a term that Du Bois himself used in the essay—could portray African Americans as humans who were “lovable and inspired with new ideals for the world.”²⁰

Accordingly, Du Bois’s conception of positive propaganda indirectly but strongly expressed the point that social research contained certain practical limitations when used to inform activism. Moreover, underpinning his practical critique of research vis-à-vis activism lay a deeper, philosophical dimension, which is the topic of the next section.

Du Bois’s Philosophical Critique of Empirical Methodologies

Du Bois’s critique of social research with regard to activism also contained certain implicit philosophical concerns. They arose from the research practices of his era as well as, to some extent, his own practices. They emerged from within his circum-1900 works, even as he was praising the importance of social research. Such a philosophical critique pointed to limitations at the core of social research, especially empirical methods, and the need to include other methods by which we could interpret human behaviors—or more pointedly, by which we could understand ourselves vis-à-vis others in the world. Here I will focus on two interrelated philosophical concerns of Du Bois’s early years: subjectivity and the idea of humanity.

The significance of subjectivity can be read very clearly in Du Bois’s own self-appraisal of The Souls of Black Folk, which was published in The Independent in 1904.²¹ In the self-appraisal Du Bois wrote that it was important to convey to the (white) readers of Souls what an African American experienced under the oppressive conditions of segregation. He acknowledged that the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races: An Introduction
• Chapter 1. W. E. B. Du Bois and Positive Propaganda: A Philosophical Prelude to His Editorship of The Crisis
• Chapter 2. W. E. B. Du Bois as Print Propagandist
• Chapter 3. Art in Crisis during the Du Bois Years
• Chapter 4. “We Return Fighting”: The Great War and African American Women’s Short Fiction in The Crisis, 1917-1920
• Chapter 5. W. E. B. Du Bois and The Crisis of Woman Suffrage
• Chapter 6. The Crisis Children’s Page, The Brownies’ Book, and the Fantastic
• Chapter 7. God in Crisis: Race, Class, and Religion in the Harlem Renaissance
• Chapter 8. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Prophetic Propaganda: Religion and The Crisis, 1910-1934
• Chapter 9. The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, Walter White, and the NAACP’s Representation of African American Femininity
• Chapter 10. The Crisis Responds to Public School Desegregation
• Epilogue
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index