DU BOIS, W. E. B.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868–August 27, 1963), who was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the year of Andrew Johnson's impeachment and died ninety-five years later in the year of Lyndon Johnson's installation, cut an amazing swath through four continents. He was a Lenin Peace Prize laureate and his birthday was officially celebrated in China. He wrote fourteen pioneering books of sociology, history, and politics, and in his eighties a second autobiography and three historical novels, complementing the two large works of fiction he wrote in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The premier architect of the civil rights movement in the United States, Du Bois was among the first American intellectuals to grasp the international implications of the struggle for racial justice, memorably proclaiming at the dawn of the century that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. The Souls of Black Folk, his 1903 collection of fourteen essays, transformed race relations in the United States and, by redefining the terms of the three-hundred-year-old interaction between blacks and whites, reshaped the cultural and political psychology of peoples of African descent not only throughout the western hemisphere but on the African continent as well.
By 1910, the problem of the color line in America had become so acute that Du Bois gave up his Atlanta University professorship for the editor's desk at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York. Du Bois's magazine, The Crisis, was entirely the editor's creature, its policies virtually independent of the NAACP's board of directors, and its extraordinary monthly circulation of more than 100,000 by 1920 due almost entirely to Du Bois's pen. For fourteen years, Du Bois spoke through The Crisis to demand full civil rights and complete racial integration as the NAACP grew from a small operation into a corporate body increasingly staffed by lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants. Du Bois grew increasingly impatient with the legalistic tack of the NAACP after the onset of the Great Depression.
Having failed to reform the NAACP, Du Bois devoted the years after 1934 to reading Karl Marx and supervising graduate students. Du Bois's period of Talented Tenth Marxism (1935 to 1948) was distinguished by a deepening economic radicalism, but also by a renewal of his social science meliorism. He wrote with increasing enthusiasm for communism in Russia and with mounting condemnation for European imperialism in Africa and Asia. His 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, was ultimately to transform the historiography of a period, although initially it appalled most professional historians by positing a general strike by the slaves during the Civil War and a proletarian bid for power in the South after the war. Flaws it certainly had, but Du Bois's sprawling monograph would return the African American to the Reconstruction drama as a significant agent. Historians Howard K. Beale
and C. Vann Woodward wrote the author of their admiration for the work and of its influence upon them.
Pressured by several members of the NAACP board, secretary Walter White invited the septuagenarian back. As consulting delegate with White and Mary McLeod Bethune to the founding of the United Nations in May 1945, Du Bois began what would become ever sharper public attacks upon the policies of an international body whose charter was ambiguous about the rights of colonial peoples. His 1947 United Nations petition, "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America," was a bold initiative for the NAACP. Although the NAACP board had unanimously endorsed the document the previous August, by June 1948 new board member and UN delegate Eleanor Roosevelt made it plain that international circulation of the petition and repeated attempts at General Assembly presentation "embarrassed" her and the nation. By then, Du Bois had virtually endorsed Henry Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy, denounced the Marshall Plan and NATO as building blocks in the aggressive American containment of the Soviet Union, and roiled the NAACP directorate by distributing a detailed memorandum for restructuring the national headquarters. Already shaken in 1947 by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s charges in Life magazine of Communist infiltration, the NAACP chose Mrs. Roosevelt and fired Du Bois in September 1948.
During the 1950s Du Bois aligned himself increasingly with the communist-dominated peace movement. Tried and acquitted in 1951 as an agent of a foreign power, he was barred from travel abroad until the return of his passport in 1958. After several years of extensive travel in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe, Du Bois joined the American Communist Party in 1961 and departed for Accra, Ghana. He died there in 1963 on the eve of the March on Washington.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. 1940.
Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. 1968.
Lewis, David Levering. ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. 1995.
Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. 2000.
Marable, Manning. W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat. 1986.
