His Was the Voice

The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Emma Gelders Sterne

Foreward by Ronald Stevenson

Washington D.C.

Copyright © 1971 by Emma Gelders Sterne

Republished with permission by Ebooks for Students, Ltd. June, 2015.

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DEDICATION

For Max and Jim and Vicki and Saundra, that they may grow up knowing the name of W. E. B. Du Bois

Foreword

Emma Gelders Sterne knows how difficult, if not impossible, it is for a white American to understand what it means to be black in racist America. And she writes with this particular sensitivity. Therefore, I think she tapped her reservoir of personal courage to write this book.

She is not another pretentious white woman writing about a black man she admired or adulated. Her book adds a new dimension for the reader to the life of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois. The book unfolds the developing vigor and picturesqueness of the mind and ability of the man.

The author brings to this book a vast amount of knowledge and personal practice in the struggle of all human beings for the total realization of freedom, dignity, peace and prosperity. Mrs. Sterne has earned her credentials in real life by standing with the oppressed against the oppressor, with the lynched against the lynchers. Her sincerity springs from dedication.

Her enormous capacity for her work is deserving of the honest praise of the many black critics on the alert (like myself) to detect an error of judgment in her presentation of Dr. Du Bois. The book is a valuable contribution to the constructive forces in the United States today.

Ronald Stevenson

San Francisco August, 1970

Preface

It will be apparent to the reader that this is not a conventional or definitive biography. Nor was it meant to be, although every scene and statement in the volume is based on careful research on Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois’ life and times. It is rather a story, a woven tapestry intended to depict scenes made significant in his own three autobiographies, in the month by month revelations in the pages of The Crisis magazine which Du Bois founded and edited for twenty-four years.

Some of the scenes are also based on his essentially autobiographical works, The Souls of Black Folk and In Battle for Peace with Shirley Graham Du Bois’ comments; on his Credo, A Litany at Atlanta; on his novels; and on articles, essays, speeches and poems.

This abundance of written material was supplemented by conversations with friends who were close to Dr. Du Bois at various periods of his long life. Dr. Herbert Aptheker, for many years a close confidant of Du Bois and his literary executor, swept away my hesitancy in undertaking the writing, a hesitancy born of the awareness that so many other writers were better qualified. For a month Dr. Aptheker gave me the run of his library, and discussed with me the method I had chosen, read and offered illuminating details for almost every one of the scenes. I talked with poets Du Bois had encouraged when they were young beginners, with teachers from the Atlanta University complex, with my friend Ella Baker who was a young field worker in the NAACP when Du Bois returned to the organization in 1945, to Ethel Nance who was the secretary who greeted him on his arrival in San Francisco to serve as consultant for the UN. I was also given valuable insight by Mrs. Vincent Hallinan, who shared in the reawakened happiness and gaiety Shirley Graham Du Bois brought to her husband’s last years.

Fundamental help in piecing out the story came from the W. E. B. Du Bois memorial issue of Freedomways, the magnificent quarterly Du Bois helped launch just before his departure for Ghana. In this small volume are gathered precious reminiscences of those who shared in every facet, every important movement Du Bois initiated, who were part of the warp and woof of the tapestry I have tried to weave to depict his life story. To Bettina Aptheker whose relationship with Du Bois began in her early youth, I am indebted for a copy of his speech to high school students in Washington on the “Joy of Living,” delivered in 1912. It seemed to me not improbable that this speech would have flashed through the mind of Du Bois when he stood handcuffed in court in that same city in 1951—so that is where the reader will find it in this book. This is an example of the reasons this book must be considered an unconventional biography. Throughout, the facts are drawn from documentary evidence—but I have not used them in the conventional manner of biographers. I have taken the liberty of choosing, of rearranging, of interpreting. And there are no footnotes!

Finally I have drawn on my own recollections, on the meaning of W. E. B. Du Bois in my own life. I was the Alabama freshman in Smith College whose life was changed by being in Du Bois’ presence. I never told Du Bois. Letters I wrote out of gratitude went into my own wastebasket, unsent. Often afterward, when I came in closer contact with this great man, in work for peace and black liberation, I felt my thanks would be an intrusion. When I finally “saw Africa” from the deck of an ocean liner—to me Du Bois’ Africa— W. E. B. Du Bois was dead.

When I had stood in August, 1963, in the Mall in Washington, and heard the announcement of his death— the brief words, “His was the voice that brought us here today,” spoken by one who had helped silence that voice for so long—I could not help but think of the saddest thing

Dr. Du Bois had ever said: “The children of America will not even know my name.”

This must not be! The little children and the young men and women in and out of the high schools need to know “the oldest freedom fighter,” as the African youth call Du Bois. They need to know whence came the inspiration, the foundation stone of present-day thought. They need to know that the concepts of Freedom Now, Black Power, Black is Beautiful, and self-determination were developed decades before these words became slogans. How can they in this great imposed silence guess that without Du Bois and the history he uncovered, the prophesying, there might have been no Malcolm X, no Stokely Carmichael, no Eldridge Cleaver, no Huey Newton, no Bobby Seale? Not even the short-lived clubs that took his name had time or the ready means to study the life of the prophet. True, after his death Du Bois’ picture went back up on the walls of the NAACP that had proscribed his name since 1951. True, his last, monumental autobiography was published in 1968, and paperback reprints of the books he had written began to appear, but for young people, nothing. And it was to youth that W. E. B. Du Bois gave his greatest trust.

So I have come to the writing of this introductory story of the life of a man who meant so much to my own life, to fill a vacuum and to pay a debt of gratitude. To tell so long and complex a story in so few words I have employed the technique of writing in short scenes based primarily on documented fact, but fact augmented by imagination and essentially harmless invention. If it serves to send his young inheritors to Du Bois’ own books, his histories as well as his autobiographies, I shall be well satisfied.

In closing this personal note I want to acknowledge the assistance of librarians at the Schomberg Collection and also at the main public library in New York, the library of San Jose State College, and Stanford University. And my thanks to my friend Dr. Genevive Knupfer, who searched out and brought me material from Stanford which I needed; to Ronald Stevenson who read, and arranged with two young black students to read, the manuscript chapter by chapter, and lastly to my friend Martha Crump, who typed the final copy as an act of love for Dr. Du Bois.

PART I

The Apprenticeship

“I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and experience in form, gifts, and features but different in no essential particular, in soul, and possibility of infinite development.”

Chapter 1

Great Barrington

Massachusetts—

May, 1878

“I can see that we must have been near the edge of poverty. Yet I was not hungry or in lack of suitable clothing or made to feel unfortunate in company of my fellow students.”

One sunny day in May in the small New England town of Great Barrington, the school bell rang for noon recess. The boys and girls of the grammar school marched, two by two, sedately as usual, as far as the open door. However, instead of racing down the lane toward their homes for dinner, as if they were in training for the Volunteer Fire Brigade, the seventh grade boys and several girls huddled under the huge chokeberry tree. A rumor had gone around that Willie had challenged Ed to a fight, and fighting on the school grounds was strictly forbidden.

“Back of the railroad station,” Will Du Bois said. “That suit you, Ed?”

Ed nodded, and ten or twelve boys and a couple of the more daring girls followed the participants in a solemn line. Ed, a lumbering farm boy, big for his twelve years, towered over ten-year-old Willie, dark-skinned with curly hair. Will marched with soldierly bearing to the ground of battle. He came from a farming family, too. The Burghardt farm bordered Ed’s, but Will’s mother had brought him into town to live as soon as he was old enough to enter school. He was the only black student in the Great Barrington grammar school.

Will Du Bois’ thoughts, however, were not on being black as they approached the scene of battle. He had never been in a fight before, and he was trying to remember exactly the rules of fighting as he had read them in a description of a prize fight in the newspaper at Mr. Morgan’s store.

“Make a ring.” Red-haired Art Burnham broke the solemn silence when they reached the graveled station yard. “Gimme your jacket to hold, Willie.”

Ed wore none. He laid down the paper sack that held his lunch and stood waiting, a little embarrassed at being so much bigger than the skinny little figure crouched before him.

The fight lasted about two minutes, its outcome inevitable. Willie picked himself off the gravel with a satisfied smile. His honor had been vindicated.

It was not until he stopped to catch his breath halfway up the hill to his home that Willie had any qualms. He was late for dinner. And the scratches on his face from the sharp gravel and the tear in his nankeen pants would require explanation.

“I had to fight, Ma.” Willie lowered his eyes to avoid seeing the concern on his mother’s face.

“Fighting’s not the way,” his mother said almost is a whisper.

“That Ed’s twice as big as you. Why didn’t you pick somebody your own size?” His tall, thin, sallow-faced grandmother was always sharp-spoken and blunt. She had come to town to live with them after Grandfather Othello died.

Willie’s uncle let out a guffaw of laughter at the womenfolk’s concern. “He’s a boy, Mary.” Jim Burghardt, a barber, lived five miles away in Sheffield. He ate with the family whenever he came to town. He was leaning against the arm of the tall, empty chair that nobody sat in now that Grandfather Othello had died. “Boys fight.”

Willie swallowed hard and wished for his understanding, easy-going grandfather. Grandfather Othello would have understood and explained. But he was dead.

“I had to fight,” he said. “Ed called me a name.”

Grandmother Sally stopped stirring the pot of greens on the stove. Willie’s mother pressed her fingers too hard against the clean rag she was using to wash the grit out of the scratch on his face. His uncle’s laughter died in his throat.

“Black folk can’t stand for name-calling. Sure you had to fight.” A sadness came into the big man’s face. Namecalling in Great Barrington? The Burghardts were, bone and sinew, part of this valley. Black but always free. Since the first Tom Burghardt fought in the Revolution in 1776 there’d never been a Burghardt slave.

“What name, Willie?” Mary Burghardt Du Bois asked in her gentle voice.

“I never thought race hate would come to Great Barrington. Slavery days, even in the South, are over, thank the Lord,” her mother interrupted. She was never one to let her children hold the center of the stage. “But they do say the leftover poison of slavery is spreading North.”

“What name, Willie?” The mother’s eyes were clouded with misgiving.

“Ed called me Teacher’s Pet. That’s a fighting word, Ma. I had to fight.”

“Teacher’s Pet!” This time the uncle’s laugh was a belly laugh of relief. Race prejudice hadn’t crept into Great Barrington after all. Not that there wasn’t plenty of it around in Massachusetts and always had been. All the way from Springfield to Boston. Especially after the election in 1876. To excuse themselves for deserting the black South and moving out the Federal troops just when they were most needed, the same Northern whites who had been proud of the part they played in freeing the slaves now gave ear to every slander. But even in the mind of the Sheffield barber, Great Barrington was different. True, since his father’s death none of the immediate family had farmed the Burghardt acres; but cousins lived on the land, and they were still almost the oldest family in the valley and respected. Yet, the man was glad to see Mary’s boy prepared to fight name-calling of any kind.

Will ate his mid-day dinner and set off slowly down the path back to school. His mind was working faster than his feet.

Being black and the problems of being black were taken quietly for granted in the Burghardt household. The talk was all of slave or free. He had been aware that in appearance he was different from his friends and classmates. His dark curls were tighter and grew closer to his head, his skin was smoother and darker, though not as dark as his mother’s beautiful, bronze cheeks. However, his looks had never seemed to set him apart.

In school, in the social affairs of the valley—the Congregational Sunday School picnics, coasting on the snowy hills, or the May Day expeditions through the meadows and hills in search of the first spring flowers—the wood violets and the sweet-smelling arbutus hiding in cracks of granite outcroppings—Will Du Bois was never excluded. Indeed, classmates had always looked to him for leadership.

Sometimes, in school, Will had noticed visiting strangers staring curiously. He had accepted the stares as a kind of compliment. Was he not the youngest in his class and also the best at giving answers to any questions the teacher asked?

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois had been happy, untroubled, all the years of his life. Half a century later, he would still remember his birthplace as a beautiful place.

The Housatonic River, yellowed by paper mills, rolled slowly through the center; while the Green River, clear and pleasant flowed in, to the South. Main Street was lined with ancient elms; the hills held white pines and orchards and faded up to magnificent rocks and caves which shut out the neighboring world. ... Its surroundings were a boy’s paradise. There were mountains to climb and rivers to wade and swim; lakes to freeze and hills to coast on . . . and all of it was apparently the property of the children of the town.

His town—the town of a black boy born in 1868, three years after the emancipation of two million slaves in the South, the year of the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments insured, or seemed to insure, that the freedmen would have equal citizenship and the right to vote like any other American. Will had heard talk of these things at home.

Now, in 1878, the barely won freedoms were threatened by the election of President Hayes. But the grown-up talk he overheard was about a far-off mysterious place called “the land of slavery.” It had not touched his own life. Suddenly, walking slowly back to the schoolhouse, Will Du Bois was fiercely glad that fight with Ed had nothing to do with skin color or racial hatred.

Black children were having rough times. In other places, nigger, or coon, or darky were the names the haters called people like himself. It could happen to him! And then he would have to fight as his father had fought in the Union Army for freedom.

Will’s only mental picture of his small, handsome father was from a small tintype photograph hidden in his mother’s bureau drawer. She almost never talked about him even when he was alive, but once when they were walking in the south end of town she had pointed to a little house and said, “That’s where you were born. Alfred, that’s your father’s name—Alfred Du Bois. . . . We lived there happy for two years before you came and another year after. . . . Always singing and playing his banjo.”

Will had a hundred questions to ask, but he didn’t ask them because talking about those days brought such sadness to his mother’s eyes. So all he knew about his banjoplaying father was that he had gone from somewhere in the North to help free black people from slavery and then wandered into Great Barrington, married, and gone off again. And last year they heard he was dead.

“My father fought to help free the slaves,” he said to himself as he came in sight of the schoolhouse. “Some day I might have to fight, too.”

But not with his fists. His mother had said that was not the way. He would use another weapon—knowledge. He’d learn everything there was to know, and then he’d be ready to help others. He was ten years old going on eleven and ready for the highest grade in grammar school. After that he’d go to high school and graduate. There had never been a black high school graduate in Great Barrington. His cousins and his uncles and aunts had, some of them, gone through sixth grade. None further. This “teacher’s pet” business, it just wasn’t so. After the fight, Ed had admitted as much. “I guess you’re just smarter than the rest of us so Teacher depends on you for answers.”

Not smarter than Mary Dewey. Mary’s better in arithmetic. And Art Burnham can draw better than I can. . . . Will wanted to be fair in his judgment. “But I can excel in most things.” He liked that word, excel.

He stopped at the schoolhouse door and looked back at the granite hills. He thought of the world beyond the hills from which his father had come and where great men lived and poetry writers and musicians and people in trouble.

“Lift up your eyes to the hills from which shall come your strength”. . . . Snatches of things like that which he’d read or heard in church often came to clarify things to Will Du Bois, growing up in this secluded New England valley in the years after the Civil War. Great Barrington was surely the unlikeliest place in the country to be nourishing one whose voice and writings would one day lead the black people a great distance on the road “out of the land of bondage.”

An unlikely place, perhaps—and yet the isolated town in its narrow valley gave William Edward Burghardt Du Bois two priceless things: a sense of his own worth and an abiding love for the American soil. From this he could look out and measure beauties of other lands on the five continents of the world and the likenesses and differences in people’s lives. From this base he could develop his own unique way of thinking and fighting, first for the black people and then for all mankind.

Keeping on with his studies at the end of his grammar school (instead of going out to look for work as Burghardts were expected to do) was made easy for Will by his mother. When his grandmother died during the summer of his twelfth year, they quietly moved from the home over the empty stable to a little cottage at the end of town in back of the house owned by old Mrs. Cass. After trying out a shabby little three-room house across from the railroad station, Mary Du Bois chose the Cass home because she sometimes helped Mrs. Cass out in the kitchen when company came and because the friendly old woman only charged four dollars a month rent. Besides, Mrs. Du Bois said, they’d be away from the questioning of her brothers and sisters who couldn’t see why Willie shouldn’t go to work on a farm or at the hotel as a bus boy learning to become a waiter. She had different expectations for her son and, with all her outward submissiveness, had a will of her own. There was no question that Willie could excel in school, and he was not afraid of hard study. She’d manage. In his last autobiographical book, published after his death, Dr. Du Bois wrote:

As I look back, I can see that the little family of my mother and myself must often have been near the edge of poverty. Yet I was not hungry or in lack of suitable clothing and shoes or made to feel unfortunate in company of my fellow students. That was because much of the village folk were poor or middle class. There were but few rich families. Most of my schoolmates belonged to families of small farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers. When special expenditures were called for such as new shoes or school books, the money often came as gifts.

The house was set in a beautiful meadow, with ground for a garden. It had a front room, a pantry, and a kitchen downstairs and two attic sleeping rooms under the eaves. There was an outhouse and a good stove for keeping warm. Mrs. Cass let them draw water from her well and never raised any objection if the rent wasn’t paid.

Food, too, was often a donation. A Mr. Taylor, the town historian, kept cows on his land and offered all the skim milk Will could carry home in a bucket. Milk and corn-meal mush made many a meal, but in season vegetables— any that didn’t grow in their own garden—were free for the taking. Fruits ripening in the orchards were considered by all the boys, rich or poor, theirs to pick and enjoy, though once in a while the fruit-picking forays got them into trouble.

Will, from the day he entered high school, helped out the family finances by making the early morning fire in the shop of the milliner, Madame Hommedieu. She paid him fifty cents a week.

Books were the biggest problem during Will’s high school days. Mr. Hosmer, the new principal, perceived almost at once the young student’s exceptional ability and proposed that he take the college preparatory course. This meant books in Latin and Greek. No secondhand Greek or Latin books were to be had in the town; and, of course, there was no money in the family to buy new volumes.

Once college had been held up before young Du Bois as a possibility, it became a necessity, a passionate desire. There had to be a way!

His uncle, Jim Burghardt, could not help. The hardworking barber had lost his shop in Sheffield and had come to Great Barrington to work for small wages. He boarded with his sister and nephew, and the board he paid was almost the only family income except when Mary Du Bois went out to work as an occasional cook. She had had a stroke several years earlier; one arm was withered and she limped badly. Will hated to see his mother go to work in other people’s kitchens. Rather than have her hire out regularly as a servant, he would give up Greek and Latin and never be admitted to a college. . . . Hot tears were shed in his attic room for several nights.

Mr. Hosmer solved the problem. He went himself to the home of Mrs. Russell. It was an imposing house, surrounded by flower gardens, orchards, stables, and broad driveways. Mrs. Russell’s stepson was too frail to go to school, but if he were well and a good student lack of books would not hold him back. Yet here was a boy, Mr. Hosmer said, who, “given the tools of education would unquestionably . . .”

“I know Willie Du Bois,” Mrs. Russell interrupted. “He often comes to play with my son. He is very kind and good. I will think over what you said.”

A few days later a note from Mrs. Russell came to the school principal’s office: “I have consulted with my husband, you may order the books Willie needs. I will pay for them.”

There were other books Du Bois longed for in his childhood. When they moved from the Burghardt farm, he begged to take along an old “secretary” with glass doors. Behind its doors he had assembled every book he could find in the house—tattered, unread volumes, mostly without value. There were schoolbooks outgrown, hymnals, a torn book of poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, the antislavery poet, given somebody or other as a Sunday School prize. . . . This collection he called his library.

He had a glimpse of the world of newspapers, magazines and books in Mr. Morgan’s shop in the front half of the post office. He never bought anything, of course, but Johnny Morgan didn’t mind his reading the Springfield Republican, the main newspaper in western Massachusetts, or looking at cartoons in the magazines, or reading a page or two in the history books. Then one day in the window of the shop he saw a five-volume set of The History of England by Thomas Macaulay, and he wanted those handsome books for his library more than he had ever wanted anything except to prepare for college.

Every cent he earned went to his mother; but Mr. Morgan said he could buy the Macaulay set, paying twenty-five cents a week and leaving the books in the store window until they were paid for. Will began looking for jobs all over town, chopping kindling, cleaning yards on Saturday afternoons, selling copies of a Negro paper, the New Age, to his family and to the dozen or so Blacks who had come into the valley since Emancipation. His mother spared him the twenty-five cents a week for Mr. Morgan out of his increased earnings. Those volumes, placed on his shelves and read cover to cover many times, were the cornerstone of the magnificent library he built up over a lifetime.

He wanted to know, to learn, to reach out. It was a great thing when in the summer before his fifteenth birthday there came a letter from a Mrs. Green, an old acquaintance of his mother’s. This woman wrote that she was now the wife of Alfred Du Bois’ father. She had known and admired Alfred in his last years and was writing to invite Alfred’s much-loved son to visit his grandfather in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Mary Du Bois put the letter in her lap and sat looking out of the window as if she were seeing things past. “Your father never wanted to leave us,” she said slowly. “After you were born, nothing would suit my family but that we should come home to live on the farm. But the family had never cared for Alfred. He was different and a stranger to Great Barrington and they didn’t know anything about his family. They never felt comfortable with him, nor he with them. After awhile he left to get a job. He sent for us to come ... it wasn’t but forty miles away. They kept persuading me to delay. I didn’t get another letter—there might have been others. I—I think there were. Then I had my stroke and afterward we heard Alfred was dead. He was a lovely man but strange. French, you know, from Haiti. A sort of a poet.” With her good arm she pressed the letter against her breast. “You have got to go, Will.” Determined that her son should make the trip, she was already figuring where she could raise the railroad fare.

Will’s first excursion into the world outside the valley was an unforgettable experience. His ticket took him by Amherst where an uncle lived, who bought him a navy blue serge suit and put him on the train for New Bedford.

Alexander Du Bois, Will’s grandfather, was a short, austere-faced, gray-eyed man, white enough in appearance to “pass.” Indeed, Will learned that he, through no choice of his own, had lived for six years in the white world. That was when his white father, Dr. Louis Du Bois, had brought his two boys from Haiti and put them into a fashionable school near New Haven, where he lived and practiced medicine.

The doctor had come every week-end to see his sons until one day on his weekly visit he dropped dead. His unexpected death left the orphaned boys in the control of the Du Bois relatives. Apparently they knew and resented the fact that the doctor had married a woman in Haiti who was black. They took possession of the doctor’s comfortable fortune, removed his sons from school and apprenticed Alexander to a shoemaker. They probably said among themselves, “Blacks may be the rulers in Haiti. In the United States they must know their place.”

The grandfather told Will the story without open resentment. Only at the end did the bitterness smoulder in his eyes. This angry black man with a white skin had spent his whole adult life fighting discrimination. In Springfield where he had a grocery store, and now in New Bedford where he was retired with a new wife, he had only a few people he called friends—all black. He recognized the existence of whites only to oppose them and break their power.

For a week Will listened to his grandfather’s stories: of escaped slaves smuggled to Canada; of the New York riots in the Civil War; of Frederick Douglass’ struggles to get free black Northerners into the liberating army—his own son and Alexander Du Bois’ son too. These life stories were interspersed oddly with long recitations from English or French poets. Once he recited a love poem of his own, for he was a man deeply rooted in the white, Western culture which denied him the right to be a man at all.

Will came away with a deeper idea of what he meant to do with his own life. At ten he had known he might have to fight for justice and had chosen his weapon and made up his mind to get through high school. Now he was almost ready to graduate and through good fortune was prepared to continue his education in college. His goal deepened but did not change.

Gravely Will Du Bois considered the college he would go to and chose Harvard. He knew no one who had gone to Harvard. The few boys who had gone to college from Great Barrington had not aimed that high; they had gone to nearby Williams or Amherst. Will knew nothing about Harvard except that it was in Cambridge and was the oldest and greatest college in the United States. He had no money for tuition and no prospect of getting any. Yet Harvard was the goal, clear and unquestioned. His need for knowledge was not for himself alone.

On his fifteenth birthday in February he wrote:

I am determined to work for the rise of the Negro people so newly freed from chattel slavery. The weapon for the struggle will be the best in education.

Graduation day came and went without the prospect of college coming any closer. Many things, good and bad, happened to Will Du Bois in the next year, but college was scarcely mentioned. When the opportunity came, it came suddenly in the form of a scholarship to Fisk, a college for Blacks, in the land of the former slaves.

Chapter 2

Nashville, Tennessee

September, 1885

“To me Jubilee Hall seemed made of songs and the bricks were red with blood and dust of toil. . . . These were my people in all their sorrow and their beauty.”

Fisk University was one of four schools founded for the higher education of the Freedmen in the first flush of victory after the Civil War. Even before the fighting ended, “tent” schools had sprung up to answer the clamor for education of the hundreds of thousands of escaping slaves. They had poured into the military encampments, into forts, onto the battlefields—wherever the American flag was flown. Homeless, hungry, penniless, kept ignorant by the rules for the conduct of slaves (the Black Codes), they were called “contraband,” that is, property of the enemy. Under this pretense they could legally come under the care of the United States Government.

Their first need, after food for survival, was to satisfy the longing to read and write. This was, to the Freedman, the very badge of freedom. From the military men in charge of the Freedman’s Bureau, the call went North for teachers and Webster’s blue-back spellers. Young men and women from the churches and the abolition societies came, expecting and facing danger and contempt from the former slaveholders. The experiences were not unlike those met by the Freedom Riders and Northern SNCC and CORE workers who came South a hundred years later.

The teachers stayed and taught in the log-house public schools set up by Reconstruction state governments established about the year Du Bois was born. But the arrangement was at best a temporary one. Pitifully few Southern whites would teach in schools attended by black children. The number of trained black teachers from the North was small. High schools in the South were nonexistent, and even grammar schools, lacking teachers, were rare as oases in the Sahara Desert. Schools to teach teachers were a necessity if the Freedmen “were to be brought into contact with the standards of modem culture.”

The four schools established were Hampton Industrial School in Virginia; Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Atlanta University in Georgia; and Fisk, in Tennessee. Small funds came from the federal government, larger amounts from the American Missionary Society, and a few donations from wealthy individuals. Except for Atlanta University all the schools were named for generals who headed various branches of the Freedman’s Bureau. At first they were poorly housed. Libraries and science laboratories were inadequate, but the administrators and teachers (all white) were dedicated, highly trained scholars from Northern universities. The students enrolled in the grammar and high school departments far outnumbered those ready for college. However, the best of the black students, from North or South, were offered the same courses as white students in the New England and mid-Western universities.

At first Fisk was the poorest housed of all the four schools. Classes were held in a discarded and run-down Army hospital. The president, young Reverend E. M. Cravath, and the music instructor, George White, conceived a plan to help the students to help themselves raise funds for land and a new building.

A little company of talented singers was trained. They called themselves the Jubilee Singers and went forth to try giving concerts in the North. The songs they sang were the songs of slavery, the gospel hymns, the planting songs, the songs of rebellion and escape, the “sorrow songs” which were the expression of the longing for freedom over the years of suffering and enslavement. No one, unless he had been in the South, had ever before heard these songs with their strange rhythms and exquisite harmonies brought from forgotten Africa.

From 1871 to 1876, the Jubilee Singers, directed by Mr. White, gave concert after concert, at first to scattered handfuls of listeners but finally to crowds in great city auditoriums, and as the invited guests of kings and queens in Europe. Almost a hundred thousand dollars was sent home to Fisk. Land was bought, a beautiful hillside overlooking the city of Nashville, and plans drawn for a handsome building. The foundations were laid by the time the Jubilee Singers came home to finish their own education. Within a couple of years Jubilee Hall was dedicated.

There it stood, four stories high, of red brick faced with white stone, with gas light and a new-fangled bathroom. Complete with dormer windows and a turret topped by an American flag, it was the most imposing building in the United States for the use of the black people, just a decade out of slavery. Best of all, Jubilee Hall was the gift, not of government or private white philanthropy, but of black men and women using their own talents and their heritage of song.

By 1885 other buildings had gone up on the Fisk campus—a men’s dormitory, additional classrooms, a library, and a small science laboratory. Jubilee Hall was the young ladies’ home; its classrooms were always in use, and everyone ate in the great dining hall, the professors and the college men and women together.

On Monday, September 6, 1885, the school term had just begun. The gong for supper had rung and the long tables in the Jubilee Hall dining room were almost filled. The dining room was a little noisier than usual with the clatter of laughter and spirited talk of students returning after the summer, or coming for the first time from North or South, to Fisk. At the long table nearest the door two chairs were unfilled. Three young women sitting opposite speculated aloud about the empty places. Who were the expected scholars? They must be coming from the North. The Louisville—Chattanooga train was late coming in—as usual.

Platters of cold meats and salad were set on the table, and hot biscuits in a basket, wrapped in a white napkin, were being passed along from hand to hand, when President Cravath himself escorted the two young late-comers to their seats and made brief introductions. “Miss Dorsey, Miss Calhoun, Miss Nickol”—with a courteous nod, he indicated the young women—“may I introduce Mr. Otho Porter of Bowling Green and Mr. William Du Bois of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Mr. Talley, on your right, Mr. Porter, and beside you, Mr. Du Bois, Mr. Barber.”

Before the young men had sat down, the president had made his way to his own place at the other end of the table.

Du Bois took a slice of ham from the platter John Barber held out to him, and some potato salad and a biscuit. But he did not take up his fork to eat. Never before had he found himself in the company of such self-assured young men and women.

It was incredible enough to be suddenly confronted with a dream come true, being admitted to a college, which in the year since he graduated from high school had begun to seem more and more impossible. To be sure, it was only Fisk University in the South and not the Harvard of his dreams. But even before he came away from home, he had been well-satisfied with that choice. Now, to find himself at that first supper in Jubilee Hall, sitting across from three of the most beautiful young women anybody could imagine, was overwhelming. The food on his plate was untouched. Happiness had taken away his appetite.

Otho Porter, who had happened to come on the same train and turned out to be entering Fisk himself, pinched Will’s elbow.

“She’s asking you a question. . . . Miss Calhoun . . . the young lady in the pink shirtwaist,” Otho whispered. “You’re really all the way from New England, Mr. Du Bois?” The girl’s voice was as beautiful as her face.

Will Du Bois sat tongue-tied.

Otho Porter chuckled. He was new to Fisk too, but quite at home talking to pretty girls back in Ohio. “Just wait till Du Bois gets his bearings. There wasn’t anything shy about him on the train. He was so full of witty puns that I couldn’t match him. All’s the matter with him now is, the school he went to was all white. New England born and bred. The onliest Negro ever graduated from high school there, and the top of his class in every way. You know what? Du Bois is only 17, same as I am, and he’s entering the Sophomore Class!”

Had he really bragged about all those things in the train trip from Bowling Green to Nashville? Du Bois grew more and more embarrassed. He had to break up Otho’s monologue even if it meant speaking to the goddess across the table.

“Miss Calhoun, pay no attention to Mr. Porter. He’s just buttering me up so he’ll get the bed by the window when we choose our room.”

“You two are going to room together? How nice!”

“We hope to, ma’am.” Du Bois didn’t want the conversation to die right there, so he explained in a rather formal way that when another Fisk student happened to take the empty seat beside him in the railroad car, it seemed like such a coincidence. . . .

“Happened to!” Otho Porter laughed. “Yours was the only colored face I saw. With things our people tell about the way they are in the South—the hate looks and insults and the filthy Jim Crow cars—I was mighty glad to sit with another black man.”

Rumor of the new segregation laws in the deep South hadn’t even reached Du Bois in his isolated New England valley. He sensed the separation of the races falling like a heavy veil. Bad things were happening, of course, but also this wonderful thing—this beautiful room full of young people like himself, wanting to “raise up the people so lately out of slavery.” He was suddenly no longer divided within himself but “bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, a Negro.” He fiddled with his fork and lifted his water glass to his lips.

“Do you believe in the age of miracles, Miss Calhoun?”

Later, Lena Calhoun often laughed with Du Bois at that first stilted conversation. “You really overawed us,” she said. “I thought that at any moment you were going to come out with a Latin quotation.”

The most important part of his education at Fisk came to Du Bois through his fellow students. The story of the long struggle of the Afro-American people against their enslavement, which most of his new friends took for granted, struck him with more impact than Homer’s epic of the battle between the Trojans and the Greeks. The names of black heroes—Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, leaders of organized if hopeless revolts—the whole galaxy of heroes of the Underground Railroad, the names of black soldiers who, like his own father, had fought in the War for Emancipation, were new to him. Will Du Bois, protected New Englander, played and sang and studied in the library beside men and women who had faced mobs and had seen lynchings, who had known constant insult, and, some of them, the chain gang.

One senior, G. D. Field, a serious little man, hated the whole white South and always carried a pistol. “Fighting is not the way.” The words of his mother came to Du Bois’ lips.

Field stuck the pistol back in his hip pocket. “You don’t need it often, but when you do it comes in handy.”

In the classrooms Will’s education was more or less a continuation of the New England classical culture. To his Latin and Greek were added German and “moral science” and music—wonderful music of the Jubilee spirituals and Mozart oratorios. Fisk was a good college. The classes were small, the professors genuine scholars and interested in the development of the talents of each individual.

Du Bois seldom spoke of his mother among strangers who had not known her. A year had gone by since she died, just a few months after his graduation from high school. He missed her more than ever here, where there was so much of beauty she would have enjoyed. Mary Burghardt had loved music, though all she had ever heard were the German church hymns, sung to poorly translated English verse, and dance tunes played on banjos or harmonicas. And that mournful crooning lullaby learned from her grandmother, who had learned from her grandmother, the little Bantu woman brought straight from Africa at the time of the Revolution.

Fisk was bursting with music. Ten years after he left the campus, Du Bois wrote:

To me Jubilee Hall seemed made of songs and the bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me, morning, noon and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of my brothers and sisters, full of the verses of the past . . . these were my people in all their sorrow and their beauty.

Not everyone among the scholars waited until they had finished their training before working in the great crusade. Several were accustomed to earning part of their tuition by going out during the summer months to teach rural schools in the countryside.

Du Bois did not need to earn money. The scholarship raised by his white pastor and other friends in Great Barrington was enough to support him at Fisk until he had his A.B. degree; however, it left nothing extra for travel deeper into the heart of slavery country which he longed to see. Teaching a country school in East Tennessee would give him at least a glimpse of the way the former slaves lived.

You had first to attend a Teacher’s Institute, for black and white teachers. The whites were taught in the daytime “the mysteries of fractions and spelling.” The Blacks were taught after dark. After a week or two, well-prepared or not, they were given a certificate and sent out to hunt a school for themselves. Those who could afford it rode horseback out over the hills and valleys, dotted at long intervals with settlements. Du Bois walked.

Accustomed to neat town squares with church steeples rising above green elms and a courthouse or town hall facing the square, Du Bois found it hard to dignify the straggly rows of houses and stores along the highway by the names of towns. More than once he walked to the end of one of these settlements before he realized he had passed his destination.

“Have you got a teacher?” That was the question you were supposed to ask. For miles on end the answer was “yes,” which meant, “No, they didn’t want him.”

June gave way to July, and “settlements” gave way to a post office in a lonesome country store. A sallow-faced white man or his wife looked at Du Bois with hostile eyes. They hadn’t opened a school for black children in the neighborhood in all their lives.

According to Du Bois’ account in The Souls of Black Folk, he persisted in his search. Late one afternoon he noticed a cabin beyond the white settlement where a giant black farmer was resting on a stump in the doorway. Wearily heading up the path, the would-be teacher came upon a homely, barefoot girl picking wild berries. She was named Josie, she said, and they wanted a school the worst way where her family lived over the next hill.

Josie talked fast and anxiously. There was a schoolhouse for black folk that Colonel Wheeler used for storing corn some years, but it was nice and empty now. There hadn’t been but one teacher come their way since Emancipation, three years before she was born.

“My mama went to that school. She was real smart and learned to read almost half the speller, remembered enough anyway to teach us older children a little.” Josie was breathless with eagerness now. She had heard tell of that college in Nashville with those Jubilee Singers. When she spoke of Fisk, glints came into her eyes, like an astronomer who has discovered a distant star. “I aim to go there some day if I can get a start on my readin’ and writin’.”

Du Bois climbed over the mountain to Josie’s house early the next morning. It was a four-room unpainted cottage set in a clump of peach trees. The father was out in the fields, the mother bustling as energetically as one could with a crowd of young children tugging at one’s skirt. Du Bois counted six besides Josie, and he had a glimpse of an awkward boy, taller than he was, inside the back room.

“Johnny,” the mother beckoned her elder son. “You take Teacher down to Alexandria to Colonel Wheeler’s store. Teacher’ll have to get hired and certified.” She turned to Du Bois with a managing air that reminded him of his own grandmother. “The schoolhouse is on the Colonel’s land. He ain’t such a bad man, even if he is white. Josie, you go bring the word to the neighbors.”

The downhill walk along a bubbling creek was pleasant. Alexandria was no better, no worse, than the other settlements Du Bois had passed in the last week. Several white men were standing around inside Colonel Wheeler’s store.

John, who had scarcely spoken a word on the walk, merely nodded toward the gray-haired man behind the counter.

“That’s him,” he mumbled and settled his lanky body against the hitching post outside. He evidently did not share his sister’s enthusiasm at the prospect of a school, but seemed pleased to have an excuse to come into the metropolis of Alexandria.

Colonel Wheeler listened to Du Bois without comment. Then he pointed to a sandy-haired young man in spectacles. “He wants the white school. Looks like Alexandria is going to get educated this summer. Y’all have to go to the county seat to see the commissioner—that’s twelve miles further on. I’m renting him a horse.” He looked Will Du Bois over, from necktie to shoes. Light colored, better dressed than the white teacher, probably uppity, asking for a nigger school.

“You’ll have to pay cash down if you want a horse too.”

“I will walk,” Du Bois said and stepped into the sunlight. Since coming South, he wanted no more contact with whites than could be helped. He would not, could not, bring himself to pretend mock humility. Sometimes on the sidewalks of Nashville he had encountered the same look of hate that had crossed Colonel Wheeler’s face when he looked down at the shoes on a black man’s feet.

Murder, maiming of innocent Blacks in the year 1886 was not even news. It got no publicity except the horrified grapevine reports that came almost daily to the college. With each incident something of Du Bois’ joyous youth had died that first year at Fisk. Now he felt that he was experiencing in a small way what the mass of former slaves went through just to stay alive.

The soft rhythmic clump of horse’s hoofs sounded in back of Du Bois about a half-hour out of Alexandria. The white school teacher drew rein and wiped the sweat off his eyeglasses with his shirt-tail.

“It’s a hot day for walking,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind the exercise part way, that is, if you’d like to share the horse, turn and turn about.”

Du Bois breathed deep, and the crooked little smile his friends loved to see hovered at the corner of his mouth. “I would be glad to pay my share of the ride,” he said. “I can afford half a horse.”

The commissioner of education in the county courthouse was civil. He interviewed the applicants separately; examined Du Bois’ certificate and said, “This will do. You get $28 a month, furnish your own board and lodging on school days. At the week-ends you’ll be expected to board around in the homes of your pupils.”

He invited both the young men to stay for noonday dinner. At the table, only two places were set, one for the commissioner, one for the white teacher.

“Make yourself comfortable on the back porch, Will,” he said cordially. “I’ll call you for your dinner when we’re through.”

The schoolhouse was a log hut. The opening where a door had once been, and wide chinks between the logs in the wall, provided light and air. The floor was fairly good, if you were careful not to step too hard on certain rotten boards.

The furniture and equipment left something to be desired. The scholars’ seats were rough plank benches without backs. Cracked slates for writing had to be balanced on your knees. There was no blackboard, no pictures or maps and almost no books. The teacher’s desk was made of three boards nailed together. Du Bois was permitted to borrow the chair from the room he rented, but his landlady made him bring it back every night. He called the somewhat dour, childless woman his landlady, though the two-room shack up the hill from the school belonged, of course, to Colonel Wheeler. In slavery, she had been his cook; now “free,” she cooked for him still.

For two months that summer and again the summer following his Junior year, Du Bois taught the thirty children of that poverty-stricken, isolated mountainside. From Josie, aged twenty, down to Thonie Burke’s little bow-legged brother, they were all beginners. He slept in their homes, ate the food they ate and found it all an enthralling experience:

There the children sat, on the rough benches, faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a twinkle of mischief and the hands grasping Webster’s blue-back spelling book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvelous. We read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.

Only a few looked toward more education in special fields. Slow-learning, miserably poor John Sherrod was going to work his way through Meharry Medical School and go back to become that badly needed man—a black physician in Mississippi. Otho Porter intended to become a minister. One or two more of Du Bois’ classmates were going to Baptist or Methodist seminaries to study for the ministry. The rest, men and women, were already looking for teaching jobs.

Lena Calhoun was an exception. She came back from the summer vacation engaged to marry twenty-five-year old Frank Smith, the college dandy, who had already graduated and gone into business with his well-to-do father. Du Bois had been hopelessly in love with the beautiful Lena. He felt pangs of regret as he watched her sketching wedding dresses with flowing veils and bustles on the margins of her science notes. But he was not ready to marry. There was still the goal to be met, the goal he had set himself at fifteen and renewed every birthday since then: to get the “best in education in order to raise up the Negro people so lately freed from slavery.”

Josie and the families in the hills of East Tennessee had shown Du Bois that the mass of black people were only half-freed. The reading begun in Professor Chase’s “moral science” class and the science experiments carried out in the tiny, badly equipped laboratory had brought home to him that, good as it was, Fisk could not give him the “best” his mind could absorb.

He hungered for facts not only to “render the emancipation of his people easier and quicker in America” but also in the far-off Africa that no one at Fisk seemed to care about. To know all the facts there were to know, for the use of others? Yes, but also, he admitted candidly to himself, for his own full development, for William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, black scholar. In his twentieth year, he applied for and received a scholarship for Harvard University. Even with a Bachelor of Arts degree he would have to enter as an undergraduate in the Junior Class.

Chapter 3

Cambridge, Massachusetts

October, 1891

“I believe, foolishly perhaps, but sincerely, that I have something to say to the world, and I have taken English 12 in order to say it well.”

English Composition was the only subject in the Harvard curriculum that was compulsory in the year 1891. Even here the students in the Senior Class had many choices in instructors and in the way the subject was taught. English 12, as taught by Dr. Barrett Wendell, was perhaps the most difficult. The illustrious professor, educated in Great Britain, required daily themes, usually on subjects of the student’s own choosing. In class, he sometimes read passages from the great classics—essays or poetry—and sometimes he lectured for the whole hour on the work of living writers. He was keen in his criticisms, often blunt but never malicious.

At least once a week, Dr. Wendell read, in his precise, clipped, British accent, a selection from the pile of student manuscripts on his desk, graded and ready to return to the members of the class. Rarely did the great man comment, never did he mention the name of the author, but to have your piece read at all was a coveted honor. Of course friends often guessed the authorship; or the writer himself, unable to conceal his pleasure, gave the secret away. Then there was backslapping and congratulatory joking on the way out of the classroom.

One day in October, Dr. Wendell had begun by reading from a long epic poem on the subject of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, which told in iambic pentameter verse the many subject races who made up the empire “on whom the sun never sets.” This poem was followed by an amusing parody by a young man who would soon be publishing in nationally known magazines. His style was recognized by his friends, and a buzz of whispers went up and down the rows.

Near the back of the room, one student took no part in the chatter. He was slim and boyish-looking, clean shaven. Except for his darker skin he looked like the majority of the fifty young men in the class. His much-worn suit was a little shabby, but Harvard men, unlike those at Fisk, prided themselves on carelessness in their dress. Yet there was a subtle difference about William Du Bois, an aloofness in his posture, coupled with a wistfulness in his big, brown eyes.

Du Bois bore at this time a striking resemblance to the little picture of his dead father, poet and vagabond of the Civil War days. The faded tintype his mother had kept hidden in her bureau drawer was on a shelf in Will’s Cambridge boardinghouse room, along with one or two pieces of blue and white china they had used on festive occasions and the huge fire tongs that had belonged to his Grandfather Othello. These were his only family possessions, his “household gods,” like the Lares and Penates of the ancient Romans. Du Bois had taken them to Fisk and now to Harvard, as he would take them everywhere he made his home to the very end of his life.

Du Bois knew almost none of the young men in this room, although it is probable that some of them knew of him, especially since he had come so close to winning the oratorical contest last spring and had only been beaten by Clement Morgan, another black man. Everybody knew Clement, and he knew everybody. William Du Bois had remained a stranger from choice or, if not entirely from choice, then as a sort of a preventive self-defense.

He wrote in his final autobiography:

Had I gone from Great Barrington directly to Harvard, I would have sought companionship with my white fellows and been disappointed and bitter by a discovery of social limitations to which I had not been used. But I came by way of Fisk and the South and embraced eagerly the companionship of my colored friends in Boston.

Yet he believed that the separation of people because of skin color was no final solution. He had often argued about this with some of his black friends. They were an exceptionally lively and interesting group, many of them from old families in Boston. Their parents and grandparents had worked with whites such as Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison for an end to slavery and even after Emancipation, when Reconstruction seemed to be going well. But the climate was very different now. The concern of the whites had fizzled out like a rocket shot off on their Fourth of July.

“Keep away from ’em,” Monroe Trotter, reporter for The New Age and acknowledged leader of the younger set of Blacks, had said. “Let them keep their old clothes and their dollars and their patronizing airs. This has become our fight and ours alone, and it isn’t confined to the South either.”

“For a time, yes.” Du Bois felt he knew better than most. Hadn’t he lived on both sides of the Veil? If it came to a final choice he’d be on the side of the beautiful, oppressed, dark-skinned people.

Suddenly Dr. Wendell’s voice broke through his daydreaming with a phrase Du Bois recognized. He gripped his knees. He could feel the blood rising to his face. It was his essay that the professor was reading. Wendell paused to turn a page—the last page. He was almost done.

Spurred by circumstance, I have always been given to systematically planning my future. ... I believe, foolishly perhaps, but sincerely, that I have something to say to the world, and I have taken English 12 in order to say it well.

Something to say . . . After class Du Bois strode across the windblown Harvard Yard with a dozen essays taking shape in the turmoil of his mind, one idea weaving into another with the changing speed of colors in a kaleidoscope. Du Bois had set his sights on becoming a teacher, using his education and whatever talents he possessed to speak to the untutored black folk of the South. Teachers were desperately needed to give them the tools of learning. He wanted to say to them, “Be yourself and not another,” to say to the abused and the scorned, “You are beautiful, Black is beautiful,” and to say it in such a way that they would in time come to take their color for granted and be armored against insult. He wanted to say “Freedom Now!” and “Black Power.” To say “Africa” . . . (He would in future years in published works express each of these concepts for the world to read and live by.)

The phrases and sentences to move masses of people did not come easily. Still, Dr. Wendell had chosen his paper to read, out of fifty. Du Bois had an inner self-confidence, but even he needed praise from some one he respected.

“Am I dreaming too big?” he asked himself. “Let me dream that I have something to say to white America, too. Let me lift the Veil a little and let whites see America as black folk see it—a country built on the work of many peoples, the product of that work for the use of only one part of the people.”

He longed to say things that would shake white self-satisfaction, to tell them that their democracy they were so proud of was not democracy at all when it failed to include all American citizens; that their law was not law when Klansmen in white sheets beat and burned and slaughtered their countrymen outside the law. He wanted to say “STOP, turn around, mend your arrogant ways.” The black people had much to give. He wanted to ask white America whether she would be poorer if she replaced her brutal blundering with light-hearted humility, her cruel wit with loving good humor or her shallow music with the soul of slave’s sorrow songs.

The men at whose feet he sat at Harvard—William James and tender-minded George Palmer—were both teachers and writers. But not even they understood the need of the Blacks to have dignity restored after two hundred years of slavery. Only someone who had lived on both sides of the Veil could lay bare Josie’s reaching for the stars and Trotter’s righteous anger. Dare he try?

That October day, with the oaks and elms and maple trees all aflame, was not brighter than Du Bois’ vision as he walked across the Harvard Yard in the New England he loved. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, teacher and writer: this was not a change of goal, merely an enlargement of the field of action. He permitted himself the dream of a book of his own some day on the shelf of the Harvard library.

“The name’s too long. No publisher would use it,” he said to himself with his crooked little smile. In fact, no one published any serious writing by Blacks, whatever the length of the name. Sometimes poems and sketches in absurd dialect that passed for black folk’s talk. Beyond that, nothing. However, Du Bois in a dreaming mood never shrank at obstacles. “I could use just my first two initials. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois would fit nicely on a title page.”

All that winter Du Bois wrote poems and stories and essays with increasing confidence. At Fisk he had published The Fisk Herald, a literary journal. It might have been expected that he would submit his work to the Harvard Crimson, as other aspiring writers in the class did. However, he was still determined to cut himself off from the white world. The mother of Birdie Ruffin, a young woman in Boston, published many of his essays, written for English 12, in her small weekly Black newspaper. He submitted nothing to the Crimson.

Nevertheless, as graduation time approached, Du Bois was chosen as one of the five speakers at commencement. Wanting to face the Harvard audience with a discussion of slavery, he chose a topic startling for a black man, and particularly surprising for the time and place:

“I wish to consider Jefferson Davis,” Da Bois began quietly from the platform in Memorial Hall. “Not the man, but the type of civilization which his life represented. . . . Individualism coupled with the rule of might.”

The twenty-two-year-old black scholar went on to describe Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, as “a naturally brave and generous man, now advancing civilization by murdering Indians, now hero of a national disgrace called the Mexican War, and finally as the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free. . . .”

The oration created a stir. High praise came from such places as Washington and Chicago. From the New York Nation and from the Boston Herald. Bishop Henry Codman Potter wrote: “When at the last commencement of Harvard University I saw a young colored man appear . . .and heard his brilliant and eloquent address, I said to myself: ‘Here is what an historic race can do if they have a high field, a high purpose, and a resolute will.’ ”

A Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University only whetted Du Bois’ appetite for further education. Four hundred dollars inherited when his grandfather Alexander died made future planning possible. Again he requested and received a small scholarship from the university to work for a Master of Arts degree.

Du Bois had come to Harvard with the idea of becoming a professor of philosophy. The courses that inspired this decision had not even been called philosophy at Fisk. In the catalogue the courses were called “Moral Science” and “Mental Science.” What were these but the study of mankind’s view of itself and its place on the planet Earth? Certainly the philosophy classes of Dr. William James at Harvard were exactly that. The two undergraduate years of study under James had reinforced Du Bois’ determination.

“To help the children of enslavement to discover their historic place in the world”—was not this just another statement of Du Bois’ goal?

“But, Mr. Du Bois, you have your living to make,” William James said. The summer was almost over, and the work in graduate school was about to begin. Dr. James had invited Du Bois to drop around for supper. They still sat at the candle-lit table, though the meal was long over. The professor drummed thoughtfully on the table. “It is hard to make a living—hard for anyone—as a teacher of philosophy. . . .” Hard for anyone, impossible for a black man in the United States of America. Dr. James hadn’t said this in so many words, but he did not deny it when Du Bois asked bluntly if that had been his meaning. One never felt the need to beat around the bush with William James. His whole philosophy was based on facing facts. And Du Bois did not question the depth of his friendship. Of this, there had been too many evidences in and out of class.

“If you must study philosophy, you will,” James continued. “But if you can turn aside into something else, do so. Philosophy can’t open any doors for you, especially with your concern for the Negro in America.”

“And in Africa, Dr. James. My colored friends don’t agree with me. For the most part they want to forget Africa. But the roots of a people can’t be pushed aside and buried. What they think and feel didn’t start on a slave plantation. They have special gifts and talents which must have a source.”

“There’s a new name for what you want to develop in your studies: sociology, or the science of society. Germany is the place where it is being developed. The work in this is so new there’s no department of sociology in the United States, not even at Harvard. It has a bearing on philosophy, surely, but draws more from economics and history.” Dr. James pushed his chair back with a smile. “If I were you, I would take my graduate work under Albert Bushnell Hart in the history department. He thinks as highly of you as I do, and you know how sound his methods of research are. But for African history, I’m afraid you’ll have to dig and delve for yourself.”

Dig and delve Du Bois did, in out-of-the-way places of the enormous library. He allowed himself little recreation that year. When he wasn’t on a stepladder or down on his knees searching through musty volumes in Arabic or medieval Latin, he was in his own little cubbyhole taking notes from pamphlets and yellowed manuscripts piled on his writing table. First, Du Bois compiled a list of references concerning the leader of an important slave revolt, Nat Turner. He had thought he might write the story of Nat Turner for his master’s thesis. However, this work led him to a study of the slave laws and how chattel slavery came to be imposed on the kidnapped Africans.

The young scholar was invited to read this essay, History of the Slave Laws, before the American Historical Society at Christmas-time in 1892. As usual, his presentation brought surprised and extravagant expressions of praise in the Northern newspapers: “As one looked at this black man reading in faultless diction, one could not help saying, ‘Let us not worry about the future of our country in the matter of race discrimination.’ ”

“They’d do better to look at Jim Crow laws spreading wider and wider over the South and scarcely a week without some poor, wretched human being burned alive or hung,” Du Bois said hotly when Maud Cluny showed him the clipping from the New York Independent.

Miss Cluny was a highly talented musician from Texas. She was from an educated family and lovely to look at, and Du Bois was in love with her. “At least they did not mention that you had ‘white blood’ in your veins, as they do when I give a concert,” Maud answered.

They became engaged just before Du Bois set out with Clement Morgan to earn money for the summer by giving readings in Negro churches. Readings from white poets. That fall, instead of trying for a teaching job to begin earning a living, Du Bois decided to continue with another scholarship at Harvard, working for a Ph.D. Maud Cluny broke the engagement. However, like Lena Calhoun at Fisk, Miss Cluny remained a lifelong friend.

To leave his studies at this point would have been impossible for Du Bois. His research into the life of Nat Turner, into the history of the slave laws that had turned this gifted leader’s life into tragedy, had led Du Bois straight to the act of enslavement, from the era before Columbus sailed for the “New World,” to the world-wide slave trade that despoiled a whole continent. He began to see why Thomas Jefferson and other antislavery men of Revolutionary times imagined that suppression of the slave trade would mean the end of slavery. But he also saw how the chance was lost. In the time that went by between the proposal for suppression of the slave trade and passage of the laws to suppress it, chattel slavery had become a system too valuable for the shipbuilders and the plantation owners to give up without a desperate struggle.

With Dr. Hart’s approval, Du Bois chose The Suppression of the African Slave Trade for his Ph.D. thesis. Two more years of study should be enough to do the work, and Harvard agreed to grant the necessary funds. After that Du Bois hoped somehow to get to Europe. Only there could he find the beginnings of the system “which found it cheaper to work a slave to death and then replace him with a fresh importation from Africa.” Only there could he check his methods against the new science of sociology.

“You haven’t got a chance,” Monroe Trotter said one evening at a bridge game. “Rich whites don’t give scholarships to Negroes.”

“Seems to me I heard that the Slater Fund looked for a black man who was well enough prepared to be worth sending abroad,” said a visitor from Washington. “They gave it up because we just weren’t that good.” The laugh that went round the table showed in all its bitterness the plight of a black scholar.

Du Bois left the party early. Before morning he had begun a whirlwind campaign to break down the walls of Jericho. Letters, interviews, some plain talk went on for months. Finally, the guardian of the fund, Rutherford B. Hayes, former president of the United States, gave in. Mr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois would be granted $750 a year for one or possibly two years for study at the University of Berlin, Germany. The scholarship was half a gift, half a loan which would have to be paid back to the Slater Fund.

Chapter 4

Berlin, Germany

February, 1893

“Not as a sensitive outcast prepared at any moment to meet insult nor yet as one of a self-protecting group as at Fisk or in the midst of his Boston friends, but as a man.”

Again Du Bois was “an only Negro” as he had been in his school days in Great Barrington. He had crossed the ocean in a trance, prepared every moment to feel isolated and defensive. After a week on the friendly Dutch ship and a few days travel in Holland and up the Rhine River without experiencing a single hostile or even curious glance, he began to look around him confidently.

It was the same when he enrolled in the lectures at the University of Berlin. There, some doubts were cast on the value of a degree won at an American institution, doubt that would have existed in many European universities in the 1890’s. Americans could make money. They could concoct valuable machines. They had yet to prove themselves in the realm of learning. W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard, A.B., M.A., with a thesis for his doctorate almost completed, had as good clothes as any of the other Americans and rather better manners than most. He was welcome to enroll for lectures and seminars under the world’s most illustrious scholars. As for a Ph.D. from Berlin at the end of two years—probably not!

As time went on Du Bois was convinced that Europeans were not without prejudice. The military looked down on the civilians; the nobility expected worship from commoners; the shopkeepers felt themselves above the artisans or peasants; the Christians looked down on all Jews. And the German Jews rejected the Polish Jewish immigrants. It seemed to Du Bois that skin color was simply not for Europeans a mark of inferiority. Besides, university students were a group apart and especially admired.

Du Bois found himself surrounded by gay, congenial young men and women with intellectual interests. Like many of his colleagues, he grew a Van Dyke beard and waxed his mustaches in imitation of the emperor. He wore stiff bat-wing collars, a derby hat, yellow kid gloves, and carried a cane. His evenings were usually spent at the theatre or the opera or concerts, the many holidays in travel. A whole new world of art was opened to him. Life was good.

One night, late in February, he went with three companions to hear Schubert’s "Unfinished” Symphony. The orchestra was tuning up as they followed the usher to their cheap student seats in the balcony. The young lady Du Bois had brought to the concert opened her notebook containing the score of the symphony. She was a student at the music conservatory and diligently followed the score even after the lights were dimmed. Her yellow braids were almost hidden under a fur cap still flecked with snowflakes. She was a high-spirited girl, and Du Bois liked her.

The hats and canes of the young men were scarcely stowed under the seats before the conductor, in swallow tails, stood with baton raised at the podium. The lights dimmed, and the first honey-sweet notes of Franz Schubert’s music filled the hall. Du Bois did not know the Schubert work as he did Mozart or the spirituals of the Negro people, but he had heard the symphony several times since coming to Europe. The “Unfinished" Symphony—its title and theme was not unlike his own life’s pattern! Themes begun slowly, gently; questions raised in the soul, unanswered, unresolved, were like his own preparation for living, his apprenticeship that was coming to an end. . . .

Tomorrow, February 23, the sun would rise on his twenty-fifth birthday. Reserved as always in his personal life, Du Bois had not mentioned it to any of his new friends. They would have seized on the excuse for feasting and jollification. Sonderhof’s birthday party last week had lasted until dawn. Was that what he wanted?

Suddenly, as he recorded in Dusk of Dawn, he felt a little lonely. None of these students knew his home, his people. They knew nothing and could not imagine, out of their comfortable existence, the three-room cottage with its kerosene lamps and outhouse which he and his mother called home. Or the log school in the Tennessee mountains with the rotting floor and desk made of rough splintery boards, and the sweet-souled and eager-eyed scholars who had never heard of Franz Schubert and had not between them a pair of shoes. Or the beauty of the black girls at Fisk, who could have been models for the Egyptian statues he’d seen in the British Museum at Christmas vacation.

Life in this center of European culture was fine and rewarding, but not on his twenty-fifth birthday. That he would spend alone.

After the concert, while they were waiting at the checkroom for their overcoats, Maria mentioned that the kaiser would be holding a parade tomorrow to welcome some Eastern prince or other. Like so many students of the day, the young people called themselves socialists, chiefly because until a year ago the Socialist Party had been forbidden. Being socialists did not keep the students from enjoying the pageantry of the military, the uniforms, the prancing horses and the patriotic bands playing Deutschland über Alles (Germany over everything, today over Europe, tomorrow over the world . . . .)

“It’s a good show,” said Sonderhof. “Shall we meet the girls at the Brandenburg Gate, Du Bois?”

Du Bois shook his head, “Sorry, not tomorrow.”

When he got to his room, Du Bois lit two candles, poured himself some Greek wine and in a little ceremony dedicated his library, which now filled a fairly large bookcase, to his parents. Before he went to bed, he wrote a letter to his Aunt Mame in Great Barrington. She was his closest living relative, and he had stayed with her for a few months after his mother died. Du Bois stared at the candle flames. He would let the candles burn to the end. Then he would go to sleep.

In the morning he had a breakfast of oranges and coffee, did some reading on ancient Africa in a book he had brought home from the library, and then went to the art gallery. Here he ran into his friend, Sonderhof, with whom he had mid-day dinner. They had the same seminar in the afternoon and stopped at a sweet-shop for a supper of hot chocolate, oranges and cake. Then Du Bois excused himself and went back to his room.

Still unsatisfied with his birthday commemoration, Du Bois felt that something was still unsaid, something undone. At twenty-five almost certainly a third of his life was gone. “Life? What is life?” Du Bois asked himself. A restatement of his life’s goal seemed called for, but what could he say that had not been said as a young boy? His aim, “to raise up the Negro people,” had not changed. To this he had dedicated his life. But the weapon, education, no longer seemed adequate. And it was not enough to work for the Freedmen in the Southern states—not even enough to educate the black folk in one country. . . .

He pulled a writing pad out of his desk drawer and began to write slowly, with many pauses, with many ideas considered and discarded.

Night, grand and wonderful. I am glad I am living. I rejoice as a strong man to run a race. ... I know that I am either a genius or a fool. O, I wonder what I am, I wonder what the world is . . . perhaps I shall never know. But this I do know, be the Truth what it may, I will seek it on the pure assumption that it is worth seeking. . . .

I will, in this second quarter of my life, enter the dark forest of the unknown world for which I have so many years served my apprenticeship. I will seek until I find— and die. . . .

What is life but life, after all? Its end is the greatest and fullest self. This end is the Good, the Beautiful is its soul and Truth is its being. . . .

I am striving to make my life all that this life may be and I am limiting that strife only so far as that it is incompatible with others of my brothers and sisters. I therefore take the world that the Unknown lay in my hands and work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world.

At the last minute, after months of anxious waiting, the word came that the Slater Fund granted Du Bois the money for another year’s study abroad. The scholar made the best of it, both in the quality of his work and in the extent of his broad travels. He finished his thesis on The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, all four hundred pages of it, down to the last footnote. He impressed his professors to such an extent that they attempted to go outside the rules and award him his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, but tradition and precedent proved insurmountable. It did not greatly matter to Du Bois. A Ph.D. from Harvard would be a certainty when he got back to the United States.

Summing up later, Du Bois said: “Of greatest importance was the opportunity which my years in Europe gave of looking at the world as a man and not simply from a narrow racial and provincial outlook. The unity beneath all life clutched me.”

His last month as well as the last of his money was spent in France. This meant returning home in the steerage like the poorest immigrant. He felt it was worth any discomfort to see Paris. The painting, the sculpture, the architecture, the theatre, and the people—all of it seemed perfect. Not London or Berlin or Vienna or Rome held a place in his affection compared to Paris on this first of many visits.

One week spent on the bare, crowded, lower deck of the ocean liner was not without interest. Most of his fellow passengers were Germans, Austrians, French, Russian, and Irish immigrants about to turn themselves into Americans. There were a few other students like himself who were coming home enriched in spirit but with empty pockets.

It was not altogether a happy homecoming. After two years of study under circumstances that had been pleasant beyond his happiest boyhood dreams, Du Bois was faced with the immediate need to earn his living. The years of learning were over; the years of accomplishment lay ahead. Moreover, he realized that his opportunities for teaching were fairly limited. No white university would consider having a black man on its faculty, and indeed his goal was to teach Negroes, not whites.

Du Bois landed in New York with $2 and a ticket to Great Barrington in his pocket. He began composing letters of application before he arrived at his aunt’s house. Fisk,

Atlanta University, and Howard replied promptly enough with regretful words that they had no openings for the current year. Du Bois tried public schools in the South. They said that he had rather too much education. Tuskegee and Hampton were industrial trade schools with curricula totally unsuited to his training. He applied nevertheless and received large doses of silence.

Finally, late in August, Wilberforce, a small Methodist college in Ohio, offered Du Bois $800 a year to teach Latin and Greek. He hadn’t studied either language since his undergraduate days, but wired a grateful acceptance, packed up his belongings, and took the first train for Xenia, Ohio.

On the train, with incorrigible hopefulness, the twenty-six-year-old scholar began dreaming again. The college bore a noble name. Wilberforce was one of the early antislavery Englishmen who had played a great role in the suppression of the slave trade. The school, Du Bois had heard, was always on the border of poverty and had a narrow, churchly outlook; but the African Methodist Church was at that time the largest Negro institution in the nation. Maybe, if he offered to give the course on his own time, the bishops who held the purse strings would let him teach a class in sociology. Original studies on the condition of the Negro, under W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, A.B., M.A., and (soon to be) Ph.D., Harvard. He would show the need for facts on the plight of the Negro people and the method, as taught in Berlin, of collecting and interpreting the facts.

Du Bois later recalled that he did not come off his bright cloud until he set foot in the dusty, hot station at Xenia and met the stares of the country loafers in the doorway. He was still acutely uncomfortable when with outstretched hand the bow-legged little president came toward him.

“I am Du Bois, sir.”

“That is obvious,” President Mitchell answered with a contagious smile as he took in the light gray suit, the derby hat, the bat-wing collar, and gloves and cane. “It is not often a professor direct from a German university arrives at Wilberforce.”

PART II

The Black Scholar and “His Place”

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”

Chapter 5

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

August, 1897

“Heaven is being able to earn a living at the work you want to do and work that needs doing.”

The air in the room where Du Bois sat working was hot and still. Pages of manuscript in neat piles almost covered the desk. Off to one side stood the familiar tintype of his father and another in a small silver frame—the wedding portrait of Nina Gomer, his bride of a year.

There were a few other traces of Nina in the crowded room. Her sewing machine was pushed between the opposite wall and the bed; a ladies’ fashion magazine showed its bright cover among the statistical bulletins on top of the bureau. The handsome crimson bedspread had been Du Bois’ one extravagance in the three austere years which had gone by since his European travels. That and the sewing machine had been his wedding gifts. When she was still a student at Wilberforce, Nina had mentioned her longing for the machine during the whole of her neglected girlhood. The bedspread had been ordered from a mail-order house because Du Bois wanted her to have something especially her own in their apartment in the faculty dormitory at Wilberforce where he brought her back from her Iowa home after the wedding in May, 1896.

Nina Gomer, slim and dark, with big brown eyes, had graduated from Wilberforce during the first year of Du Bois’ teaching. Her mother, a German housewife, had died. Her dark-skinned father had remarried, and her stepmother had children of her own; so Nina felt almost as alone and without family as Du Bois did himself. Perhaps it was this aloneness that had drawn teacher and pupil together. More likely it was her gayety and sense of humor, as whimsical as his own, that attracted Du Bois.

The teaching experience at Wilberforce had been frustrating in so many ways. Few of the students were ready for more than high-school-level work; fewer of the faculty were real scholars. The administration kept to its narrow, old-fashioned routine and were afraid of offending the bishops of the church or the state government which furnished part of the meager college funds. They weren’t interested in a science laboratory or a decent library; they wouldn’t hear of introducing anything resembling a department in sociology. They felt satisfied that they knew everything needful to be known about black folk and were not concerned about the colored peoples in the rest of the world.

When the award of Du Bois’ Ph.D. from Harvard was announced, they felt proud of having a learned professor on the faculty whom they could introduce to the visiting bishops as Doctor Du Bois, but they gave no scope to his ideas. When Harvard published his The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in its handsome, red-cloth binding, there was not even a library from whose shelves it could go into circulation. If anyone bothered to read the book, Dr. Du Bois was not told.

The book, however, was the cause of a piece of good fortune that came to Du Bois. The newly set up sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to make a study of the black folk in the poorest section of Philadelphia. Dr. Samuel Lindsay was put in charge. It was he who, having read the book, recognized the quality of Du Bois’ scholarship and urged the appointment of the young man to make the study. The heads of the university were not willing to appoint a black man to a professorship. Since he already had his Ph.D. they couldn’t offer him a mere grant of funds as a student investigator. Lindsay refused to hire Du Bois to do the work while he himself took the credit. The authorities compromised by offering an “assistant instructorship” with no classes to teach, and no office at the university. They conveniently forgot to publish his name as a faculty member of a white college.

Du Bois did not care. “Heaven,” he said, “is being able to earn a living at the work you want to do and work that needs doing.”

The salary was $900 a year, enough to get married on. Dr. Du Bois hastened to accept, and agreed to start as soon as the current term at Wilberforce was completed. In

May, 1896, he made a trip to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to marry Nina and bring her from her unhappy home back to Wilberforce. In June, they came to Philadelphia and set up housekeeping in the one-room apartment over a settlement house in the middle of the slum that would be the scene of his investigation.

Nina was very loving, very gay and uncomplaining. He missed her laughter now that she had gone to Great Barrington to his Aunt Marne’s to await the birth of their first child. He should hear almost any day now. . . .

It was hard to keep at his writing, but the report of his year’s study was almost complete. The time in Philadelphia had gone by very swiftly. The extension of two months had been a lifesaver, but they too were nearing an end. He read his manuscript, line by line, with anxious care. He wanted to be sure that the mass of statistics had not buried the human quality of the five thousand people he had talked with. Not all Philadelphia Blacks had welcomed another black man’s inquiries into their lives. Not all understood that it was for the good of the whole race that the study was made.

The ringing of the doorbell interrupted his reading. A messenger held out a yellow envelope, to be signed for. Du Bois was trembling. He could scarcely get the envelope open, and the telegram unfolded: Unto you a child is horn. Wife and son doing well.

“Wife and son . . . wife and son. . . .” The train wheels clattered out the words like a song. The lapping waters on the Hudson River nightboat pounded out the refrain. A second train ride seemed unbearably long, but finally the Berkshire hills came into sight.

Du Bois ran the mile from the familiar railroad station. He scarcely stopped to speak to his aunt when she opened the door of her house. He took the narrow steps two at a time to Nina’s bedside. There lay his wife, mother of the infant, who was all head and voice in the curve of her arm.

There was a glint of gold in the baby’s hair, and his eyes were blue with mere flecks of brown, this man-child who would grow up a black man behind the Veil. As Du Bois held his son in his arms he felt an ecstasy-tinged sadness. He had wanted the child to be born in this valley where the memory of his own childhood was filled with beauty, but the stay would be too short. In just a few more weeks they would be leaving to make a home for the child in the land of sorrow—the deep South.

Dr. Du Bois had accepted an appointment as professor of economics and history at the University of Atlanta. With the professorship went a promise of studies of the condition of the Southern Negro, with yearly conferences and published reports in a method of his own devising. The opportunity to carry forward the thing which he considered his life work had seemed almost too good to be true, but at this moment it appeared in a different light.

Suddenly, as she smiled up at him, it swept over Du Bois that Nina had never been in the land of Jim Crow, the land of the lynch law. He felt a twinge of pure terror. Yet they would live on the campus, separated by wide, green lawns from Atlanta slums around the college and from the streets of the whites where contempt and insult stalked. Surely he could shield his wife and son from hurt. Nina need never step onto a Jim Crow street car. When walking was impossible, he would hire a horse and carriage. They need not go to a theatre, to be sent to the balcony up a side stair. For music they could content themselves with hearing artists willing to come to the university campus. For companions for little Burghardt as he grew out of babyhood, they could depend on the children of other faculty members, white and black. The baby would grow up surrounded by love until he was strong enough to enter the struggle at his father’s side.

The return to Philadelphia was a joy. The packing was easy since they had so few possessions. A trunk, the sewing machine, the books, the blue china and fire tongs, a few souvenirs of Du Bois’ European travels—all was arranged for shipping in a day.

Nina scarcely noticed her surroundings. The Jim Crow car did not disturb her after she had spread a clean white sheet to hold the basket in which the baby slept serenely. Their rooms at the university, opening out to a small, private garden and a view of the hills, were by far the pleasantest she had ever lived in. She was interested only in the placing of her son’s crib out of all drafts.

Nina Du Bois built and molded her life upon the child. He tinged her every dream and idealized her every effort. No hands but hers must wash or garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must touch them that had not wearied her fingers; no voice but hers could coax him off to Dreamland, and she and the child spoke together in some sort of soft, unknown tongue.

With his work and his wife and child, he was well satisfied. He heard in the baby’s voice and perceived in its wide, knowing eyes the Prophet that would one day rise within the Veil.

Then disaster struck. At eighteen months, Burghardt Du Bois took sick, desperately sick, and died.

They called it typhoid fever or “summer complaint” in that day, this sudden mysterious death of children between their first and second year. There are no reliable statistics of the rate of this dying. Only a hint, a guess of the cause, in the open sewers and polluted wells, the hovels without screens.

Statistics of this sort were part of the facts to be covered in Dr. Du Bois’ studies. That babies might not survive their second summer was an almost accepted fact of life among the black folk in the South. The small white gravestones in the cemeteries seemed statistics enough.

Mothers said, when asked the size of their families, “I had six children and raised three.” For the poor whites and for the Blacks the proportion of deaths was always greater. This did not lessen the grief.

That grief, the meaning of the death of a child, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois set down in one of the most beautiful essays in the English language. It was written about a year after the death of his son, published first in the Independent, a literary monthly, and later in the volume The Souls of Black Folk, which, next to the Bible, became the book most likely to be found in the homes of black families.

The white South received it scornfully. “This book is dangerous for the Negro to read,” the Nashville Banner warned. “It will only excite, discontent, and fill his imagination with things that do not exist or things that should not bear upon his mind.”

The death of his first-born was a fact of existence, and to express its meaning Du Bois not only raised a corner of the Veil to whites but revealed areas unguessed by those who knew only this man’s deep personal reserve.

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain! For where, O God, beneath the broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace—where Reverence dwells and a Goodness, and a Freedom that is free? . . .Yet surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.

Du Bois and his wife made the sad journey to the New Haven burial ground and back again to Atlanta, unable to bring comfort to one another. Du Bois had his teaching and his writing. Nina had nothing but empty grief. She never really recovered from the loss of her son. No laughter bubbled in her throat, no song.

Two years later, in 1900, another child was born, a little girl they named Yolanda. Once again the mother could sew and wash and watch over a baby, but it was a pleasure clouded with apprehension and memories.

She found it difficult to leave Yolanda even for an hour in the care of the cheerful student, working her way through college, whom her husband engaged as a nurse; equally difficult to make friends with the faculty wives and impossible to take an active interest in the problems of the community.

Dr. Du Bois was increasingly in demand throughout the country as a speaker and advisor. He was made a fellow of the American Academy of Science, a consultant to the Labor Department in Washington. The Atlanta Conference Reports went out to all the important libraries in the United States and abroad. National magazines solicited work from his pen and published his essays and poems.

With suffering and success, Dr. Du Bois had grown more broadly human. However, around him, the grim, everyday life of his people outside the university walls—the poverty and powerlessness against white oppression, the petty meanness of Jim Crow—weighed on his mind and body.

The white rulers could no longer plead ignorance. When he was young, Du Bois had felt sure that if the truth could be known, the oppression of black folk would cease. He had made the conditions known. The statistics were before them, not all but enough. His poetry and essays had lifted the Veil. Knowledge had not lifted the weight of suffering. The denial of the vote, the fraud and cheating, the assaults on the dignity of their very lives continued. What more could he do?

He talked with friends on the campus, especially with Georgia-born John Hope at nearby Morehouse College. He exchanged letters with Northern friends, with Monroe Trotter, who was publishing a brilliant and bitter weekly journal, the Guardian, in Boston. He went to see Ida Wells Barnett in Chicago, who fought lynching in her newspaper with the dedication of a black Joan of Arc. Reluctantly, he took a step that threw him into a new kind of leadership within the black community itself.

Ever since his return from Europe, Du Bois had watched with misgivings the effect of Booker T. Washington’s rising power. It was not the school which Washington had founded that troubled him. Tuskegee was a good school of its kind and one that was needed. However, Du Bois was convinced that the founder of Tuskegee Industrial Training School had become the spokesman for those who believed that the black man must learn to accept what the whites were willing to give. What they offered was a place on the lowest rung of the ladder, unrelieved poverty and ignorance of everything in life except work with one’s hands. This is what Booker T. Washington asked his people to accept.

This role for non-whites in the United States had recently been extended by force of arms to the colored peoples of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Dr. Du Bois recognized it for what it was and called it by its name: imperialism. The treatment given the black people in the United States was that of conquered colonials.

He had come bitterly to admit that the weapon he had chosen as a boy, the weapon of education in the truth, was no longer enough. Even at the risk of losing his work as teacher and writer, which meant more to him than his life, he felt that he must act.

In 1903, some of his essays were being gathered together for publication in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois quietly included a new essay raising the question of Booker Washington’s usefulness as spokesman to and for the black people.

It was just one chapter out of fourteen in the volume.

When it was finished and sent to the publisher, Du Bois went on with his teaching and waited for the storm to break. Had not Frederick Douglass said, “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”

Chapter 6

Niagara Falls, Canada

June, 1905

“We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights.”

To climb out of the Jim Crow coach at Washington, D.C. and walk down the track to board the Pullman car on the same track, drawn by the same engine, was always an eerie experience to Dr. Du Bois. This blustering April morning was no exception. Grimly he entered the sleeping car, noting that as usual he had been assigned Drawing Room A at no extra expense. Whenever possible, black passengers were put into the isolation of the private room, not for their own convenience, but to spare the delicate feelings of prejudiced whites.

Today he was rather glad of the privacy. He had slept badly in the grimy coach from Atlanta. Half of the Jim Crow car had been partitioned off as the “Gentlemen’s Smoker,” occupied by white traveling salesmen who had spent the night drinking and telling “nigger” jokes. Du Bois settled down, glad of the seclusion of the drawing room, which spared him, for a few hours, the sight of white faces, the sound of white voices.

Methodically he opened the attaché case he still carried from his European university days. Europe was pleasantly on his mind, for he had recently returned from Paris where the Atlanta exhibit of the Study of the Southern Negro in the United States had won a Grand Prize. He himself, as author of the exhibit, had received a gold medal, much praise and a welcome that for a few days at least had left him feeling like a human being unfettered by race. He had barely begun sorting the notes for the address he would deliver in Buffalo that night when a knock on the door interrupted.

A white-coated Pullman porter entered with a fresh jug of ice water. It was plainly an excuse because there was already one at Du Bois’ elbow.

“Professor, I saw you come aboard. You wouldn’t remember me, but I was in your Latin class at Wilberforce.” The young man pulled out his wallet and unfolded a worn newspaper clipping from the Guardian.

“Monroe Trotter’s paper?” Du Bois was immediately interested.

“I don’t go all the way with Mr. Trotter’s ideas.” The porter held out the clipping. “But even if he didn’t do anything else but print this Credo of yours, Dr. Du Bois, he’s my friend.”

The one-page prose poem had appeared first in the Independent and had been reprinted in Negro journals all over the United States. Du Bois had written it straight from his heart on one of the many nights he had spent recently wrestling with the decision about the next step to take in his life and his work. He was being prodded by his own conscience to a new kind of leadership, to the role of agitator.

Without looking at the printed words, the young man began to recite: “I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and yellow and white, are brothers, varying through time and experience in form, gifts, and features, but different in no essential particular. . . .”

“I remember you now, Mr. Gordon,” Du Bois interrupted with a glance at the white coat, uniform of servitude. “You sing. You had the makings of a great singer.”

“You wonder what I’m doing making up beds and bowing and scraping for tips. A man’s gotta live, professor. I still sing in my church, and I give readings. You remember how you put it? ‘I believe in service—humble, reverent service, from the blackening of boots to the whitening of souls, for Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell, and Wage is work well done! ... I believe in Liberty for all men, the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.’

Beauty and love . . . that’s the bit in the Credo that makes people cry.”

Du Bois heard him recite to the end in silence. Then he said, “Maybe you could help me, Mr. Gordon. I’m planning to call together twenty-five to fifty black men and women, leaders in one field or other to discuss what action we can take—along the lines of the Credo. Do you know any hotel, any resort, any place at all between here and Buffalo that would rent us rooms for a three-day conference?”

“Black men at a hotel?”

“Newspaper editors, doctors, teachers, churchmen. . . .”

“There’s ‘no room at the inn,’ professor. I’m on the Florida—New York run now, but I’ve been up and down and across the country—Chicago, Saint Louis, Buffalo, everywhere. It’s no room at the inn if your skin is black. I can’t name a hotel that would welcome a group of black people, not this side of Canada.”

“Then Canada it will be,” Dr. Du Bois said to himself after Andrew Gordon had gone about his duties.

The next day Du Bois took a cab from the college campus where he had been speaking. He had stayed the night in the college president’s guest room with meals served in a little alcove on a tray. “So much more restful for you than in the public dining room, Doctor,” the president had tried to explain.

Du Bois directed the cab to take him to a small hotel he had heard of in Niagara Falls for one more try at finding accommodations for the conference.

“What do you want?” the room clerk asked brusquely.

Dr. Du Bois explained.

“This is a white hotel.”

The illustrious scholar looked around. He couldn’t resist having a little fun. “The color scheme is very nice,” he said, “though it must be a little hard to keep clean. Now, about the conference. Perhaps you could rent us a whole floor for the three days. We’d be willing to have our meals served in one of the rooms and even bow to custom and use the freight elevator if that would save you embarrassment.”

“What are you trying to do? Ruin my business? You can quit your fancy talk right there, boy, and get out of here.”

Dr. Du Bois managed “to keep silent in seven languages” as a friend once commented in similar circumstances. He crossed on the ferry to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls to Fort Erie where he found another world. Without any trouble at all, he reserved the entire lot of rooms in a pretty little hotel for the week of July 9th. He made the advance payment from his own bank account.

Back in Atlanta he sent out letters to friends who had indicated they would sign the call to the conference and waited. If a sufficient number did not respond to the call, he would be bankrupt. Perhaps he would be thrown into jail. Monroe Trotter had recently served time in jail merely for presuming to ask Mr. Booker T. Washington a question in a public meeting in a Boston church. The charge was “disturbing the peace.”

The Niagara Movement, as it came to be called, was for the express purpose of disturbing the deadening peace of hopelessness that had settled like fog over the mass of his oppressed people. Trotter and Forbes would certainly come, and John Hope had already given his promise. . . .

Within a week the signatures began pouring in, and Du Bois breathed more freely. He was not, after all, without followers. When the call went out for the conference across the Canadian border, fifty-eight signatures besides his own were on it.

Twenty-nine men made their appearance at the hotel in Fort Erie. They came not only at some financial sacrifice, but at serious risk to their jobs and reputations. They came to make the first public demand since the end of the Reconstruction era in 1876 for their right to full and equal citizenship. They would be known henceforward in the white world as “radicals.”

The wording of the demands was not in the poetic language of Du Bois’ Credo, but their meaning was the same. He returned to Atlanta, well satisfied. The meeting on foreign soil, and in secret, was to be followed next year by a public gathering of forces on the Fourth of July at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

The second meeting took on the quality of a crusade. The gathering walked barefoot at dawn to the scene of John Brown’s capture and martyrdom for the “crime” of attempting to lead slaves in their struggle for freedom. Because of the choice of the place, the day, the boldness of the manifesto adopted, this 1906 meeting of the Niagara Movement was one of the most significant that American Blacks ever held. In many forms, in many places, not only in the United States but in Africa and Asia, its hopes, its uncompromising demands were destined to be echoed. W. E. B. Du Bois, teacher, writer and agitator had planted the seed corn for the future.

Present among the observers at Harper’s Ferry that July morning was a young white reporter for the New York Evening Post by the name of Mary White Ovington. She saw to it that the Niagara Manifesto, composed by Du Bois, was printed in full in the columns of her paper.

The preamble began quite simply by asking for a hearing and stated the pressing reasons—disenfranchisement, steadily advancing discrimination, intimidation and silencing of voices raised in criticism.

Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone, but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the Thief and the home of the Slave—a byword and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretentions and pitiful accomplishment.

There followed detailed explanations of the five main demands; then the moving, final paragraph, ending:

Here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom, we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free.

Controversy raged! Washington’s friends acted as though the Manifesto were an attack on him, personally. The industrialists on the Southern Education Board held in their hands control over the funds for higher education for Negroes in the South. They withheld from Atlanta University funds needed to print Du Bois’ Conference Reports, as well as funds to expand the faculty of the college itself.

The head of the board hinted to Dr. Ware, the young, newly-appointed president of Atlanta University, that if they wanted money, “certain circumstances” on campus would have to be changed.

“I’m at least one of the ‘circumstances,’ ” Du Bois said wryly to his friend, John Hope. Though Dr. Ware had made no complaint to his most illustrious professor, it became apparent that not only the “Studies of the Condition of the Negro” was in danger but his own career as a teacher.

Meantime, he kept on with the work in hand. The most important of the summer projects was a study of conditions in Lowndes County, Alabama, where the great majority of the population were former slaves. A report had been ordered by the Labor Department of the federal government, and Du Bois had some hopes that action to improve the wretched lives of the black people in Lowndes County might come out of it. He spent as much time as he could spare in Lowndes County, overseeing the work of a teacher from Tuskegee, of local black men, and of his own sociology students.

It was in Lowndes County, early in September, 1906, that Du Bois got the news of the bloody rioting in Atlanta. This rising of a mob against the black people was the most vicious and widespread and destructive the United States had seen since Reconstruction. Even from the first meager reports in the white Alabama papers, Du Bois sensed deep trouble ahead. Leaving notes and papers in his attaché case behind, he ran to the depot and was able to get on a train just pulling out for Atlanta.

As he made his way to the Jim Crow car next to the engine, his thoughts were centered on the safety of his wife and child. The Ku Klux Klan had a special hatred for the black university. What kind of protection could the college expect from the city? None, if the rioters had gotten that far. Looking at the cowed and frightened faces of the poorer Blacks in the Jim Crow car, he forgot his own personal problems. His grief for his people rose to white heat.

As always in moments of deep disturbance his feelings found an outlet in the beat of rhythmic words. He fumbled in his pockets for some scrap of paper to write on—an envelope, a laundry list, anything at all. To the grinding of the car wheels, with a stub of a pencil, on scraps of paper, W. E. B. Du Bois began to write the poem that came to be known as “A Litany at Atlanta.” Abraham Lincoln had composed the Gettysburg Address on a scrap of paper, too. Neither one, alone, without the other, tells the whole tragic truth about our country.

Hear us, good Lord.

Listen to us, thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy Sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy Heaven, O God, crying: We beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord. ... A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and rumbled beneath the stars where church spires pointed silently to Thee. All this was but to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance.

Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a bloodless, heartless thing!

But whisper—speak—call, great God, show us the way and point us on the path! . . . Whither? North is greed and South is blood; within, the coward and without, the liar. Whither? To death? Whither? To life? But not this life, dear God, not this. . . . We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord, in night, O God of a godless land! Amen! In silence, O Silent God. Selah!

In Atlanta, no black cab drivers were at the station. No living black folk at all to be seen. Even in normal times no cabs driven by whites would accept a black passenger. Dr. Du Bois made his way through streets full of debris and fallen bodies, still unclaimed.

He found Nina in a state of terror, her back against a closet door where she had hidden six-year-old Yolanda since dawn. Her husband comforted her as best he could. He cradled the child in loving arms. The delivering of his wife and little girl from the memories of violence were one more reason Du Bois knew he must leave Atlanta. But not at once, not while Atlanta needed him. W. E. B. Du Bois, for whom violence “was not the way,” bought a gun.

“Reverend Porter came by looking for you last night,” Nina said.

“Otho?” Du Bois’ roommate at Fisk had recently become the pastor of the largest Negro church in Atlanta. The two friends had been glad to see each other again, but there was not a very close relationship between the university and the black community. At least, there had not been until now.

“I’ll get in touch with Otho Porter right away. It would be good if out of this trouble the college and the community came to see that we need each other. But I will not leave you and Yolanda today.” He felt in his wallet for the crumpled scraps of paper. “At least,” he added, “I’ll be no farther away than my study. I wrote a kind of prayer or chant last night that might, if it’s worth publishing, help explain some of the bewilderment and pain this senseless killing has caused our people.”

The “Litany at Atlanta” was printed by itself on a single page of the Atlantic Monthly. In the sixty-odd years since its publication, the poem has been translated into more languages and reprinted in more parts of the world than anything Dr. Du Bois wrote in his lifetime. The meaning of a race riot to the oppressed and dispossessed victims was engraved on the minds of a few sensitive, white American readers. This resulted, two years later, in an event which was to take W. E. B. Du Bois away from Atlanta for a quarter of a century.

Chapter 7

New York City

November, 1910

"I essayed a new role of interpreting to the world the hindrances and aspirations of American Negroes. . ."

Vesey Street is in downtown New York, within sight of Wall Street, the street of the bankers and stockbrokers, and just across the way from beautiful, old Trinity Church. Number 20 Vesey Street was a small, rather shabby building. Horse-drawn drays and private carriages rattled over the cobblestones outside the door. Occasionally a high-seated automobile edged its way through, although driving motor cars on the city streets was discouraged because they frightened the horses.

A bright new brass plaque bolted onto the door announced that the office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was to be found on the second floor. At the head of the stairs an arrow pointed to the NAACP offices.

There was a small reception room with two doors. The first door was generally open, and one could catch a glimpse of cubbyholes, for offices workers, partitioned halfway up. On the morning of November 3, 1910, the second door was closed. A hand-lettered card tacked to the door spelled out The Crisis, Editorial Office. In one corner was the name of the editor: W. E. B. Du Bois.

The room was sparsely furnished, with plain wooden bookshelves across one wall and reaching to the ceiling. His library was as much part of Dr. Du Bois as his high bat-wing collar and Van Dyke beard. A portrait of Frederick Douglass and a small bulletin board with news clippings and notices filled the wall by the door. At the large desk in the center of the room, Dr. Du Bois sat, turning a small magazine this way and that, studying every detail of the binding and cover before opening a page. Then, with a sigh of satisfaction, he began to read the editorial on page one as carefully as if it had not come from his pen and been read and re-read in proof half a dozen times:

The object of this publication is to set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people. It takes the name, Crisis, from the fact that the editors believe that this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of man. . . .

Du Bois had got no further in his reading when someone knocked on his door.

“Do I intrude, Doctor?” Mary Ovington paused, with one gloved hand on the doorknob. She wore a navy blue broadcloth suit, with a white ruff at her throat and a veil tied over her sailor hat, against the wind. She might have posed, just as she stood there, as a model of young college women in the working world of 1910. Actually, however, Mary Ovington’s work was only as a volunteer. Since graduating from Radcliffe College she had devoted most of her time looking for ways to bring justice and equality to black Americans.

“No, no. Of course not, Miss Ovington.” Dr. Du Bois held out the magazine to her and drew forward the only other chair in the room. “Volume I, copy 1!” he beamed. “It’s just come from the printer. The article you suggested is right here on the first page—the one about the danger of segregating the Northern schools.”

“You give me credit I don’t deserve, Doctor. I just mentioned the story about Philadelphia threatening to set up separate schools for colored and white—just barely mentioned that your prophecy about the problem of the twentieth century being the problem of the color line was proving true.”

“And that made it very easy for me to open the subject without objections from any of our conservative philanthropists on the board of directors,” Du Bois answered lightly.

“As if they’d dare!” Mary Ovington’s eyes sparkled. “You know it was agreed, when we persuaded you to leave your teaching in Atlanta and come to the NAACP, that you’d have a free hand.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask the young woman sitting opposite him how she had managed to persuade them to offer him the job at all. It was not the usual thing for an interracial organization to give the only official, paid position to a black man. He knew very well that it was Mary White Ovington who had pulled it off. But he did not know her very well, so he merely sat staring at the bent head as she began reading the magazine.

In Du Bois’ opinion Miss Ovington was the strongest link in the curious chain of circumstances that had brought this great change in his life. It was seventeen months ago on the Fourth of July, 1909, that the founding meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been held, the meeting that brought almost the whole of the membership of the Niagara Movement together with a number of prominent whites—church men, college professors, writers, social workers, Christians and Jews, Republicans, Democrats and Socialists. That meeting of seventy-five Americans “dedicated to finishing the work Abraham Lincoln had started” was a link in the chain, of course, but not so strong a link as the earlier meeting— with no more than half a dozen people brought together by Mary Ovington and her friend William Edward Walling. Oswald Garrison Villard had been there, the grandson of William Garrison, the great Abolitionist. Also present were the socialist scholar, Charles Edward Russell; Dr. Henry Moskowitz, social worker; Professor Joel Spingarn; and, of course Walling. William Edward Walling, the newspaper reporter out of the South, had witnessed the lynching of perfectly innocent Blacks during the troubles in Springfield, Illinois, on Independence Day, 1908.

The year 1908 had been a high point in the violence against the almost-crushed masses in the South. The number of killings had risen to five a week, and all had been unnoticed and unreported in the white press. Then lynching spread North. Two Blacks were killed in Springfield, Lincoln’s home city, in the accidental presence of Walling. He was able to bring these lynchings to the notice of the public. Miss Ovington had written a bitter, emotion-packed letter to Walling. They had agreed that it was high time to finish the work Abraham Lincoln had started. That discussion had brought Du Bois to the launching of the NAACP magazine.

For the very beginning, Du Bois said to himself, you would have to go back to Harper’s Ferry and the Niagara Manifesto, because Miss Ovington had been at Harper’s Ferry. It was Miss Ovington who understood that any step that would be meaningful had to be taken by whites and Blacks together. She had proposed and indeed insisted that Du Bois be invited at once. The links in the chain were complete. Those who saw the organization of the NAACP as an outgrowth of the Niagara Movement were not far wrong!

Du Bois decided that there really wasn’t any reason not to ask Miss Ovington how she had managed to break down the hesitancy of well-meaning whites, accustomed to “doing something” for, never with, his people. She looked up just at this moment with a laugh. “This piece on ‘agitation’ is a beauty. Some good friends of our cause really do fear agitation, you know. They won’t after they read what you’ve said: ‘A toothache is agitation. Is a toothache a good thing? No. Is it therefore useless? No. It is supremely useful for it tells the body of decay and death. Without it the body would suffer unknowingly. It would think: All is well! when lo! Danger lurks. The same is true of the social body.’ How true, how simple! A child could understand it.”

“I’m planning to have a children’s number of the magazine, every year,” Du Bois confided. “Pictures of beautiful black babies, fairy stories from Africa, poems about things black children can believe in because they’ve experienced them.”

“That’s good. The image children have of themselves must be a major factor in the Negro problem.”

Du Bois mobile features wrinkled into a smile. “Of course, I’m as interested as you are, Miss Ovington, in the social problem. But in not quite the same way. You see, I am that problem. It’s going to take a long time to solve it, but we can see to it that young people like some I’ve known don’t die with starved souls and murdered spirits. There was a girl I taught once, long ago, in the Tennessee Hills.”

“Josie?” Mary Ovington asked unexpectedly. Seeing the surprise on Du Bois’ face, she explained, “You wrote about her in The Souls of Black Folk, you know. I often wondered if she were real.”

“But, of course.”

“Did she ever go on with her education?”

Du Bois shook his head. “I was speaking at Fisk last winter, and took that chance to ride horseback to the back country to see what had become of Josie and her ambitions. She had died, without having seen the inside of a decent schoolroom, without anybody except her family caring.”

“You cared,” the young woman answered.

“Yes. It’s for Josie, partly at least, that I mean to mince no words in the Crisis. As long as I’m here, I’ll tear at hypocrisy and drag murder out in the open. The murder of the body and the murder of the spirit. At the same time, I hope to spread the beauty of the world before black children. I have a daughter, you know, ten years old. In all that time Yolanda has never been able to open a magazine or newspaper to see a black child like herself in a picture. Even in her school geography, the only Blacks are pictured as naked savages in Africa!”

“You could print the graduation pictures of Negro students.” Miss Ovington’s face lit up with enthusiasm.

“And beside them the list of every man lynched or shot or burned that month,” Du Bois added, suddenly grim. “They must come to know the bad with the good.”

Whatever the general program of the organization turned out to be—the board of directors had many unfinished plans—Dr. Du Bois saw his work as editor as somewhat apart. The Crisis was to be a medium to mirror Blacks to themselves as worthwhile human beings, inferior in their capacity to no other people on the earth. Hopefully, he might to able to hold up a mirror to unthinking white Americans, too. When they read in the pages of the Crisis of unpunished terror; when they had the record before them of insult and arrogance; when they saw themselves as agents of untold suffering; perhaps—just perhaps—they would be prepared for change. It wouldn’t be an easy battle. The power was still in the hands of those who believed that the white race must dominate, that the lowest white man counted for more than the highest black man—or woman—that the promises of the Declaration of Independence carried the label: For Whites Only.

Miss Ovington stood up and laid the magazine on the desk. “It is beautiful, Dr. Du Bois, from start to finish. How many copies did you have printed?”

“One thousand. I risked that many because I already have several hundred subscribers.”

“You’ll need twice that number by the next issue.” Mary White Ovington said. She was aware, even more clearly than the editor himself, how little faith the majority of the members of the board of directors, including the two other black members, had in Du Bois’ promise that the magazine could be made to pay for itself. She believed, however, that the success or failure of this, the first interracial organization, depended on Du Bois’ leadership. Her fellow whites must learn that only a black person could know what the black people wanted and needed. Du Bois was the one man she had ever met who expressed their desires in language moving enough to stir deep emotions and at the same time factual enough to convince all rational minds.

“Not to go too far, not to go too fast,” not to offend the tender feelings of wealthy white philanthropists was a subject of discussion at every board meeting. But the call, last year, that had brought the NAACP into existence had urged all believers in democracy “to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests and the renewal of struggle for civil and political liberty.” Seventy-five men and women of both races had responded. Now they were banded together, seventy-five out of twenty million Americans—a pitifully small number. However, Mary White Ovington, a socialist in a capitalist society, was used to being a minority. The publication of the Crisis was the first public action of the new organization. She did not intend to let it fail.

Miss Ovington’s visit to his office that morning left Du Bois thinking, too, of the future of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the role of blacks and whites in the organization. He foresaw difficulties ahead, to be sure, but the divisions would not be entirely along the line of color.

Du Bois had had moments of doubt in the months that followed his arrival in New York, when he and Nina and Yolanda were getting settled in the brownstone residence near “San Juan Hill” in the section of the city which housed most of the black population. His wife was happier here in the greater freedom afforded by the Northern city, but he had missed the beauty of the Atlanta campus and felt cut off from the unfinished studies. The hope he had of keeping on with the studies on the Condition of the Southern Negro proved vain.

There was a strain in working in partnership with some of the members of the NAACP board. Yet he could never agree with Monroe Trotter and Ida Wells Barnett, who refused to join the NAACP because they distrusted all whites. John Brown, whose biography Du Bois had just completed, was a white man. Yet, in his opinion, Brown, next to Frederick Douglass had perhaps come nearest of any person before the Civil War to touching the real soul of black folks. And now there had come forward white crusaders like Mary Ovington and Walling and Russell and the Jewish professor, Joel Spingarn. Spingarn had resigned from his university teaching in protest against an injustice to another teacher. In the Crisis, Dr. Du Bois “essayed the role of interpreting the hindrances and aspirations of American Negroes” and at the same time of opening doors of knowledge to the dark-skinned millions, not the city people or educated alone. ... He had a vision of the magazine in the hands of families on plantations; wherever there was one person who could read aloud in a community; of children looking through its pages in Sunday school libraries. . . .

Nevertheless, W. E. B. Du Bois, with all his gift of prophecy, could not imagine that November morning that the Crisis would, within a few years, run printings of 10,000 —20,000—100,000, and would carry his message for almost a quarter of a century into every state in the Union and into Europe and Asia and Africa.

The story of the rise of the NAACP from the small beginning in 1909—10 through a world war and a vast depression is chiefly, but by no means entirely, the story of the Crisis magazine and its editor. During this time the Association carried on an astonishing variety of other activities and interests, many initiated by Dr. Du Bois in his capacity as a member of the board of directors. Writing and lecturing were his specific jobs. However, he was the constant prodder, the gadfly, the much-criticized radical who for the years of his connection, made the NAACP the leading body for agitation, the political spokesman for Negro unity. When the unknown young scholar, Du Bois, had declared in 1900 that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, neither black folk nor white understood or believed it. The pattern of life on the planet Earth seemed fixed, unchanging: whites on the top, people of any other shade of skin on the bottom. The Niagara Movement, the first era of the NAACP, marked the awakening years. Today a new generation hears the trumpet call. And yet—and yet—a hundred years after the prophet’s birth, the walls of Jericho haven’t come tumbling down!

Chapter 8

Northampton, Massachusetts

June, 1913

“Is it not high time to be men? Is it not high time to hold up our heads and clench our teeth and swear by the Eternal that we will not be slaves. . . ?”

In the 1870’s, at about the same time that colleges for the freedmen were opened in the South, the first schools for higher education for women were founded in the North. Except for Oberlin College in Ohio, where abolitionists offered equal education to men and women, black and white, there had, up to this time, been no place in the country where a woman could pursue the same course of study as a man.

The women’s colleges were no better received than the colleges for the former slaves. The same hypocritical objections were raised in the name of “kindness.”

“Latin and Greek for nigras?” many whites had cried. “Their minds can’t take it. They’ll just be made discontented and worthless and forget their place.”

“Latin and Greek and higher mathematics for females'?” the doubters said, when women entered Radcliffe or Mount Holyoke, Vassar or Smith. “Their minds will be overstrained. They’ll come down with brain fever. They’ll never get husbands and will die old maids.”

The obstacles raised in the South against education for Blacks had deeper roots than mere prejudice against something new, of course. An educated group of Blacks was a threat to the economic system. The idea was fought harder and longer than the idea of education for women, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, Dr. Du Bois was fighting it still.

The furor against the education of women had about died away, but Du Bois recognized a connection between the two struggles. He was always glad to speak, when invited, at any of the women’s colleges. He had another reason, too, for accepting the invitation to be the commencement speaker at Smith College in June, 1913. Neither Smith nor Vassar had seen fit to open their doors to black students, and he was conducting a quiet campaign to break down these barriers. A visit to the college, a word with President Seelye, could make a difference.

The commencement exercises were very pretty, very feminine. Except for the faculty in the academic procession, there were no caps and gowns to be seen. The Seniors, in ankle-length white dresses, carried long-stemmed American Beauty roses. They walked across the campus to the Assembly Hall through garlands of field daisies, gathered and borne by the members of the Junior Class. The Juniors wore more sophisticated costumes and picture hats and elbow-length kid gloves.

Members of the Sophomore Class ushered parents and alumnae of the college to their assigned seats. The Freshmen, Dr. Du Bois was told, were not supposed to be there at all. Exception was made for a few who acted as “runners,” doing errands for the Seniors. They were assigned no seats. However, just before the procession entered the Hall, they were permitted to slip into the balcony and sit on the stairs.

One of the Freshmen, sitting hunch-kneed on a balcony step was a student from Alabama. To her all this was new and wonderful. She leaned forward to listen to Dr. Seelye, president of the college since its founding, introduce the commencement speaker. For a moment after the introduction, the two scholars stood side by side. In their swallowtail coats and light grey trousers, they looked much alike. Both had the same high foreheads, the same thin, narrow New England features. The speaker, to be sure, had a Van Dyke beard and quite dark skin, almost. . . . The girl from Alabama gasped. Nobody had mentioned that Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois was a Negro!

Never in all her eighteen years had the girl seen or heard of an educated colored person. She had never even heard the name of a black man or black woman who had done anything notable. Yet she had to believe what she saw with her own eyes. Here was a magnetic orator, speaking in the most beautiful English, and black!

Living in a city whose population was more than a third black, she didn’t know the names of as many as ten Negroes. Ten? She could only name five or six to herself. There was Minnie, their cook; and John Luke Williams, who had come to work from the back country as a stable boy when he was fourteen. He had risen to be houseman and served dinner every night in a white coat. John Luke helped her practice mounting her horse when she was learning to ride. (Maybe that’s when she had come to know his last name. Usually with colored persons, you didn’t.) And there was Effie, the washwoman, and her daughter who carried the basket of stiff-starched clean clothes upstairs every week. And Sally-Lou, the seamstress . . . and the “hot tamale man,’’ who as far as she knew had no name at all.

Aside from their work to make her own life easy, what did she know about these people who had been living in the same town as herself? The speaker on the platform was talking about work:

Manifestly life and abundant life is the object of industry and we teach men to earn a living in order that their industry may administer to their lives and the lives of their fellows. If, therefore, any human being has large ability it is not only for his advantage but for the advantage of all society that he be put to the work he can do best. To assume that ability is to be measured by so-called racial characteristics—by color, by hair—is not only ridiculous but dangerous. . . .

At Christmas vacation, when the girl in the balcony was home, she had heard a good deal of discussion about whether there ought to be a Negro high school in Birmingham. A letter in the newspaper asked what good it would be to spend money to educate Negroes when scientists had proved that after twelve years old a colored child couldn’t learn any more. Did the writer of that letter, did her parents, did any white person in Birmingham know about Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois? The Blacks that she passed on the street without noticing—as if they were faceless shadows— did they know about that man on the platform? Did any of them have any of the books he’d written in their houses? Could they read them?

When she went to the public library for books, there were black folks you couldn’t help seeing. This was because the library and the city jail were both on the same floor of the city hall, with just a glass window and iron bars between you and the sad, silhouetted black figures endlessly moving along. Seeing them behind bars gave her the same uncomfortable feeling that the garbage collectors did early in the morning when the chains on their legs clanked against their ankles. The chain gang—they were prisoners, too. Always Negroes, and mostly young—had they ever had a chance to go to school? Funny that she had never thought to ask.

Of course she had been taught all about the “War between the States” that was called the Civil War up here in New England. She had always been glad slavery was over.

When her parents brought her up to college last fall, they’d gone to Boston and Concord. She’d gone with her mother to stand beside the grave of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had been against slavery and so had Walt Whitman, the two writers her mother read the most. Louisa M. Alcott was antislavery, too. Everything those writers said was different from what you learned in high school history class.

Her mother had taught her and her brothers never to say “nigger” because it hurt people’s feelings, and you didn’t hurt anybody’s feelings even if they were black. Suddenly the girl knew these little things were not enough. . . .

When Dr. Du Bois finished his address the all-white audience applauded loud and long. The Alabama Freshman in the balcony forgot to clap. She just sat there, enthralled, with her hands squeezed tight together. She couldn’t remember afterward much that Dr. Du Bois had said. His voice and snatches of phrases floated around her like a rosy cloud. The mere fact that a black man like Dr. Du Bois existed had made a great change in her life. Of course he never knew it. She was one of thousands. Dr. Du Bois was in the business of changing lives.

In churches, in colleges, before clubwomen and scientific and historical societies, wherever he lectured, his subject was race relations as he had come to understand them from study and long experience. It seemed vitally important to him “to lift a corner of the Veil,” to let the great white majority in the United States know even a little about the way black people felt.

It was, however, to his own people that he spoke most frankly in the pages of the Crisis. He had become a “hammer of justice,” pounding away, month by month, in the years from 1910 to 1934.

Du Bois used drama, poetry, history, witty anecdotes, quiet, careful reasoning—every means at the command of a skillful writer—to rouse the beaten-down, unhappy people to fight for their rights.

Is it not high time to be men? Is it not high time to hold up our heads and clench our teeth and swear by the Eternal God that we will not be slaves and that no aider, abettor, or teacher of slavery in any shape or guise can lead us?

He called for an education that was a real education, not mere training for lowly jobs which the whites didn’t want for themselves. “This is a crime against childhood,” he said, “for which any nation ought to be ashamed.”

For the children, in the pages Du Bois dedicated especially to them, he wrote singing verses on the beauty of the natural world and on the beauty of blackness that were like talisman or lucky four-leaf clovers to keep in their memory against petty insults.

I am the Smoke King

I am black

I am darkening with song,

I am hearkening to wrong;

I will be black as blackness can,

The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man.

In time, gifted black boys and girls began to send him their own poems and pieces. Young people like Arna Bontemps and Shirley Graham and Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Not all of the childhood contributors to the Crisis grew up to become famous writers as these four did, but all were enriched in their lives by his interest and encouragement.

Not all his writing in this period was gentle and loving:

Humanity is progressing toward an ideal; but not, please God, by men who sit in cloistered ease, hesitate from action and seek sweetness and light. Rather we progress today, as in the past, by the soul-torn strength of those who can never sit still and silent while the disinherited and the damned clog our gutters and gasp their lives out on front porches. . . .

Du Bois believed that one trouble between black and white was the denial of work to the black man. Work that he could do. The NAACP board had agreed to leave the concrete matter of jobs for young Negroes of education and skill to another new organization, the Urban League. But the jobs the young people needed most were within the industries where trade unions were strong. These unions clamped their doors tight against black workers, and the Urban League uttered no word of protest. Finally Du Bois spoke out in the pages of the Crisis:

It is practically impossible for any colored man or woman to become a boiler maker or book binder, a machinist or metal polisher, a plumber or a potter, a printer or a pressman, a telegrapher or a railway trackman, a textile worker or a tile layer...a carpenter, shoemaker, tailor, or any of a dozen other well-paid employments without encountering opposition of the whole united labor movement of America.... If, braving this outrageous attitude of the unions, he does succeed in some small establishment...he is labeled a “scab” and written down as one who, for his own selfish advantage seeks to overthrow the labor uplift of a century.

As editor of the Crisis, Du Bois carried on a constant battle against the violence visited upon colored people. One by one, he reported the hundred or more lynchings a year, the burning of small Negro churches in the countryside, the brutal arrests by white police, the beatings and unmentioned killings in the jails.

When the bitterness of his tone was criticized by a white reader, Du Bois printed the protesting letter and his answer:

For nearly twenty years we have made of ourselves mudsills of the Western world. We have echoed and applauded every shameful accusation made against 10,000 victims of slavery. Did they call us inferior half beasts? We nodded and said: “We is.” Did they accuse of laziness 4,000,000 sweating laborers, half-paid and cheated out of much of that? We shrieked, “Ain’t it so?” We laughed with them at our color, we joked at our sad part and we told “chicken stories” to get alms. And what was the result? We got “friends.” I do not believe any people ever had so many “friends” as the American Negro today. He has nothing but “friends” and may the good God deliver him from most of them for they are likely to lynch his soul.

There were still those on the NAACP board of directors who winced at such plain talk. To Mr. Villard, for instance, Dr. Du Bois replied bluntly that the other splendid work of the organization, the slow but staunch breaking of barriers by trials before the courts, the building of chapters to support the work all over the country, the fund raising were all in excellent hands and needed little help from him. The opinions expressed in the Crisis were and must continue to be the editor’s own. He quietly pointed to the circulation figures—from the original timid thousand to fifty thousand in this year of 1915.

“Let the condition of the Negro improve, and I will be glad to report it. Do you realize, Mr. Villard, that lynching and terror in the South doubled this year?”

Mr. Villard, chairman of the board, still could not believe that it was a good thing to risk losing the sympathy of wealthy Northerners who, themselves, gave no encouragement to lynching. “They give no encouragement,” Du Bois answered, “except by silence! EXCEPT BY SILENCE!”

In 1915, Booker T. Washington died. He had continued to the end to support a program of submission to white domination. Everyone—especially Mary White Ovington and Du Bois’ other close friends on the board—waited anxiously to see what the editor of the Crisis would have to say at Washington’s death.

Du Bois’ statement was a eulogy. He began by calling the founder of Tuskegee the “greatest Negro leader since Frederick Douglass.” He spoke generously of the good the famous man had accomplished in calling attention to the necessity of economic development, but spoke also of Mr. Washington’s shortcomings, which had paved the way for disfranchisement throughout the Southern states and the establishment of legalized Jim Crow. He said, in closing:

What is done is done. Gravely and with bowed heads let us receive what this great figure gave of good, silently rejecting all else. Firmly and unfalteringly, let the Negro race in America close ranks and march steadily on, determined never to swerve from their great goal: the right to know and the right to stand as men among men before the world.

The editorial provided a foundation for greater unity among the Negroes than had been achieved since the days of Emancipation. A conference of carefully chosen leaders was arranged and unifying resolutions adopted, but as if to make sure that the progress of the black people in the United States should never be smooth, new divisive obstacles were thrown in the way.

In 1915, the European nations were at war, and there seemed some danger that the United States would be drawn in. A peacetime draft was proclaimed by President Wilson.

Under the influence of a Southern president and a military establishment heavily weighted with Southern officers, the draft clamped upon young black men the most flagrant segregation regulations an army had ever had. Volunteering for service by Blacks was at first refused and then severely limited; they were in effect given a choice either to accept a Jim Crow draft or to go into forced labor. To make matters worse the vast majority of training camps were set up in the South under the local rules of segregation.

It was decided by the NAACP to make a demand that Negro officers be trained to head the Negro regiments. Was W. E. B. Du Bois, champion of equality, submitting to Jim Crow and asking Negroes to segregate themselves? Many thought so among Blacks and whites, but Du Bois saw this move as a step toward self-protection on the part of the black troops. "We are faced with a condition, not a theory,” he said. A training camp was set up in Des Moines, Iowa. Even then there was delay. The highly qualified cadets were trained, but their commissions were not forthcoming. Du Bois went personally to see the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker.

“We are not trying by this war to settle the Negro problem,” Baker said.

“True,” Dr. Du Bois retorted. “But you are trying to settle as much of it as interferes with winning the war.”

More than seven hundred black officers were commissioned.

When the black regiments were about to go overseas fighting under their own black officers, the editor of the Crisis addressed them in these long-term prophetic words:

You are not fighting simply for Europe; you are fighting for the world, and you and your people are a part of the world.

This war is an End and, also, a Beginning. Never again will darker people of the world occupy just the place they had before. Out of this war will rise, soon or late, an independent China; a self-governing India; an Egypt with representative institutions; an Africa for the Africans, and not merely for business exploitation. Out of this war will rise, too, an American Negro, with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult. These things may not and will not come at once; but they are written in the stars. . . .

Photographs 

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "W.E.B. Du Bois as a young man." 

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "W.E.B. Du Bois with the Fisk University of 1888." 

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "W.E.B. Du Bois with his wife Nina and daughter Yolanda circa 1901." 

Founders of the Niagara Movement near Fort Erie, Canada, 1905

Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "W.E.B. Du Bois and staff in the Crisis magazine office." 

A photograph of the lynching of Jesse Washington in progress. Taken by Fred Gildersleeve on May 15, 1916. Du Bois included photographs of the lynching in the June 1916 issue of the Crisis.

Du Bois and the NAACP organized the Silent Parade in 1917 to protest the  East St. Louis Riot. Source: Library of Congress.

African-American family leaving damaged house after 1920 race riot in Chicago.

Duluth, Minnesota (June 15, 1920): Three African Americans who worked for a traveling circus were lynched for allegedly raping a white woman. A physician’s subsequent examination of the woman found no evidence of rape or assault. Michael Fedo’s book, The Lynchings in Duluth (2000), documents these events.

Source: from Albert A. Smith, "The Reason," in The Crisis, (March, 1920) as found in Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Who Set You Flowin'?", (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Source: "British NAACP pickets with anti-lynching placards." Between 1910 and 1940. Visual Materials from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

W.E.B. Du Bois addresses the World Congress of Partisans of Peace at the Salle Pieyel in Paris, France in 1949.

Du Bois and other defendants from the Peace Information Center prepare for their trial in 1951.

Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois with singer Paul Robeson, and Congressman Vito Marcantonio who defended him in a federal trial when Du Bois was indicted and accused of being an agent of a foreign state. He was acquitted by the judge before a jury was seated, and wrote about the case in In Battle for Peace.

Du Bois at his 95th birthday party in Ghana in 1963.

PART III

The Duty and the Deed

“If we do not feel the chain When it works another’s pain, Are we not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?”

Chapter 9

Paris, France

February, 1919

“Forget nothing, but set everything in its place . . . above all— Africa, Mother of Men.”

The Orizaba, the ship chartered to bring the advance guard of newspaper men, the magazine writers, the photographers from the United States to Paris, landed on the coast of France just a month after the signing of the Armistice. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, as editor of the Crisis, was aboard. The men of the press were rushed overseas to prepare for the Peace Conference to be held at the Palace of Kings at Versailles. There was no quicker way to get to Paris after the world war ended in November, 1918, and Du Bois considered himself lucky to have gotten a berth.

Du Bois’ last duty before sailing was to write a short editorial for the Christmas number of the Crisis:

The nightmare is over. The world awakens. The long, horrible years of dreadful night are passed. Behold the sun! We are sane. We are alive. Behold the heavens and its stars; and this blood, this warm, dripping blood from our mad self-laceration . . . hail this Holy Christmas time, nineteen hundred and eighteen years after the Birth and five since the last Crucifixion. On Earth, Peace, Good Will toward men.

Two or three hours on the boat train would bring Du Bois to the familiar and much-loved streets of Paris. This was his fourth visit to the city of his dreams. As a young man, he had come with his gloves and walking stick, a tourist fresh from a German university. Paris, then, meant to him architecture, history and art. It meant sidewalk cafes on the left bank of the Seine, and it meant the sculpture of the Louvre.

On the second trip to Paris, he had exhibited the work of the Atlanta “Studies on the Condition of the American Negro,” and had won a prize for the university and a medal for himself. He had talked on a basis of equality with social scientists from around the world.

The third visit, in 1911, had been a short one, after the impressive “Congress of Races” in London when the threat of European war was no more than a cloud on the horizon. Many different peoples had been represented at the conference, but the speakers, except for himself, had all been white men who talked of Africa and Africans as if they were backward children. However, a few brilliant black students from French or British colonies had been in the audience. In Paris that year, because of his speeches at the congress, he had found himself something of a celebrity to these black students. How many of those young men who had entertained him were still alive today? Du Bois had been told that almost 200,000 black soldiers from the colonies had come to defend France. Forty thousand, it was said, had marched to their death on Flanders Field alone.

The editor of the Crisis had not been sent across the ocean to learn the fate of black men from Senegal or Uganda or South Africa. This was not the concern of the NAACP. What the board wanted was information about the ugly rumors of mistreatment and actual murders of black American troops. Accusations had been made—not against the French or other Allies, not even against the enemy—but against white Southern officers in American camps. Du Bois came in search of evidence. He wanted, as always, the truth. But the investigation would take months. It would require travel over all of the French countryside. He had something more immediate on his mind.

One of the war aims announced by President Wilson had been “self-determination” of peoples. Now victory was won. Delegates for a huge Peace Conference were gathering, a conference over which the president of the United States would preside. Yet, not a single delegate from among the African and other dark-skinned peoples, not a single black delegate from the United States, would have a seat at Versailles. Those people most in need of having something to say about the way they wanted to work and live would not be admitted. Du Bois had already sent a page-long telegram to Woodrow Wilson on this question. He intended to present another plea before the conference opened. He was well aware that it would be ignored.

The fifty-year-old scholar had another plan in mind. He had crossed the ocean with a vision before him—a Pan-African Congress meeting in Paris at the same time as the Peace Conference in Versailles—the meeting to be composed of black men from Jim Crow United States, from the West Indies, from the African colonies ruled by European nations to satisfy their own greed. The excluded and rejected would gather around a conference table of their own, make their own demands to take to the gentlemen at Versailles. This would be the beginning of real self-determination.

Du Bois had attended a small conference of this kind in 1900, many years ago. There he had first heard the term Pan-Africa, meaning all Africa—every lake and mountain and grain of desert sand on the continent. Africans had ruled themselves, had established great kingdoms lasting a thousand years or more before the slave ships and the white slavers came. They must rule themselves again in time, and what time was better to begin when the world had to be remade after the nightmare of war?

Du Bois sent his luggage ahead to the hotel reserved for the American press and walked alone on the familiar streets. Paris at sundown! But it was not the Paris that he or anyone knew who had not been through four years of war. Remembering that walk, he wrote:

The city was dispossessed. Through the narrow, winding streets poured khaki-clad foreigners, speaking awkward syllables that were never French. Women carrying bundles, with mourning bands on their sleeves, feverish, hurried, and tears so intertwined with joy that there seemed scant difference. The grim terror of war had not lifted. It lay on the closed cafes, on the sandbags guarding the treasures left in the Louvre, on the ragged children.

Only the flower stands were left, filled with baskets of posies for sale. Even the flowers were not the same. Whereas the flower stands had once been filled with the roses of England and hothouse lilies, they now had grasses from the fields and scraggly, late-blooming chrysanthemums and daisies gathered from dooryard gardens.

Du Bois scanned the faces beneath the jaunty overseas caps of khaki, especially the black faces, for a familiar one from home. By some miracle he met up with the one man in Europe he wanted most to see—his closest and dearest friend, John Hope of Atlanta. Hope wore the insignia of a YMCA secretary. He had been in France during the thick of battle, ministering to the black American soldiers in various camps. Now he was stationed in Paris.

The two friends found a little restaurant on a side street. There was no sugar and the day’s ration of bread was gone. The black-gowned owner of the restaurant was apologetic because she could only provide the Americans with a bottle of wine and a bowl of soup.

“Anything but a doughnut,” John Hope murmured. The YMCA cantonments had become famous for their doughnuts. Sometimes the future president of Atlanta University felt he had done nothing for the war except pass out doughnuts.

Du Bois and Hope exchanged news and talked about plans for the Pan-African Congress until the twilight curfew sent them out into the dark streets. Then they walked and talked half the night through.

Next day Du Bois presented his credentials at the embassy and put his proposal for the congress before an American official.

“Impossible!” the frock-coated undersecretary replied with a shrug. “The French would not permit it. Paris is still under military law, you know.”

“Then permission from the French Government is what I need?” Dr. Du Bois asked quietly.

The American official agreed, thinking no doubt, as he watched the dapper, middle-aged black man from the States make his way down the street, that he had handled the situation well. Permission to stir up trouble in the French colonies would be the last thing Paris authorities would grant.

He had reckoned without Du Bois’ knowledge of the situation. Blaise Diagne, the Senegal delegate to the French Parliament, had recruited 200,000 African warriors almost singlehandedly. France owed him an enormous debt of gratitude. And Diagne, the black Senegalese, had entertained Du Bois in 1911 after hearing his great speech at the Races Congress. Blaise Diagne was the man to see.

Du Bois met with Diagne that night at a reception at the home of Madame Claimante-Levy, the widow of Du Bois’ French publisher. A few days later the message came through from Diagne. “M. Clemenceau is considering your proposal. You must give him time.” Clemenceau, “the Tiger,” was premier of France.

It was hard to be patient, but Du Bois used the time to alert friends of Africa in the United States and to look up as many of his fellow Blacks then in France as possible.

When requests for visas began to come to the State Department at home, the official in charge, relying on the word of the American Embassy in Paris, refused visas, telling the black applicants that they had been misinformed. There would be no congress.

One man did manage to arrive, however. Monroe Trotter did not trust the word of the State Department. He did trust W. E. B. Du Bois. When his visa was refused, Trotter took a job as a cook on a French liner, crossed the ocean and showed up at Du Bois’ hotel.

Blaise Diagne had laid the matter of the congress before M. Clemenceau early in December. The month of January was almost gone by without a reply. Diagne counseled patience and then more patience.

“The old Tiger is not sleeping,” he said.

On the last day of January, patience was rewarded.

“You and your friends may call your conference,” Clemenceau told Diagne. “But act very quietly. President Wilson could find ways to stop it. It will not be a popular idea at Versailles.”

The premier himself arranged to put the ballroom of the handsome Grand Hotel at Diagne’s disposal. Du Bois was ready with a list of fifty-seven names of Blacks who could attend. Among these, sixteen were Americans already in France; twenty were from the West Indian islands; twelve were Africans from European colonies. Many more wanted to come, but England and Belgium followed the lead of the United States in refusing passports. The State Department in Washington was still saying, “There is no such congress” in the middle of February, when Du Bois, at the head of the big, rectangular table in the Grand Hotel ballroom, was calling the First Pan-African Congress to order.

Almost every man at that table, whether from Africa, the West Indies, New York, or Alabama or California had learned what he knew of Africa’s past greatness from Du Bois’ small book, The Negro, published in 1915 and translated into several languages. The history revealed there was incomplete, as later works by Du Bois and by younger historians following Du Bois would show.

Forget nothing, but set everything in its place . . . above all—Africa, Mother of Men.

The facts had long been buried in old manuscripts, slowly being rediscovered and translated into European languages or hidden still in references few could understand or interpret. Archeologists were just beginning to dig for the ruins of lost cities, for Napata and Meroe, with its glass windows and libraries and works of art of great beauty, built when the Egyptian pyramids in the North were young, and Europeans were still living in huts and caves. The archeologists had unearthed the legendary city of Timbuktu—the center for scholars a thousand years ago.

The ancient civilizations of Ethiopia and Ghana and the Bantus, the highways and rivers traveled before the Sahara became a desert, revealed to the Africans themselves and to their descendants brought to the Western Hemisphere in slavery a glorious past on which they could build a new pride. Now, in Paris, the descendants of these great civilizations were meeting together around a conference table to prepare resolutions to send to their white “masters” a few miles away in Versailles.

Dr. Du Bois’ keen vision carried further than this one congress. He saw ahead a second and a third, as many as were necessary until the final goal of true self-determination of peoples should become reality. This is what he had in mind when he said to the black soldiers drafted for the war against Germany: “You are not fighting simply for Europe, you are fighting for the world, and you and your people are a part of the world.” This was as true in the Grand Hotel ballroom as on the fields of battle.

The main business of the congress was to deal with the future of the conquered German colonies. A petition was prepared to present to the Versailles Conference, a petition with a very concrete proposal. It asked that the conquered colonies should not be returned to Germany. Neither should they be held by the victorious allies, but put in trust for the African inhabitants under the League of Nations which was being formed to keep the peace. The petition added:

Here is the opportunity for the establishment of a nation in the center of the African continent, an opportunity that may never recur. Thousands of colored men, sick of white arrogance and hypocrisy, see in this their race’s only salvation. They will not humbly accept the fate which Europe shall decide for them.

The words are from Du Bois’ pen. The vote for the petition was unanimous. The demands were not wholly ignored by the peacemakers at Versailles, for out of the demand came the trusteeship or mandate system finally adopted by the League of Nations and carried forward by the United Nations. And out of the trusteeships, though the system was often badly misused, came seeds of freedom.

Bernard Fonlon, editor of an African magazine in the Federal Republic of Cameroon, had this to say in 1965 about the effect of the small Pan-African Congress of 1919:

We in Cameroon have a special debt of gratitude to Du Bois because it was he who originated the idea of international trusteeships, an idea that shaped the course of our history for forty years and without which it is doubtful whether Cameroon could have survived as a political entity. . . . Led by Du Bois, the Pan-African Congress passed a resolution urging the allied powers to place the former German territories under international supervision for the inhabitants. ... A very striking thing it is indeed how far Du Bois was ahead of his times.

A prophet? Yes. But Du Bois was something more. He did not just prophesy and then sit on his hands. The free African nations whose ambassadors vote in the United Nations Assembly today is one example of prophecy in the Du Bois style. So is Miss Angie Brooks, a black woman from Africa, serving as president of the 1969 session of the UN Assembly. For more than fifty years, Du Bois studied in order to unearth and record the former glories of African history. He wrote three books to bring the facts to light. He plunged into the thick of the battle for freedom and justice for the African people and the descendants of Africa over the world and continued that battle to the very end of his long life.

In 1919, as he presided over the first Pan-African Congress, this man, whose ancestors were Dutch and French as well as African, who had had the best education that the West afforded, nevertheless felt himself African. Yet he had never glimpsed the African continent. That opportunity did not come until years later.

In 1923, he was somewhat reluctantly appointed special envoy to represent the then President, Calvin Coolidge, at the inauguration of a new president of Liberia. Dr. Du Bois wrote of the moment when he first saw Africa. As you read, you feel the joy of a man coming into his heritage:

When shall I forget the night I first set foot on African soil? I am the sixth generation in descent from forefathers who left this land. The moon was at the full and the waters of the Atlantic lay like a lake. All the long, slow afternoon as the sun robed herself in her western scarlet with veils of misty cloud, I had seen Africa afar. . . . Suddenly we swerved to our left and then to the right rose the twinkling hills of Monrovia, with its crowning star. Lights flashed on the shore, here, there. . . . In small boats men rowed out to the steamer. . . a few moments of greeting and I was in the great long row-boat with the President of Liberia’s aide-de-camp. The black, thin, muscular rowers took over. The boat quivered, danced beneath the moon and glided near the dark landing. Lo! I was in Africa. Neither London nor Paris nor New York has anything of its delicate, precious beauty. . . .

Chapter 10

New York City

May, 1919

“For the black men and women in the United States, the right to vote, the right to work, the right to live without insult was written in the stars.”

Dr. Du Bois had been back from Paris a month. It was a month crowded with emotions of both elation and despair. New York in springtime has a magic of its own. After the somber, war-exhausted poverty of Paris, the glittering luxury of Fifth Avenue, as seen from his office window, was almost overpowering. A line from a poem by Jack Reed kept singing in his mind: “Manhattan, zoned with ships, the crudest, youngest of all the world’s great towns.”

Youth and zest and power of youth, the city certainly had—and cruelty, too. If you were black the cruelty often overshadowed the zest and beauty. White America, self-centered, thoughtless, flaunted its cruelty in startling newspaper headlines of riots in the North, of the Ku Klux Klan riding in the South, of thousands of black workers driven away from their jobs in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The black soldiers sent off to fight the “battle of freedom and democracy” were coming home to a country more hostile than ever—those who lived to come home.

“At least,” Du Bois said to James Weldon Johnson, the newly appointed executive secretary of the NAACP, who was standing beside him at his office window, “at least the facts about their treatment in France will soon be before the public.”

In his investigations for the NAACP after the Pan-African Congress was over, Dr. Du Bois had uncovered documentary evidence so damaging that any person of good will could not help but be moved. He had not dared bring it through customs himself for fear it would be confiscated and had asked a white newspaper friend, J. Olin Howe, to pack the papers in his own luggage. The material had arrived safely and was now in print in the pages of the May Crisis.

The last week had been spent by the whole office staff in proofreading and seeing the completed, bound magazines through the press—110,000 copies. The last batch had gone out in the mail three days ago.

Since then—silence. No copies had been delivered in New York. None in Baltimore. Wires had gone out and been answered. None received in Chicago, Saint Louis, Atlanta. None across the country!

The telephone buzzed. Johnson answered in his soft Southern voice, “Yes? You’re sure?” He put his hand over the receiver. “It’s lawyer Storey, long-distance from Washington. He’s tracked the thing down. They’ve held up the Crisis at the Post Office. Won’t let the May issue through the mails!”

Du Bois was not a swearing man. No profanity crossed his lips, but his eyes blazed with anger.

“I rather think they’ll change their minds. Tell Mr. Storey I’ll leave for Washington at midnight. Unless he hears otherwise, ask him to meet me at the office of the postmaster general at ten in the morning.”

A hurried conference was called with Joel Spingarn and Arthur Garfield Hays, another NAACP lawyer, and a weary, worried Johnson.

James Weldon Johnson was a poet and a teacher of poetry, the author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which had become a sort of black national anthem. Du Bois hated to see him using his talents and strength on a fight of this kind. But working with him in the Association was a joy

All the men agreed that Du Bois would go to Washington in person to demand an explanation of the government action. They had all read the documents and knew their importance.

At their apartment in Harlem, Nina Du Bois had her husband’s bag packed and ready. How often had she packed those bags for his travels!

In Washington, Du Bois did not stop for the wearisome business of finding a room to stay in. (Washington, under Wilson’s administration, was the most segregated city in the United States.) He drank a cup of coffee at the “colored” lunch counter and found a “colored” cab driver to take him to the office of the postmaster general. Moorfield Storey was waiting. Together they met with a postal official.

Yes, the official said, It was true that the department did not intend to allow the Crisis the use of the mails. It considered the May issue “Unsuitable, derogatory to the Army and dangerous to the welfare of the country.”

It took three days to clear the matter up, with the services of skillful attorneys and a black Tammany politician with an eye on the black vote in New York. At last Du Bois’ arguments began to enter the brain of the postmaster general.

“To hold up publication will be worse for the government than to let the documents be read by the public. Denying our magazine the use of the mail will simply be an admission of the truth before the whole world. And make no mistake, the whole world will get the facts overnight.”

The order was rescinded, the magazine began going out to subscribers before Dr. Du Bois left the building.

He spent his last evening in Washington in the home of Judge and Mrs. Terrell. Mary Church Terrell was one of Du Bois’ oldest friends. She had not always seen eye to eye with his vigorous methods of struggle, but of course they were together in the matter of the Crisis mailing. Her influence and that of her distinguished husband had been useful. Mrs. Terrell had been one of the first black women in the United States to win a college education. She had been a teacher at Wilberforce when Du Bois was an undergraduate at Fisk. Now she was vice-president of the Washington chapter of the NAACP and a leader in the struggle against the complete segregation of black government workers in the capital.

“You look depressed, Will. You oughtn’t. You’ve won a victory, you know.” Mary Church Terrell was the only person alive who called Dr. Du Bois regularly by his first name. As if she were his mother. Even Nina had taken to calling him “Doctor” most of the time.

Du Bois smiled his crooked little smile, half-hidden by his mustache. “A ‘famous victory’ as you’ll agree when you read the major document we unearthed. It was put out under the signature of a couple of French lieutenants, but I understand that the order came direct from General Pershing. ‘It is important for French officers to have an exact idea of the position occupied by Negroes in the United States. . . .’ That’s the way it begins, and it goes on to explain that Negroes would be a menace to the white race if it were not that ‘an impassable gulf has been raised between them. Indulgence and familiarity are matters of grievous concern to the Americans. They consider them an affront to their national policy. . . .’ ”

Du Bois recited word for word, as if he had the document before him. “It goes on,” he said, “to give the French populace direct orders: ‘You must not eat with them, must not shake hands with them, seek to talk with them on the street or receive visits from them in your homes. It is ordered that a point be made not to spoil Negroes with indulgence. . . .’ ”

Mrs. Terrell listened with tears in her eyes. “Poor boys, poor boys, for this they were asked to cross the ocean and die!”

Du Bois, always so reserved and aloof, reached out and patted the old woman’s hand. “It was an order that was never delivered. Ten thousand copies were printed, it’s true, but a level-headed French colonel took one look at his copy and ordered the whole lot burned at once. Even if the French people had received an order such as this, I doubt if it would have been obeyed. They loved the black soldiers and treated them like human beings—and like the heroes they are. It’s fools like myself that are affronted, who believed that somehow something good could come out of this war. The fighting on both sides, Mary, was really a scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia, for wealth from the labor of colored peoples.”

“You’re not the only one who believed the fine speeches,” Mrs. Terrell answered. “A lot of well-meaning white folk supported our cause with high hopes.”

Du Bois nodded. “‘To make the world safe for democracy.’ I know. If I am depressed it is because I wonder what’s going to happen in New York, Detroit and Chicago where the black men and women have had good jobs for the first time in their lives.”

“And Washington, too. If we get through the summer without a riot, I will be surprised. But tell me, Will. Do you get any time at all for your writing—your own, I mean—your humor, your poetry, your fantasy? Is all that going to be lost to the world?”

Du Bois looked uncomfortable. He was too shy to enjoy talking about himself. Then he made a confession. “I was sick last year, and it seemed to me that I might die. I didn’t, as you see. When I recovered, I realized that I was fifty years old and wasn’t going to live forever. I began writing my autobiography. It turned out to be an odd sort of volume, not very personal except that the pieces—poems, essays and what-not—were written just because I wanted to get them said.” He stood up to leave. “I called the book Darkwater. It’s not a very happy book, I’m afraid, because these are not very happy times; but there’s a chapter on black womanhood I think you’d like. I’ll send you a copy when it comes off the press.”

Low spirits never took hold of Dr. Du Bois for long. Events proved to him that a change was coming in the attitudes of the American people.

When the 92nd Regiment—the famous black regiment—was returned from the war front and marched up Fifth Avenue, a million New Yorkers lined the sidewalks to cheer them. Du Bois, exulting, saw in that vast crowd of every color, age and condition of people an answer to those bigots who intended that the gulf between the races must be kept wide and deep. Perhaps he had not been so mistaken; for the black men and women in the United States “the right to vote, the right to work, the right to live without insult was written in the stars.”

Harlem itself reacted to the war’s end in many ways. The young artists, the story writers and poets flooded the Crisis with material. However, it was the musicians who really came into their own. Blues singers and jazz bands filled the air with music such as white America had never heard. And they began to hear it now. Coming up to Harlem, they crowded the dance halls and climbed the rickety stairs to the small theatres to listen and learn. Critics such as Heywood Broun, dramatists like Eugene O’Neill, publishers, famous poets like Vachel Lindsay and Edna St. Vincent Millay read the poems printed in the Crisis and in Opportunity, the magazine put out by the Urban League. They came seeking out their dark-skinned colleagues. Langston Hughes, Jessie Lauset, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jr., became in the early 1920’s more than names “behind the Veil.” Month by month, throughout these years, Du Bois’ engagement calendar was filled with the names of writers and publishers.

To Dr. Du Bois this “Harlem Renaissance,” as the critics called it, was a beautiful thing.

To do the work you want to do and work that is needed. . . .

The talented young people did not let him forget that it was his faith that brought it into being. Particularly was he moved to read the poems inspired by the interest in Africa—an interest that he had brought into being. Countee Cullen’s groping question, “What is Africa to me?” and Langston Hughes’ longer poem, “I Have Seen Rivers,” were widely reprinted from the Crisis and were the start of of these writers’ road to national fame.

Stimulated by all the creative work, Dr. Du Bois was impelled to write two interesting books of fiction: The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess. For two years, with Jessie Lauset and Augustus Dill, he published the unique magazine for small children called The Brownies’ Book.

Nowhere in national publications, in advertisements, in the popular (and fairly new) moving picture world could black boys and girls see faces like their own. Black children were pictured in wretched caricature or not at all. In the Brownies' Book, as in the yearly children’s issue of the Crisis, Du Bois tried to let them see that “being colored is a normal, beautiful thing, to make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race ... to point out the worthwhile things of life. . . .”

The style of this short-lived venture into children’s writing is a little old-fashioned, but to read the yellowed volumes today is to get an insight into this scholar’s tremendous understanding of the real concerns of children. This had been shown at least once before, in the great protest march against lynching which Du Bois planned and led in 1917. In the first line of march of 15,000 men and women up Fifth Avenue were rows and rows of little children walking hand in hand, their starched white dresses and suits glistening in the sun. The children and grandchildren of many of those sturdy young marchers—and of the readers of the Brownies’ Book—are among the leaders of the Black Liberation Movement today. And among the contributors to the pages of the Brownies’ Book were his daughter, Yolanda Du Bois, Alice Childress and young Shirley Graham, destined to play so great a part in the last years of Du Bois’ life.

It was at the height of the “Harlem Renaissance” that Yolanda became engaged to the poet, Countee Cullen, Jr.

They would be married when Dr. Du Bois returned from one of his long journeys in 1926. This trip was made at the invitation of the Soviet government of Russia.

The Socialist Revolution in Russia had taken place in the midst of the World War. Du Bois had rejoiced at the rising of an oppressed people. In spite of fear and criticism of the experiment among the great powers, in spite of the fact that American soldiers were among the troops of fourteen nations sent to turn the clock back to the old, repressive way of life, Du Bois had watched from afar with sympathetic interest. Now, in 1926, he had the opportunity to see for himself what was going on in the far reaches of eastern Europe. He accepted the invitation with the proviso “that the visit would not in any way bind him from making and expressing his own judgment.”

For the Russian people, the war years had dragged out far beyond the 1918 Armistice. The last of the foreign armies had not left Soviet soil until five years before Du Bois’ visit. Du Bois in his month-long travel saw war devastation, and the poverty and ignorance of a people long denied education. However, he also saw a nation of many ethnic groups living totally without a color bar. He saw organization “of wealth for use of the many and not for profit of a few.” He saw people of many different traditions, skin colors and history molding something new together.

His visit to the Soviet Union in this early stage of its socialist experiment was to have a strong influence on Du Bois’ future course of action. For the moment, however, all that happened was that he began to read seriously for himself the works of the philosopher Karl Marx. Until now, though he had for years called himself a socialist, he had been satisfied with the second-hand opinions delivered in philosophy lectures at Harvard and Berlin University. After his Russian sojourn, the Marxian comment struck like a flash of lightning: “The philosophers,” Marx had written, “have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Surely this was what Du Bois himself had been trying to do since the first meeting of the Niagara Movement—and even before.

Du Bois’ sixtieth birthday was one he had determined not to celebrate, but it was celebrated in a way that gave him great joy. It had happened that, on a lecture tour in Massachusetts, he found himself within a short drive of Great Barrington and the home of his ancestors.

“There the old house stood,” he wrote in the Crisis, “old, lonesome, empty.”

Its windowless eyes stared blindly on the broad black highway to New York. It seemed to have shrunken timidly into itself. It had lost color and fence and grass and up to the left and down to the right its sister homes were gone—dead and gone with no stick nor stone to mark their burial.

The Burghardt clan was scattered, but the mountains, the wide and lovely plain, the two rivers were as beautiful as ever, and by the brook stood the mighty wine-glass elm. His Grandfather Othello’s house was decrepit almost beyond repair. Still, Du Bois had a great longing to make it his own.

Of course there was no money for a country place. It was out of the question, but he mentioned his chance visit once or twice in idle talk with friends.

On his sixtieth birthday, a telegram came to Du Bois: “The house of the Black Burghardts is come home again. It is yours.”

This was probably Mary White Ovington’s doing. An account of the incident printed in the Crisis indicates that she had shared the idea with other friends. Du Bois’ first thought was of the iron fire tongs which he had treasured so many years. They would have a resting-place again— and so would he, in the “House of the Black Burghardts.”

This was a moment of great happiness; but the year was 1928. The people of the United States, and especially the black people, stood on the brink of trouble. The dream of restoring the old house to live in one day was destined to remain only a dream.

Chapter 11

New York City

May, 1934

“My writing is not for hire.”

The forced work-stoppage which history calls the Great Depression came early for the black people. The workers in the big cities had never recovered from displacement following the World War. By 1928, a whole year before the crash of the stock market in New York, banks and small insurance companies owned by Blacks had been quietly put out of business. White capitalists had furnished the funds needed—at a price! The colored businessmen had been so sure that they could become part of the American middle class if only they had the money to build pretty homes, to hire their fellow Blacks as servants, to drive good cars and wear the latest fashions. Abruptly, as an aftermath of war, the white capitalists refused further loans, and the Blacks lost homes and cars and businesses.

In Charleston, South Carolina, one half the population was black. By 1930 they made up three-fourths of the unemployed. In Birmingham, Alabama, fifty per cent of the black folk were without jobs.

The plight of the rural Negroes in the South was even worse. The country schools had always been on short session for black children. Now they did not open at all. The plantation owners found it hard to make a profit from growing cotton. Many had to borrow from banks. They themselves were in serious trouble. They simply passed the suffering on to their sharecroppers. These landless farmers, mostly black, who had farmed for a share of the crops now faced starvation. The Ku Klux Klan had been revived, and a reign of terror existed for black people.

“It’s no wonder that the subscriptions to Crisis have fallen away,” Du Bois said to his assistant editor, Jessie Fauset.

“Our people are coming up from the South in desperation,” she answered. “I went to Philadelphia for the weekend. A train from Atlanta had just come in at Penn Station. The station was jammed with ragged black folk who looked hungry enough to rob garbage cans in Harlem. Where is it going to end, Doctor? The relief funds that the state finally allotted are not even enough to take care of New York’s own hungry and poor.”

Du Bois did not answer. He was poring over circulation figures. He raised his head with a startled look in his eyes. “Chicago is down to almost nothing. Detroit is not much better. If this continues, Jessie, we shall be forced to go to the board for financial help to stay in print at all. You know what that means.”

“Let’s forget our own salaries for a month or two,” Miss Fauset said quietly. “At least until Mr. Johnson gets back from his stay in the Pacific islands.”

“Can you manage?” Du Bois looked grateful.

“Yes, if you can. I have only myself to think about.”

Dr. Du Bois rarely spoke about personal problems, but Jessie Fauset was aware that Yolanda’s marriage to Countee Cullen had not worked out, and Yolanda had gone to Baltimore to teach school. Mrs. Du Bois was living with Yolanda. Keeping up this second household was an expense Du Bois could not curtail.

By the time James Weldon Johnson returned in 1931, the depression was in full swing, and the Crisis was receiving funds from the general treasury of the NAACP. Moreover, Johnson confessed to Du Bois that he himself could no longer work with his assistant, Walter White. Johnson was a gentle poet, White an aggressive go-getter. Their goal—equality for their people—was the same; their methods of work, very different. White had no intention of resigning, so Johnson was leaving to teach poetry at Howard University. Walter White was elected executive secretary. Under him the finances of the Association were doing well, but the program was rapidly slipping back to the narrowest struggle against discrimination. This was a program vital to the black people twenty years earlier, but in Du Bois’ opinion, something more was needed in the world of the 1930’s.

Du Bois did not hesitate to say so. Years later, he explained in his autobiography:

The man in the White House, Herbert Hoover, who had gotten his wealth in China and Russia, kept yelling, “Prosperity is right around the corner!” As President, he drove the veterans out of Washington; when the depression broke he refused the demands of Congress for aid to the unemployed but hastened to help the banks.

Thirteen million workers—black and white and brown—and their families were without a means of livelihood, but Hoover remained stubborn. The greatest danger, to his mind, came from the threat of socialism.

Dr. Du Bois, on the other hand, had seen socialism. Since 1926 he had been studying deeply and had come to believe with Karl Marx that the way the work of a nation was organized—which is called the economy—was the base of its politics and art and social relations, rather than the other way around. To change the feelings of white America it was necessary to change the economy. It was right and necessary to keep up the struggle against discrimination and injustice, but at the same time the leadership had to find a way for black folk to work together to find a way to live.

It was not enough, Du Bois realized, to make them free Americans. What had to be done was to begin to build a different America—a truly inter-cultural nation within which black men and women and little children could assume human dignity. To try to enter the capitalist world had proved a failure. To join the movement for world socialism when Blacks were such a small and weak minority in America, and while their white fellow workers refused them admittance in the trade unions, seemed futile.

The Board of the NAACP had never understood Du Bois’ concern for unity among all the dark peoples of the earth. Now they felt justified in following Walter White back to a simple program of “No discrimination.” Du Bois struggled with the problem of change almost alone.

In 1932, just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office as President, Du Bois wrote, in the Crisis:

There is absolutely no hope for the Negro in the United States from public charity and relief. The Negro ceases to be a problem for philanthropy and becomes to himself and the world a problem of self-help. Unless the Negro can pull himself out of the present economic struggle by his own bootstraps he is doomed to a more terrible slavery in the future than he ever suffered in the past.

Joel Spingarn was puzzled by the article. “Have you given up hope in the program we stand by?” he asked Du Bois sadly. “It’s your own, you know—straight from the Niagara Manifesto. ‘Equal treatment before the law and the right to vote.’ ”

“We continue winning court cases” Du Bois said to his friend “and yet somehow, despite them, we do not seem to be getting very far.” He picked up a copy of the Baltimore Weekly and read aloud. “ ‘No white group is openly advocating the economic, political, and social equality of Negroes, except the Communists,’ I believe in socialism, and the Communists at the founding of their party in 1921 have abolished the color line in their organization, but I cannot in all honesty advise people to become Communists in this time and this place. Neither can I advise keeping on as we are doing now. I can’t close my eyes to the furniture on the sidewalks of Harlem where every day more people are without a roof over their heads or milk for their children to drink. I am trying to work out a program for the NAACP in addition to what we have.”

“Isn’t it the duty of the executive secretary to formulate policy?” Spingarn suggested.

“Isn’t it the duty of the editor of the Crisis to express an opinion if he has one? You and I have seen the NAACP develop and grow before Walter White was out of the Atlanta High School.” Du Bois spoke to Spingarn as to an old friend.

“But an organization depends on compromise, Doctor. You’ve said so a dozen times yourself.”

“I have—and do—but not at the expense of truth.”

Joel Spingarn stood up, to go back to his own office. “In your books as in the Crisis, you have given the problem of the black and white races a whole new orientation, Du Bois. Don’t think the board fails to value your judgment.” This and similar conversations with old friends on a board largely filled with newcomers should have given Du Bois some hint of trouble ahead. His mind, however, was on the new program and how to make it understandable.

The total collapse of the Hoover approach to the suffering of the people and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave Du Bois new hope, as it did the majority of American citizens. After a few false starts, the federal government took over the relief of the starving workers, not with food and shelter alone but with jobs. Du Bois saw good men brought into Washington to administer new, creative plans. Harold Ickes had been president of the Chicago Branch of the NAACP, and Harry Hopkins was a socialist. Ickes appointed Clarke Foreman, a young, white social worker from Atlanta, broad-minded and not afraid to enlist the help of Blacks. Will Alexander, one of the Southerners who had inspired an intercultural Race Relations Council in the South, also brought black advisors onto his staff. Mary McLeod Bethune, a fine black educator, and Aubrey Williams, a white radical from Alabama, were also on hand. Yet none of these excellent people could overcome the built-in discrimination against Negroes. The rate black people were paid for equal work in the South remained unequal. The amount of food hungry families were given was different for white and black.

Only in the program for artists administered by Harry Hopkins was there any approach to equality. Painters, musicians, writers, actors, without color bar, were given work within their own fields. For Blacks, it was the Harlem Renaissance come alive again on a broader scale. It was a great thing to Dr. Du Bois to watch the young men and women to whom he had given a start in the days when the Crisis could afford to pay for work done. They were in the forefront of the WPA artists’ and writers’ program. They painted bare walls with splendid murals; they wrote histories, did valuable research in the libraries; wrote, acted and danced, not in New York alone, but all over the country. Alice Childress drew her inspiration from Du Bois’ African studies for her first plays; Shirley Graham, talented daughter of Du Bois’ old friend, left Oberlin College to produce the Swing Mikado in Chicago.

However, taken as a group, the Blacks were still helpless to escape the indignities of segregation. Du Bois saw that the need for a long-term plan for economic independence was greater than ever. When they got on their feet again, they must organize in their own communities in cooperatives. The New Deal would not last forever. It did offer a chance to find out what work was needed and to get some training to carry it forward.

Early in 1934 Du Bois printed a short paragraph in the Crisis questioning the narrow view the NAACP persisted in taking. He pointed to examples when the Association had accepted the necessity of temporary segregation to gain larger ends.

The paragraph blew up a storm. Walter White took the piece in the Crisis as a personal criticism. At the next meeting of the board, on May 21, a resolution was introduced and passed: “The Crisis is an organ of the Association and no salaried officer shall criticize the work, the policy or the officers of the Association in the pages of the Crisis.”

Du Bois started to respond with an outline of his plan for economic survival in the long years ahead until real equality could be won. “As long as we are fighting a color line,” he began, “we must strive by color organization. We have no choice.”

The executive secretary interrupted. “That’s nothing but self-segregation. Nothing of the sort must appear in the Crisis.”

“I am afraid the sort of campaign for co-operatives based on community control of business will weaken the struggle for justice, Doctor,” Joel Spingarn said. His concern in the NAACP was always the fight against the injustice of discrimination of his fellow Americans. Spingarn loved and venerated the editor of the Crisis. He was Du Bois’ closest friend in New York, but he had been troubled by Du Bois’ concern for Africa, and now by the criticism of what seemed to him to be the economic base of America’s greatness.

Du Bois’ first reaction was to state, as he had so often before, that the opinions expressed in the Crisis were his own affair. Then he pulled himself up short. The NAACP general fund for several years now had put up the money to pay for printing the magazine and even to pay his own salary. With that act, the board got the power over editorial content. Du Bois’ pride and his hurt would not let him continue the argument. There was only one thing to do. He would have to resign.

Du Bois spoke briefly of his long years of service.

“I have not always been right,” he said, “but I have been sincere, and I am unwilling at this late day to be limited in the way which the board proposes.... I am therefore resigning, the resignation to take place immediately.”

The members of the board were astounded. They refused to accept Du Bois’ resignation. Joel Spingarn, Mary Ovington and Oswald Villard begged him to reconsider. Du Bois agreed to delay his decision for two weeks. In the Depression he had lost his home, his small savings, even the gift of the “House of the Black Burghardts.” These had seemed small losses in the midst of so much general suffering. To lose the Crisis was like losing a child.

Mary White Ovington asked Dr. Du Bois to come down to her studio in Greenwich Village for tea.

“There must be some way to solve the dilemma,” she said. “To put the Crisis in the hands of strangers is unthinkable.” Couldn’t the Doctor arrange to buy a partnership in the magazine? To separate it partly from the Association? Funds could be raised. Even in a time of depression there were still those who had money. And now, with President Roosevelt’s New Deal. . . .

Du Bois smiled, not in merriment but in sorrow. The Crisis was the organ of the NAACP. It had been conceived as such and nurtured over the years. Her generous plan was impossible.

“But Joel Spingarn pointed out that you, yourself, have said that the secret of a successful organization is compromise.”

“Only to a point,” Du Bois answered. “A broadening of policy, a change toward building a different America, an America able to move toward the socialism you and I both believe in, seems to me an absolute necessity for my people. I can’t compromise with truth.” He would, he said, be a friend of the NAACP as long as they would let him. “But to edit a house organ that imposes silence where outspoken opinion is called for—that I cannot do.”

Silently Mary Ovington poured fresh tea in his cup. “The board is really stunned,” she said. “They trust and depend on you, Doctor.”

“When we have nothing and they have everything, where is the ‘trust?’ The Crisis can no longer pay for itself. Who pays the piper calls the tune in this world. But my writing is my own. My writing is not for hire.”

“You won’t reconsider? You’ll let the Crisis go?”

“My resignation must stand, Mary.” Dr. Du Bois had never called her by her first name before. It would not happen again.

She said, “What work will you do?” To begin a new career at the age of sixty-six is not an easy thing, even for a man as vigorous and youthful in spirit as W. E. B. Du Bois.

“Go back to Atlanta, I think. You’ve met John Hope. Ever since he was elected president of the university, John has been wanting me to join his faculty. I shall be free to teach and write what I please—as free as a black man can be in Georgia. Hope is my oldest friend. Our association goes back a long way, since before the Niagara Movement.”

“Longer than my friendship for you . . .” Mary’s voice trailed off. Her hair had turned quite white. For almost half her lifetime she had worked at Du Bois’ side.

“Yes, John Hope is my oldest friend—alive.” It may be that Du Bois was thinking of Monroe Trotter who, less than a month ago, had walked or jumped off the roof of the building in Boston which was both his home and the office of his paper, the Guardian. Strangers had found his crushed body on the street below.

Trotter had refused to come into the NAACP because he mistrusted white leadership. Yet it was the white woman who over the years had proved herself Du Bois’ staunchest supporter, while a black man was ready to destroy his work of twenty-five years . . . truly, goodness was not the possession of one race.

“You’re not resigning from the NAACP?” Mary Ovington’s question broke through his reverie.

“No. I’d do nothing to hurt the Association. Its work remains as useful as ever—as far as it goes.”

She put out her hand to say good-bye. “You are a great man, Dr. Du Bois.”

A twinkle came into Du Bois’ somber eyes. “Being a ‘great man’ can be a pretty lonely thing. Thank you for the tea, Miss Ovington.”

With springy, youthful stride, he ran down the stairs.

Chapter 12

Atlanta, Georgia

August, 1934

“John Hope and I set out to build in the lower South a university equal, if not superior, to anything which this former state of slavery ever saw.”

On a hot August morning, 1934, John Hope, president of Atlanta University, paced the platform of the depot, waiting for the train from New York to come to a puffing halt. He could have brought a delegation to greet the new head of the department of sociology, the illustrious W. E. B. Du Bois. He chose, however, to meet his friend alone, treasuring the moments they would have together on the drive back to the university. Mrs. Du Bois would, of course, not be with the Doctor. Since the death of their little son in Atlanta and since the riot she had lived through in that city, his wife had come to fear the South. She could never face the thought of living there again. Eventually, even the struggle in New York became too much for her. Nina Du Bois had found a certain contentment in the home Du Bois had bought in Baltimore. As always, when his travels took him to the area, Du Bois had stopped off to see Nina on his trip southward. That his wife should accompany him on his return to Atlanta had probably not even been discussed.

“John!” Dr. Du Bois was the first passenger off the Pullman. The New Deal had wrought a minor victory. The railroads headed South no longer herded black passengers into Jim Crow coaches at Washington. Nice for the few blacks who could pay for a drawing room. Du Bois came, carrying a Boston bag and a bulging briefcase. His trim figure, his carriage was that of a man half his age. The two friends made their way through the grimy “Colored Waiting Room” to the street.

“You can’t imagine how I’ve looked forward to your companionship,” John Hope said jubilantly, as he guided his Model-T Ford through Atlanta’s busy streets. “And to think it’s not just for a dinner and theatre in New York or a walk through the streets of Paris if we happen to be there at the same time, but for the rest of our lives!” He glanced at the briefcase clutched between Du Bois’ knees. “I suppose you’ve come loaded down with work as usual.”

“Work and plans for work.” Du Bois chuckled. “The history of Black Reconstruction is almost ready for the printer. So is the volume I’ve been working on with Dr. Guy Johnson, the introductory work for the African Encyclopedia—I wrote you about both those projects. I thought up a few more for the immediate future on the train coming down.”

Du Bois pulled a crumpled envelope out of his pocket. It was covered with his small, neat script. He looked side-wise at his friend with mischief in his eye.

“There’s the matter of my seminars. I’d like to include one on communism. It will be almost the first in any major American university, and high time, too. Sociology students need to know that there is more than one system of economic organization in the world today. I don’t intend to recommend the communism of Soviet Russia for the United States, but neither do I want black folk to repeat America’s mistakes. Karl Marx says that the way people earn their living largely determines the direction of their thought, culture and relations toward their fellows. And I consider Marx the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth Century—a man who cannot be ignored.”

John Hope smiled. “I think I can guarantee you complete academic freedom in your department, Doc. That’s my reward for serving as president of a university.”

Du Bois relaxed. One hurdle was over. Working with John was going to be everything he’d hoped. He plunged ahead with the outline of further goals.

“I thought we might go ahead at once with that scholarly quarterly you and I dreamed up over the red wine at the Champlain on your last visit to New York. It could be a vehicle of expression for students, black and white, who are interested in interpreting history in terms of race. How does Phylon strike you as a title?”

“If you know Greek, it will be perfectly clear that it’s just Greek for ‘Race.’ But how many college graduates know Greek today?”

“I thought it a catchy name and easy to remember.” Du Bois was disappointed.

“Cheer up, my learned friend. I think its mystery might be a drawing card. But publications cost money. The Rockefellers have been generous to Atlanta with their funds, but they prefer to see it spent on tangible things—like buildings and monuments. Miss Florence Read, president of Spelman, our women’s college, is a Rockefeller. She is also treasurer of the university. I hope you two are going to like each other,” he added shyly. “Miss Read is a fine administrator and has been very kind to me.”

“But surely, John, she’ll recognize that such a journal will be important to whites as well as to the darker races. ‘Race’ is a term that applies to all mankind.”

Du Bois did not wait for an answer but hurried on to his final, most pressing plan. This was, in short, to draw together all the colleges for Negroes to prepare studies leading to the program for black community economic organization.

“Harry Hopkins’ WPA and the New Deal won’t last forever,” he explained. “When it stops, what then? The Negro colleges, especially the land-grant colleges in every Southern state, can stand ready to help our people build a different America. The land-grant colleges get federal funds. If they agree, we can act without depending on private philanthropy. I realize now that it was fear of the reaction of the moneyed men that made the board of the NAACP refuse to allow me to begin this work.”

“You’re right about the need of planning, Du Bois. You always see farther ahead than the rest of us,” John Hope answered soberly. They were driving into the serene and spacious campus as he spoke, with its lawns and drives and buildings created by gifts, over the long years, from rich men and women from the North. Du Bois noticed that the surrounding slums were still there—a little shabbier, a little dirtier than twenty-five years ago.

“These last two projects of yours may be delayed, Doc. The beautiful thing about having you here where we can dream and strive together is that we have time. You don’t know what it means to me to have you.”

Time! This was just what they did not have. For a little less than two years Dr. Du Bois and John Hope enjoyed the warm companionship the two lonely men had longed for.

The work in the department of sociology went well. Du Bois’ assistants, especially Dr. Ira Reid, were capable and far-seeing. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction came out. Its angry rejection in most of the South was more than made up for by the acclaim the book received from historians in important national universities, particularly at Harvard and Columbia. Never again would the biased, bloody picture of the years after the Civil War, when the freedmen had some degree of political power, go unchallenged. The fact that Dr. Du Bois, the author, taught there brought prestige to Atlanta University.

It was true that in these first two years the Phylon remained only a dream. Funds for publication were not yet forthcoming. Nor was much progress made for the economic study of the black communities in the South. Miss Read couldn’t see any useful purpose independent sociological studies could serve. Business would find a place for deserving Negroes as soon as it recovered from the depression. There was no need to drag in the land-grant colleges and get black communities up in the air about managing their own affairs. However, Dr. Du Bois was learning patience. As John Hope repeated so often, there was time.

Then in the spring of 1936, John Hope took sick and died.

To Dr. Du Bois, John and his friendship were the source of his strength and happiness at the university. With John Hope at his side he had seen in the isolation of university life a chance to think and plan and write, away from a world in turmoil. Western Europe was in deep trouble. Mussolini ruled Italy, and Hitler was rising to power in Germany. The just-born Republic of Spain was being invaded by a Spanish reactionary army from Gibraltar. Both Hitler and Mussolini were helping General Franco with arms and planes and soldiers. Mussolini’s Fascists were also attacking black Ethiopia. Both the Fascists in Italy and Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany had come to power on the promise of destroying the Communist supporters in their own countries, and on that basis had won the approval of Big Business in the United States. When Soviet Russia came to the aid of the Spanish Republic with planes and men, President Roosevelt proclaimed his neutrality.

Hitler in Germany appeared to have adopted many of the racist theories of the most reactionary white Southerners, simply changing “nigger-hating” to suit his particular scapegoats, the Jews. All these events crowded into Du Bois’ consciousness from second-hand reports. After Hope’s death the isolation of Atlanta University seemed intolerable. He longed to see for himself, to judge for himself the meaning of the dreadful turn of events abroad.

Travel for Du Bois was not merely solace and relaxation. He considered it necessary and in many ways the most important part of his own education. From his first crossing of the ocean to the last, once outside the United States he felt himself a man, simply a member of the striving, struggling human race. This was never more true than in the summer of 1936. With the sensitivity of a novelist and poet, he could enter the lives of the people of any country. With his sense of history, he could relive the past in the presence of older cultures and refresh his eyes in the presence of the beauty of the earth.

The journey of 1936 took Du Bois around the whole world. After five months in Germany, England, France and Austria, he crossed the Soviet Union from Moscow to Asiatic Siberia. He visited China and Japan for the first time and returned to Atlanta by way of the Hawaiian Islands and California. Everywhere he saw upheaval and the tumult of change. In Asia, though he did not know the languages, he felt himself strongly at one with the darker peoples. China had gone through one fight for freedom led by the patriot and scholar, Sun Yat-Sen. Yet he perceived that the white colonialists held the Chinese people in the same contempt that they did his beloved African peoples. He saw parks and palaces in Peking and whole sections of Shanghai flaunting signs: No Chinese Allowed. Jim-Crowed in their own country! He saw British and American gunboats in the harbors of Japan. Yet Du Bois wrote of the journey a few years later: “Singularly enough I was most impressed with the poignant beauty of the world in the midst of distress.”

Back in Atlanta, calm and refreshed, Dr. Du Bois plunged into work. A new president, Rufus Clement, occupied John Hope’s office. That Clement was a black man and something of a scholar was a relief. Miss Read had actively campaigned for the position.

Du Bois determined to put up a fight for his long-delayed projects, the quarterly magazine and the studies for a new economic base for the Southern Negro. His only interruption from these struggles came in February, 1938, on his seventieth birthday. Ira Reid and Rayford Logan, his colleagues, staged an elaborate celebration in his honor. It gave Du Bois great pleasure to have Joel Spingarn as one of the speakers at the convocation. This was the last time the two friends would see each other. Just a short time after Spingarn returned to his work at NAACP Du Bois got news of his death.

The news came as a shock to Du Bois. He had been at work from time to time on another one of his unusual autobiographical volumes, like the Darkwater he had written at the age of fifty. The new book, again, dealt much less with events in his personal life than with the problems of race in the United States and in the world. The convocation held in celebration of his seventieth birthday, where Joel Spingarn had spoken so feelingly of their work together in the NAACP, moved Du Bois greatly. He had not realized how highly Joel respected his writings. Through his fifty years of literary effort, beginning with publication of The Souls of Black Folk and going on to the essays and satires and stinging humor in the volumes of the Crisis, he had changed people—a few at least.

The tone of the new book was different. As Du Bois explained in the foreword, it

. . . began to record that subtle sense of coming day which one feels of early mornings, even when mist and murk hang low.

The foreword concludes:

I have written then what is meant to be not so much my autobiography as the autobiography of a concept of race. ... If the first two books [The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater] were written in tears and blood, this is set down with wider hope, in some more benign fluid. Wherefore I have not hesitated in calling it Dusk of Dawn.

Dusk of Dawn is dedicated to Joel Spingarn, “Scholar and Knight.” It was published in 1940, just a few months after the first beautiful issue of the Phylon appeared. Dr. Du Bois wrote in the opening statement introducing the quarterly journal:

Looking over the world today, we see as incentive to economic gain, as cause of war and as infinite source of cultural inspiration nothing is so important as race and group contact. Here, if anywhere, Science is needed—not to obliterate race and group distinctions but to study them ... to make straight the path to a common world humanity through the development of cultural gifts to their highest possibilities.

That is what the journal was about; and twenty-five years later, after Du Bois was dead, one of the succeeding editors wrote: “Phylon and W. E. B. Du Bois are inseparable.”

There remained to the seventy-year-old militant the problem of funds and cooperation of the land-grant colleges for the program of black community jobs. Du Bois began his tireless journeys under wartime conditions from Southern state to Southern state, explaining his program for the black cooperative communities to live and grow strong. The idea was really quite simple. The investigators at the land-grant colleges would knock on doors in every community, find out what people needed, what work they would like to do—could do if they were trained for it. Then they would be trained and go to work producing what they needed.

In June, 1942, the presidents of all the land-grant colleges voted to adopt the proposed program. Every state college would study its local situation and resources. They would report at a yearly conference to representatives of three black universities, Howard, Fisk and Atlanta. W. E. B. Du Bois, by unanimous choice, would be official coordinator and editor of the proposed studies.

The first conference was held at Morehouse College on the Atlanta campus in the spring of 1943. Thirty-four black scholars took part and eight well-known white sociologists were also invited as observers. Dr. Du Bois was jubilant.

A second conference was planned for the spring of 1944. In early January, when the yellow forsythia was coming into blossom outside his office window, Dr. Du Bois sat at his desk. He was reviewing the invitation list for the conference. His secretary came in to say that President Clement was outside and would like a few minutes with him, if the Doctor were free.

Dr. Du Bois greeted the younger man cordially. “I was just looking over the letters we received from the visiting sociologists at last year’s conference,” he explained, “and was wondering whether we ought to invite the same gentlemen again. What do you think, Dr. Clement?”

The president of the university did not answer. He shifted his position in the armchair uncomfortably. “It isn’t about the conference I came to speak to you, professor. That is, not directly.” He cleared his throat and began again. “As you know, the trustees met yesterday evening. A resolution was proposed and passed, Dr. Du Bois, retiring you from your position on the university faculty, the retirement to take place at the end of this semester.”

Retirement? Du Bois said afterward that he felt the world tottering beneath his feet, but he gave no hint of despair in his voice that day. He was a fighter, and he would fight for the work he had planned to do. It was important for the future development of his people. Clement was a black man himself. Surely he would see. “Perhaps I misunderstood you, Dr. Clement. When John Hope appointed me to this professorship he said it was for life.”

“We can find no written record of your appointment, Du Bois. And you are seventy-six years old, ten years past the retirement age.”

“I was past the retirement age when I was appointed, Dr. Clement! I imagine Miss Read had a hand in this . . . dismissal. She has never forgiven me for expressing a preference for you, sir, as Hope’s successor. Florence Read wanted your job.”

“Miss Read proposed the resolution, true. I seconded it, myself,” Clement answered bluntly.

“And the land-grant college conferences? Did you consider that the university is throwing away the opportunity to lead a great scientific experiment? The Negro working people are going to be in difficulties after this war against foreign fascism is won.”

“I dare say your leadership will not prove indispensable, Dr. Du Bois. Though I may postpone this year’s conference to a later date.”

Without another word the president of the university rose and left the room.

Du Bois’ fears for the land-grant colleges program proved well-founded. “There were,” he explained somewhat later, “valiant efforts to carry the program forward.” It was transferred to Howard University with E. Franklin Frazier in charge, and an excellent conference was held in 1945. But the opportunity was surrendered, and the whole science of sociology has suffered. White scholars—or worse still, white businessmen—would do the planning for black people. Sociology as a science would be by-passed and reduced to “welfare work.”

As for his own future, it looked bleak and uncertain. Dr. Du Bois had never made money a major consideration, never asked for a raise in salary. His royalties from books were not enough to live on. Literary work such as his did not reach the best-seller lists. The moving picture industry did not bid for movie rights. He was a teacher, a poet, a social scientist and historian, a prophet—and black. Such men do not become millionaires. He had saved less than five thousand dollars after a lifetime of work.

“After seventy-five in the United States,” he said to himself, “it is assumed that your life work is done.” Yet even now, under this blow, he felt no lessening of his powers. He did not want idle leisure and comfort. The heaven he so often defined as “being able to earn your living doing work that one could do and that needed doing” seemed at this moment very far away.

Certainly the last thing in the rejected scholar’s mind was that which actually was to happen: a return to the NAACP office in New York as consultant on foreign affairs in the autumn of 1944.

Chapter 13

San Francisco, California

April, 1945

“Here is the chance for young women and young men ... to lift again the banner of humanity and to work toward a civilization . . . which will be healthy and unafraid.”

The guns of war were not yet silenced. Across both oceans, the dead lay unburied in the rubble of ruined cities and in burned-out fields and forests. But the tide had turned toward an allied victory. The remaking of the world had begun.

Plans for a conference of the representatives of the nations who were fighting together against the forces of fascism had been laid some months earlier in remote places whose names were strange to the American people—at Persian Teheran and at Yalta in the Russian Crimea. In these remote cities President Roosevelt of the United

States had met with Winston Churchill, prime minister of England, and Marshall Stalin of the Soviet Union. They had agreed that a new pattern of world cooperation must be created. Detailed preparations for the beginning of a “brave new world,” for the setting up of a permanent United Nations organization had gone forward. The date for the opening of the Founding Conference—April 21, 1945—was chosen; and the place, San Francisco.

On this April morning, the representatives of a “thousand million allies,” as a United Nations pamphlet put it, were coming together to set up, in the midst of war, the machinery of peace. They came by plane and ship and train —not only appointed delegates with their secretaries and advisors were converging on the city on the shore of the Pacific, but also consultants from non-governmental organizations, and observers, and newsmen and radio commentators by the dozen. (Television had yet to be perfected; radio was the enthralling means of world communications in World War II.)

One man would not be present—the initiator of the whole plan for a United Nations organization. On April 12, while working on his speech to open the conference, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. The conference nevertheless would go on as planned. It was too important to be delayed even by the death of this great man.

Dr. Du Bois arrived from New York by train. He had been chosen by the NAACP board to act as consultant representing the Association.

When the news broke, almost a year ago, of Du Bois’ forced retirement from Atlanta University, Arthur Spingarn had urged Dr. Du Bois to come back to the Association as director of special research. Arthur Spingarn was the brother of Du Bois’ dead friend, Joel. Du Bois had hesitated to accept because of the differences in thinking of the executive secretary, Walter White, and himself, but everyone assured him of a warm welcome.

Du Bois had asked only for an office with room for his large library, and freedom to do his writing and speaking. The salary offered would be sufficient for him to live on with his usual frugality.

Du Bois had moved into a small apartment in Harlem close to Paul Robeson and other congenial friends. Here and at his new work, he was reasonably content, although he and his secretary, Irene Diggs, and his books in a six-by-ten-foot windowless cubbyhole off of Walter White’s spacious quarters was certainly not the adequate office he had been promised. Nor had it ever been made quite clear what role the Association intended for its illustrious founder.

It was not until his election as consultant for the forthcoming United Nations Conference that Du Bois had felt really useful. He had put aside work on his book, The World and Africa, and plunged into activity. He had met with Mayor La Guardia and with members of the NAACP board. He had had long discussions with black political leaders such as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, the first Afro-American to sit in the national legislative body since Reconstruction, and with Benjamin Davis, black member of the New York City Council, from Harlem. He had long, fruitful talks with Robeson and Alphaeus Hunton at the Council for African Affairs. Here, too, he had rejoiced to meet with young African students who were attending various Negro colleges.

Through the young Africans Du Bois discovered that the whole world of colored peoples of which the Afro-Americans were a small part had been virtually left out of the United Nations Conference. He began to devise ways by which he could speak in behalf of their needs.

All this while Walter White had been out of the country. A few days before time to leave for San Francisco, White returned. The executive secretary had stopped in Washington on the way home and arrived at the NAACP office bringing the formal credentials from the State Department. Quite casually he pointed out that he, as executive director, was named official consultant. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune were listed as White’s assistants.

Dr. Du Bois was indignant, but he made no complaint. He had plans and intended to carry them out, whatever his title.

“White evidently wants me for his ghost writer,” he said. “But I am not yet a ghost.”

The train across the continent was crowded with friends and acquaintances, but Du Bois kept to himself on his three-day journey. The immensity of the country, the grandeur of the scenery engaged him whenever he raised his eyes from his mass of notes. Africa, Asia, the wide sweep of the Soviet and Chinese countryside, as he had seen it on his trip around the world, came constantly to his mind.

These lands lay devastated now by war. Only America was untouched, as if it had been saved somehow for great deeds of peace.

“We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community,” President Roosevelt had said in his last inaugural address. “Have we?" Du Bois asked himself. He was weighed down by the knowledge that, as in World War I, no delegates from any colonized land were speeding toward San Francisco.

Du Bois loved the United States. The country had great beauty. Its lakes, its rivers, its mountains and hillsides and green valleys stretched mile on mile before the old man’s eyes. But constantly his inner voice was whispering of the suffering and injustice white America inflicted on his people—how the whole white world had oppressed darker peoples. Would the San Francisco Conference show them to be members of the human community? What could he, seventy-seven-year-old assistant consultant from a somewhat less than militant organization, do—what could he do to bring about a change?

The train from the East does not carry its passengers all the way into the city of San Francisco. Oakland—across the bay—is the stopping-place. In 1945 passengers were ferried across the bay.

The morning fog over the water that April day had not lifted. It was cold on the deck of the ferryboat, but Du Bois bared his face to the wind, staring ahead. The fog bank hung as low as the doubts that clouded his hopes, as gray as the man-made war still raging.

Halfway across the water, the gray veil lifted abruptly. The fog streamed out to sea, revealing glittering towers and white houses rising tier on tier on the hills—a city of light! Du Bois’ spirits, always moved by beauty, soared high.

On the dock at the Ferry House he made out the small, trim figure of Ethel Nance, come to meet him. She was the daughter of an old colleague from the Middle West, living now in Oregon. He had arranged for her to come to San Francisco to act as his secretary during the conference. A capable young woman and a welcome sight.

“The NAACP chapter tried its best to get you an office near the Opera House where the conference meetings will be held, Doctor,” Mrs. Nance said when they were settled in a taxi and she had given a Geary Street address. “But the city is jam-packed and . . .” She dropped her eyes and hesitated.

“And they don’t like to rent to black people,” Du Bois helped out bluntly. “Don’t be afraid to say it out loud, Ethel. We should shout injustice—otherwise it will never be ended.”

The young woman nodded gratefully. “Mr. Griffin, head of the local NAACP, has given you one of the Association offices—just a few blocks from the Opera House. Your box of books and papers came, and they’re all laid out and ready.”

“Good,” Dr. Du Bois smiled. He knew Noah Griffin, too. He had been a classmate of Yolanda’s at Fisk.

The United Nations Founding Conference was one of the major events in San Francisco’s history. Never had so many distinguished personalities from so many parts of the world held the center of the stage in one spot. Although the Allies expected months more of war in the Pacific, the fighting in Europe had nearly ended. The German surrender and Hitler’s suicide came while the conference was still in session. Surrender in Europe came on May 7, just a week after the first full open meeting in the Opera House. The conference did not end until June 26th.

For two months Dr. Du Bois wrote, talked, pleaded with all his potent eloquence the cause of unrepresented peoples at the conference. He arrived at his office at the San Francisco Branch Headquarters at promptly ten o’clock each morning. So promptly that the office workers joked and said that they could set their watches by “Doc’s” arrival.

If there were an open meeting at the Founding Conference or a committee meeting he had been asked to attend, he would walk briskly to the Civic Center of which the Opera House was a part, pass through the curious onlookers outside the chained-off area and present his credentials to the security guards. Fairly often he was mistaken for some mid-Eastern diplomat, but once a guard, without glancing at his card, said “Go right in, Mr. Smut.” Jan Smut, prime minister of South Africa, the inventor of “apartheid”—that system of near-slavery which outdoes Jim Crow in Mississippi—had made South Africa the most unpleasant place in all the world for a black man to live. Dr. Du Bois was not complimented, but he chuckled when he thought how Smut would feel if he were mistaken for W. E. B. Du Bois!

There were meetings with the United States secretary of state to which Walter White was invited and not Du Bois. Every statement to the press, however, every paper presented on behalf of the black people and for human rights was prepared by Du Bois. And he used his European prestige and his friendship with certain members of the Chinese delegation to press the cause of the African and Asian colonized people.

It was a busy and frustrating two months. There were moments when it seemed that the United Nations organization would not come into being at all.

The structure, the form of a world organization was, however, finally whipped into shape.

Typical of Du Bois’ feeling about the weakness of the charter was this statement written May 16:

The attempt to write an International Bill of Rights into the San Francisco Conference without any specific mention of the people living in colonies seems to me a most unfortunate procedure. . . . The omission of specific reference to these peoples is almost advertisement of their exclusion as not citizens of free states and that their welfare and freedom would be considered only at the will of the countries owning them. . . .

By the end of the conference it was clear to Du Bois that the pressure for African freedom must come outside the UN from Africans themselves. With George Padmore of Trinidad, Du Bois pushed forward efforts to hold an immediate Pan-African Congress.

The Fifth Pan-African Congress was spearheaded by African workers. The date was set for October at Manchester, England. Dr. Du Bois was the only Afro-American invited to attend. Du Bois and young Kwame Nkrumah, former student at Lincoln University, were elected as co-chairmen. Its theme was Freedom Now for Africa.

Du Bois was called on to preside at the first and at most of the other sessions. The hall was filled with ninety-four delegates—26 from Africa itself, another 35 Africans then living in England and 33 from the Caribbean Islands. Behind the delegates sat men and women from colonies who had not elected representatives, as well as Englishmen of the Independent Labor Party, observers from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Negro Welfare Association. Du Bois recognized old friends from earlier conferences and several black students Paul Robeson had brought to meet him in New York. Nkrumah of the “Gold Coast,” destined to become the president of a free Ghana, had already become a valued friend. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Hastings Banda of Malawi were there, and F. T. Wallace Johnson of Sierra Leone, S. Ralna of Tanganyika, and Magnus Williams, personal representative of Dr. Mandi Azikiwe. All would in the next decade take leadership in freeing their countries of colonial rule.

The South African novelist, Peter Abraham, had come, carrying The Souls of Black Folk with him because, he said, it was this book which taught him who he was. And they called Du Bois from America, “Father,” because he had brought Pan-Africanism into being early in the century, and by his faith and his persistence and his books on African history had nourished the movement and kept it alive.

Now young Africa was ready to speak for itself: “We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. All colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control.”

Dr. Du Bois was elected international president of a newly-formed Pan-African Federation and empowered to present a resolution to the Secretariat of the United Nations. The UN would, just four days after the close of the Pan-African Congress (October 24, 1945), hold its first assembly in a factory building in the borough of Queens, New York City. The resolution urged as “first, proper and necessary that provision be made for the participation of the African colonial peoples . . . to the maximum extent possible under the present charter of the United Nations.”

Du Bois returned to New York well-satisfied, and the young Africans went forth to agitate, to go to jail, a few to lose their lives, but most of them to win through to freedom for their countries. One by one within less than two decades their forty flags would be flying with the flags of the founding nations in front of an exquisite new United Nations building in New York. Who would he free must themselves strike the blow.

Perhaps inspired by the memory of those young Africans at the Manchester Conference, Dr. Du Bois a few months later made one of the great prophetic speeches of his life to an audience of Southern young people, black and white, at Columbia, South Carolina.

At the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1947 he laid down guidelines by which the struggle for democracy was carried forward in the South in the 1960’s. In “Behold the Land,” as this historic address was called, he declared:

You have got to make the people of the United States know what is going on in the South. You have got to use every field of publicity to force the truth into their ears and before their eyes. You have got to make it impossible for any human being to live in the South and not realize the barbarities that prevail there.

At the same time he poured out his love for the beauty of the Southern landscape.

Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other and dare not face a future of equal, independent human beings in a real and not a sham democracy. To rescue this land in this way calls for the great sacrifice; this is the thing you are called on to do. Because you are embarked on a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, black and white; the up-building of democracy . . . here in the South. . . . Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization . . . which will be healthy and unafraid. . . .

“Time is long,” but in ten years, as if in answer to W. E. B. Du Bois’ voice, Rosa Parks would say No! on a Montgomery bus, and in fifteen years the Freedom Rides and the sit-ins would change the land.

Chapter 14

New York City

January, 1949

“The problem is that of getting the truth to the masses of citizens in the United States. ... It is going to take guts and the willingness to jeopardize jobs and respectability.”

On New Year’s morning, 1949, a remarkable procession marched along the sidewalk of 40th Street just west of Fifth Avenue. Paul Robeson, world-famous singer and actor, former all-American athlete, carried a heavy box on his shoulder as if it were filled with feathers instead of books and manuscripts. Professor Alphaeus Hunton followed, as dignified as if he were about to deliver a lecture at Howard University. His long arms embraced a portrait of Frederick Douglass, and his overcoat pockets bulged with ebony sculpture and other mementoes from over the world. Half a dozen other well-known figures followed with more pictures, more books. Plump and pretty Shirley Graham, author of a new biography of Frederick Douglass, strode along with a wastebasket filled with office supplies. She was humming a freedom song as they entered the attractive small, white building with Council on African Affairs in black letters over the door.

It was moving day for their friend and mentor W. E. B. Du Bois. The sprightly old man brought up the rear of the procession, swinging the fire tongs that had belonged to his Grandfather Othello.

It was in a way a freedom march. Du Bois, dismissed from the NAACP, was, for the first time in his long career, freed from the pressure of being spokesman of a university or an organization that depended for its support on wealthy philanthropists. At the Council on African Affairs he would have no salary. He had nothing beyond his small pension to live on—but he would be free to express his innermost beliefs, “to do the work he wanted to do and that needed doing,” without hindrance.

When the break with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came—as Du Bois had known, since San Francisco, that it must—he had accepted at once the invitation to serve as vice-chairman of the council. Hunton and Robeson had explained that they could offer the services of a secretary and an excellent office but had no funds for anything more.

Dr. Du Bois understood perfectly the reasons why. Paul Robeson and a talented young YMCA secretary, Max Yergan, had planned the council at the beginning of the war. It was designed to bring to the American public some knowledge of the arts of Africa—the painting, sculpture, music and dance. For that sort of thing there was no lack of financial support. At the war’s end and particularly after the Fifth Pan-African Congress, the council had moved toward work for African liberation. Du Bois’ book, The World and Africa, published in 1947, had played a part in rousing interest in the subject of African freedom. But independence for colonies, whether “owned” by European allies or merely controlled indirectly by American Big Business, was a touchy subject for the State Department.

The government had changed its beliefs since the day when President Roosevelt said, “We have learned that we are all members of the human family.” The change began with the successful experiments of harnessing atomic energy in the spring of 1945. Mankind could draw at will on a vast new source of energy. Americans had not accomplished this great feat alone. Indeed, American scientists who worked on the project were outnumbered by German anti-Nazis, by Italians, Scandinavians, British and French. The costly work had been undertaken in great secrecy as a defense measure in the war. Its value to the future of mankind was almost too great to imagine. Nothing seemed beyond the power of human beings if they could tap this central source of energy on earth.

In Dr. Du Bois’ judgment, keeping secret this great experiment from the enemy made sense. But the decisionmakers were determined that it be kept secret as well from Soviet Russia and Communist China, our allies throughout World War II. This was because they feared the spread of public ownership under socialism and the lessening of power and wealth of private capital.

They used the discovery of a way to split the atom to make bombs to increase their own power, to keep power over weaker nations in the Western world, over the dark-skinned and oppressed and to prevent the socialist experiment from spreading in the world.

A letter from the leading scientists who had contributed their knowledge to the making of the bombs was on Roosevelt’s desk, unanswered when he died. The letter begged that the bomb not be used to kill human beings.

But it was so used in August, 1945—used without warning over two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 200,000 civilians, men, women and children, were killed, maimed, blinded or made permanently ill.

World War II was ended. The “Cold War” dividing the family of man began. As Albert Einstein sorrowfully said: “With the splitting of the atom everything on earth changed except the thinking of men!”

The thinking of men . . . men were told not to think of cooperation, not to think of freedom for African or Asian colonized peoples, not to think of peace.

The Council on African Affairs, concerned as it was with all of these things, was one of the first organizations to be put on a government “subversive list.” Paying members hastily resigned. Max Yergan bowed out. Robeson and Alphaeus Hunton, scholar and historian from Howard University, stood firm in their determination to speak their minds. Dr. Du Bois joyously moved up to the firing line.

“I accepted for two reasons,” he explained in his third, and last, autobiography. “First because of my belief in the work which the Council should do for Africa and secondly because of my belief that no man or organization should be denied the right to a career because of political or religious beliefs.”

His office was arranged that New Year’s Day, 1949. Books were put in place on spacious shelves that extended to the ceiling. The pictures of Nina and Yolanda and of Burghardt, the little boy who had been dead almost half a century, stood on Du Bois’ desk; close by was the famous calendar ready for new goals for a new year. And the goal that would be written there was peace. The portrait of Frederick Douglass hung on the white wall. The fire tongs, precious memento of his ancestors, together with mementoes gathered in his world-wide travels, were neatly arranged. His secretary’s room, next door, was stacked with paper. A typewriter stood in place.

Dr. Du Bois had a new home where time and quiet waited—time to think, to prepare speeches, to answer the numberless letters that came to him from all over the world, time to work for African freedom.

Einstein was right. The atom bomb had changed everything except the thinking of men. W. E. B. Du Bois, eighty-year-old American black man, had spent his life trying to change the thinking of men. He moved without hesitation now into the battle to move their thinking toward peace.

A gathering of artists, writers and scientists of the world was being planned to explore methods of achieving peace. Du Bois, free to act as he believed, became one of the key movers on the planning committee. The obstacles put in the way of this New York conference were the measure of how far the world was divided between those who wanted peace and those who were ready for more war to get their way. Distinguished world figures such as Picasso and Pablo Casals, the eminent musician, were denied entrance visas to the United States because they were Communists. The meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel were picketed by anti-Communists. The newspapers slandered and ridiculed the women and men who attended.

The final meeting was held in the huge arena at Madison Square Garden, which usually could be filled only for a good prize fight. For peace, the Garden Arena had “standing room only” long before the last person made his way through the hostile picket lines. Paul Robeson sang folk songs in many languages and “The Ballad for Americans.” Dr. Du Bois, still slender, erect, his hair fast disappearing, his beard now white, took his place before the microphone to introduce the chairman of the evening, Harvard’s foremost scientist, Harlow Shapley.

Du Bois said:

We know, and the saner nations know, we are not traitors nor conspirators. Far from plotting force and violence, it is precisely force and violence we bitterly oppose. The conference was not called to defend socialism nor communism nor the “American Way of Life.” It was called to promote peace. . . .

The conference in New York was followed by a world peace meeting in Paris. Du Bois and Robeson were there with fifty or sixty other delegates from the United States— ministers, artists, housewives, students and professors. With 500,000 people from seventy-two countries, he marched the streets of Paris, and shouted Yes! to the manifesto adopted: “The defense of peace is henceforth the concern of all peoples!”

In July, Du Bois, with the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, Linus Pauling, and three others, signed a call for a “Continental Congress for Peace in the Americas.” The congress would be held in September in Mexico City. Du Bois could not be at this meeting, however. He was in Moscow to attend the All-Soviet Peace Conference. Of the twenty-five Americans invited, Du Bois was the only one who felt free to brave the displeasure of the State Department by going.

The grand old man’s speech before the Moscow All-Union Soviets was a carefully reasoned explanation of colonialism and its close connection with the second-class citizenship accorded black Americans in their native country. The purpose of the mistreatment from the days of slavery to this moment in history, Du Bois explained, was to collect profits from their underpaid work. Du Bois closed with the statement that not all white Americans agreed with this oppression. Not all Americans supported a Third World War in defense of profits from colonized peoples.

“There are millions of other Americans,” he concluded, “who agree with leaders of the peace movement. I bring you their greetings.”

The close of this eventful year was saddened for Du Bois by Nina’s illness and death. Although they had gone different ways for so long a time, he felt a new loneliness.

His friends sensed this and redoubled their devotion. He was surrounded by men and women whom he still thought of as young, although in fact they had themselves reached their middle years. Ama Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Jesse Fauset and Shirley Graham, all well-known writers still looked up to “The Doctor,” as they had in the early days of the Crisis when he had encouraged, criticized and printed their first work.

They filled his small apartment with their laughter and wit and gaiety. Of all the group, Shirley Graham, forty years younger than himself, became his closest companion. Du Bois had known her father well. Whenever he was in Detroit, he had visited their home. When her father died, Du Bois felt that in his way he was taking the place of a father.

However, a moment was to come when he was made to realize that Shirley’s affection was deeper than this—a moment when affection and respect gave way to love. In 1949, however, this future was still veiled. All of the group was concerned with just one thing—the keeping of peace in a world threatened with a senseless Third World War.

Agitation for peace went on at an even more urgent pace in 1950, especially after the “police action” in Korea. In the name of the UN but actually at the insistence of the United States an undeclared war had begun. Once again American youth was sent overseas to fight, this time directly to intervene between two sectors of a small Asian country.

At a conference of World Peace Forces in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Dr. Du Bois drew a picture of the American scene.

Never before has organized reaction wielded the power it does today. ... It has become almost impossible today in my country to hold a public rally for peace. . . . The problem is that of getting the truth to the masses of citizens of the United States. ... It is going to take guts and the willingness to jeopardize jobs and respectability. . . .

One of the ways the peace movement was attempting to inform the American public had been undertaken by a small “Peace Information Center” of which Du Bois was chairman. The group from time to time sent out “Peace-grams,” on yellow paper similar to a regular telegram. Recently they had begun to circulate a petition against the use of atomic weapons. Other countries were circulating petitions, too. The idea had come from a conference at Stockholm, so the petition came to be known as the “Stockholm Petition.” The petitions cost one-half a cent to print. A charge of one cent was made to the circulators to finance the campaign, since the group had no funds at all. Several hundred thousand people had signed, and Du Bois found this a proof that once they had the facts, citizens would demand an end to the arming and killing.

However, on his way home from Prague he received a cablegram stating that the State Department was demanding that the Peace Information Committee register “as agent for a foreign power.”

The Soviet Union was not named, but the reports in the newspapers left no doubt that Russia was the “foreign agent”—Russia with its 25,000,000 dead in the war against Hitler, its cities ruined, its surviving people hungry for peace!

“If Russia is for peace,” Du Bois wrote in his answer to the charge, “does it follow that we must then be for war?” The committee had only the truth to offer against the false accusation. Simon Abbott, the young war veteran who was secretary of the committee, set about marshaling the facts.

The only reply of the State Department was a repetition of the demand to register. This came in September. Dr. Du Bois had had a busy summer as a candidate of the American Labor Party for the office of U.S. Senator from New York State. He knew he had no chance of winning but had been urged to run as a means of “talking peace” from a public platform. As a peace advocate and a black man, he expected to receive very few votes. Actually, when the ballots were counted in November, he had 265,729 votes.

No further word had come from Washington. Nevertheless the Peace Information Center had decided to cease collecting signatures and to close its offices to avoid further trouble.

Meanwhile the Council on African Affairs was badly in need of funds. Dr. Du Bois was persuaded to be the guest of honor at a fund-raising dinner on his eighty-third birthday on February 23, 1951. He tried to beg off. He felt that his birthday had been celebrated too elaborately and too often over the years.

“It is blackmail,” he said to Shirley when she brought up the idea. “Pure blackmail for my unfortunate friends. And now when I have reached such an outrageous age, I feel as if people were saying ‘Hurry, hurry and give the old man a hand.’ ”

“You sound as if celebrating your birthday were a bothersome chore,” Shirley responded, and the color rose in her cheeks. “For hundreds of us, it’s your words at these dinners we wait for. From your high place you describe for us the vision. We need to share your vision right now—now, when life is hard.”

She did not need to add that he was the symbol of her hopes—and that she meant to marry him. She had said all these things before. He could not deny her the pleasure of arranging the birthday celebration.

Then while the preparations were going forward, the hotel ballroom engaged, the reservations pouring in, the blow fell.

On February 8, Dr. Du Bois was abruptly notified that the Peace Information Center and its officers had been indicted by the grand jury of Washington, D.C., for failure to register as agents of a foreign power. February 16 was the date of arraignment for this serious crime. Its other name was treason.

It is probably hard for a reader today to realize what being threatened with prison meant, at that time, to an American dissenter. After the history of the sit-ins and the marches for civil rights in the South, after the marches and demonstrations for peace in the cities of the North, going to jail has become almost a badge of honor. The term “traitor” is ignored by admiring multitudes. In 1951 it was a term of deep disgrace reserved for the Benedict Arnolds and the Aaron Burrs of ancient history.

The Stockholm Peace Petition was not the work of four people. It represented in its 200,000,000 signatures the very real fear - of the atomic bomb by hundreds of millions of Americans and other people around the world. Yet for Dr. Du Bois and his colleagues the charge of being foreign agents constituted a direct threat of a long jail sentence.

As soon as she heard the news, Shirley Graham begged Du Bois to marry her before the February 16 arrest and arraignment. She had asked him to marry her several times before. His only reluctance had been the great difference in their ages. Now she argued urgently that if they were married she could at least visit him in prison.

Du Bois was much moved, but at first would not consider it. There was no question of their love for each other. Yet he undoubtedly questioned the kind of life a young woman would have, married to an old man in prison, a man of eighty-three who would likely never come out of jail alive.

Nevertheless on St. Valentine’s Day, they were secretly married. It was her husband whom Shirley watched two mornings later being fingerprinted, searched and handcuffed in the federal prison in Washington. Handcuffed like a dangerous criminal!

Attorneys, looking on, raged. Shirley sobbed. And what of W. E. B. Du Bois? What were his thoughts as he looked down at his thin, brown wrists manacled in irons? History does not record the images that passed through his mind, but it is probable that the memory of his first visit to Washington flashed by. The time was 1904. Du Bois was a scholar with his way in the world still to make, standing before a high school graduating class—all black—in the nation’s capital.

“I am impelled to bring to you,” he had said, “a message on the joy of living, lest when the shadows come you may not know where to seek sunshine. . . . What is worth striving for?” he had asked, and answered: “Anything that joins the souls of them that knew not each other before—all this is life—the essence and the heart of life. . . .”

This is what Dr. Du Bois called the joy of living in his commencement speech to young people in Washington in 1904: the joining together of peoples. This is what he had himself lived by in the intervening forty-seven years. The striving for the joy of living had brought him in the battle for peace to this iron cage and handcuffs. Had he then failed? He managed a half-smile for Shirley, his wife, for his fellow prisoners, for the bystanders more crushed in spirit than he was himself.

Chapter 15

Washington, D.C.

November, 1951

“Wake up, America! Your liberties are being stolen. Wake up, Americans, and dare to think and say and do. Dare to cry: No more war!”

Almost nine months had gone by since the indictment of Dr. Du Bois and his four friends. At the end of the grueling day of fingerprinting, search and (for Dr. Du Bois) handcuffing, they had been released on bail.

The trial, originally set for April, had been postponed several times. Now, on November 6, it was scheduled to begin.

As Dr. Du Bois predicted, to be arrested had proved in itself a serious thing. Most uninformed citizens, reading of the indictment in the newspapers, assumed that no one was arrested without sufficient cause. In Du Bois’ case the Department of Justice and the FBI let it be whispered that they had definite proof that he had betrayed his country. Only the black and the poor or their few defenders knew how many innocent people are jailed through misunderstandings or deliberate frame-ups.

It took courage to stand up for a person accused by his government of serious crimes. How much courage, Du Bois and Shirley had learned when they came back to New York.

They found the plans for the birthday dinner in shambles. The hotel where the dinner was to have been held had cancelled the reservations. Half the sponsors had withdrawn their names. The principal speakers had begged to be excused from their engagement. Du Bois felt that he was being punished before he was even tried. Crushed, he urged that the whole idea of the dinner be dropped.

Neither his wife, the officers of the Council on African Affairs nor the chairman of the dinner, valiant E. Franklin Frazier, would hear of cancellation. Instead of a friendly gesture, the dinner to Dr. Du Bois had become a skirmish in the struggle for liberty. Instead of three hundred expected guests, seven hundred crowded into “Small’s Paradise,” a Harlem dance hall which had offered a haven after every hotel had refused them.

Paul Robeson sang song after song. Cables and telegrams were read from over the world. They bore exalted signatures of archbishops and university presidents, educators, artists, poets and musicians. But the messages that pleased Du Bois the most were not from “VIP’s,” but Mary White Ovington’s congratulations—“You have always given hope to our cause”—and a wire that read: “With pride in you, our people and our family, I send this wish for happiness for your eighty-third birthday.” The message was signed by Du Bois Williams, his granddaughter, finishing her freshman year at Fisk University.

A few days after the dinner, a second marriage ceremony was performed in Shirley Graham Du Bois’ Long Island home. There were all the trappings of a gay wedding party—a three-tiered cake and champagne, music and dancing. There was even a short honeymoon in the sunshine of the West Indian island where Du Bois’ grandfather, Alexander Du Bois, had been born.

Those four or five days of leisure were the last Shirley and the accused man were to know for many months. A committee of friends was at work preparing for the defense. Lawyers were needed to assist Miss Agrin, the lawyer for the Peace Center. Witnesses had to be interviewed in the United States and in Paris. Most of all, however, funds were needed. A trial of this kind is very expensive.

“We knew well that we were in serious danger,” Du Bois wrote. “We were not lulled to sleep by the flimsiness of the case against us, or by a fatuous reliance on justice.”

It was necessary, he explained, for the pro-war forces to stop any criticism, When a few voices spoke for peace, they had been given no publicity or were called “Communist” to frighten people away. However, when two million Americans signed the Stockholm appeal to do away with atomic weapons, it was time for the government to act. Especially when a leader of the black people in America could so conveniently be called a traitor!

Already the suspicion and smears were spreading. The attitude of the NAACP proved that. A member of the board had suggested that the NAACP defense department join in Du Bois’ defense. Another had proposed a strong resolution of confidence in his innocence. The word was passed by a State Department official that they had “certain proof” of Du Bois’ guilt. The suggestions were dropped. A very weak resolution was pushed through, and local branches throughout the country were warned “not to touch the case.”

Prominent lawyers refused to represent the Peace Information Center group or offered to appear for very large fees. Vito Marcantonio, however, did not refuse; he offered to serve without fee. His offer was accepted gladly and this staunch defender of peace and civil rights was appointed chief counsel.

There was still a need for thousands of dollars. And somehow the facts—the truth behind the indictment—had to be told to a wide public. The Defense Committee, headed by a former governor of Minnesota, undertook to arouse public opinion over the world, but Du Bois insisted that all money for the defense must come from within his own country.

The old man and Shirley set out on a “Defense Pilgrimage” across the continent, speaking to the people wherever they could.

The audiences for the most part were small. The witchhunt against dissent which history has come to know as “McCarthyism” was approaching its height. The leaders of the Communist Party had been jailed; so had ten of the foremost writers in Hollywood. Professors were being deprived of the right to teach. Informers sat in every audience, whether in a rented hall, a little church or in the homes of peace-minded friends. That Du Bois was a black man was an added obstacle.

Shirley Du Bois always spoke first, explaining the facts of the case. Then, after a collection for the defense fund, Dr. Du Bois delivered an address, carefully prepared “to change the thinking of men!” He gave the kind of scholarly, impersonal speech he might have delivered at a college commencement—with none of the self-pity of a man threatened with five years or more of prison.

At Chicago, St. Paul, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit and back to New York he had said almost the same thing—the thing he believed, the thing he wanted America to know. It might be his last chance to speak to the people he loved—black and white. He often ended with the words:

Today the vast majority of the American people who are not crazy, do not want war. Most Americans hate the current witch-hunt. . . . Wake up, America! Your liberties are being stolen. Wake up, Americans, and dare to think and say and do. Dare to cry: No more war!

Their arduous journeyings had an effect. The response from the audiences had at first been one of disbelief. Black folk, especially, seemed to feel that Dr. Du Bois had somehow been tricked into some treasonable situation. However, led by his personal appearance before them, by Shirley’s clear statement of the facts, the mass of the black working people began to rally to his cause. So did the black editors of the Negro newspapers.

The whole peace movement abroad spoke out with indignation.

An International Committee in Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois, with two hundred members from twenty-one countries, came into existence. Its purpose was to arouse public opinion, not to raise money. Sixty-nine prominent Americans joined the International Defense. A statement from the leader of the Canadian Peace Congress is an example of the hundreds that came to the State Department:

If the cause of peace as advocated by Dr. Du Bois should become a crime under American law, then all mankind will know that the purposes and policies of the United States government are a serious threat to international peace. . . .

The impact on the government was interesting. They really hadn’t known much about their prisoner except that he was black and that some important higher-ups wanted him silenced. The Department of Justice appointed one of its own men to write a report on the man they had indicted so lightly six months before.

Finally, in November, the moment of trial could be delayed no longer. Du Bois and his wife locked the door on the exquisite old house they had just moved into in Brooklyn. Arthur Miller, the playwright, had found it for them. They had rented out the lower apartment and moved their belongings into the two upper floors with the view of the harbor. It was a place to be loved, a place for happiness. But Dr. Du Bois realized as he turned the key in the lock that he might never be free to live in it. He wrote:

I have faced during my life many unpleasant experiences: the growl of a mob, the personal threat of murder, the scowling distaste of an audience. But nothing so cowed me as that day, November 8, 1951, when I took my seat in a Washington courtroom as an indicted criminal. I had broken no law . . . yet I sat with four other American citizens of unblemished character . . . in the seats occupied by murderers, forgers and thieves, accused of a felony and liable to be sentenced before leaving the court to five years of imprisonment. . . .

The courtroom was medium-sized. A rail separated the audience from the prisoners, their defenders and prosecutors and the judge’s high seat. Within the rail were also the men from whom the jury would be chosen.

The lawyers for the government sat at one table, the lawyers for the defendants at another, with the prisoners’ chairs behind them and facing the judge. The bailiff announced the court to be open, and everyone was ordered to rise at the entrance of the black-gowned man in whose hands Du Bois’ future so largely lay.

Du Bois knew that the courtroom was crowded; he knew Shirley was in the first row on the other side of the rail with Kyrt Elkins’ young wife. He could not see Shirley— he could only see the face of the judge and the blurred mass, on either side of this insignificant-looking man, the jurymen.

One by one they were called up and questioned, first by the prosecuting attorney and then by Vito Marcantonio, until twelve had been chosen. The choosing of the jury took all the first day.

Washington was thoroughly “Southern” in its rules of segregation, except in a courtroom. In any Southern state Blacks were almost never called for jury duty, but Washington had many black government workers. Their names were on jury lists. Fear of losing their jobs usually kept black jurors from expressing their natural sympathy for a black brother accused of crime. However, Dr. Du Bois seeing eight dark-skinned faces among the final jurors chosen began to have some ray of hope. Furthermore, the courtesy of Justice McGuire toward jurors and lawyers was in sharp contrast to the judge at the arraignment.

The trial began with five defendants instead of four, for Elizabeth Moos had returned from Europe to take her place as a former officer of the Peace Information Center. Mrs. Moos had not been included in the original indictment but came voluntarily, because, she said, “If the others are guilty, then I am guilty, too.”

The arguments and motions, the long days in the courtroom dragged on for three trying weeks, and still the defendants and their witnesses had not been heard. The hints of treason hung in the air like a cloud before a storm. That “certain proof of guilt”—a forged check—a scrap of a sentence taken out of context—night after night Du Bois lay awake wondering what the prosecutor would offer. For themselves, they had only the truth to bring before the court.

John Rogge was the government’s chief witness. This in itself was a tragedy. Rogge had posed as a person strong for peace.

“You heard him speak at the World Peace Congress in Paris, Shirley,’’ Du Bois said when they talked over the day’s testimony that evening. “You saw him stand up before that multitude—a brilliant, handsome, eloquent man bringing a message of peace from America. You saw him today in the witness box, his clothes hanging loose, deep lines around his mouth, unable to look us in the eye. Telling lie after lie for the sake of the new American dream— get-rich-quick!”

Rogge had initiated the Peace Information Center. It was at his invitation that Dr Du Bois had joined. More clearly than anyone else John Rogge knew that the officers of the center were not agents of the World Peace Congress, nor agents of Russia. Yet his testimony in the witness box declared just the opposite. He declared that the center was an agency of the Soviet government.

It was at this point that Judge McGuire had asked a direct question of the prosecuting attorney. “You intend to show, I suppose, a direct connection—a contract—between the Peace Information Center and Russia?”

Rogge had answered confidently. “It is my opinion that the World Peace Congress is a creature of the Russian government.” Shirley recalled the events of the next few moments as clearly as if she had a typed script before her. “It was at that point,” she said, “that the judge had the jury leave the room. Then came the sharp discussion with the prosecuting attorney.”

“Who is not,” Du Bois said dryly, “the brightest lawyer in that courtroom. You remember how he hemmed and hawed when McGuire asked whether he intended to introduce Rogge as an expert?”

Opinion, except that of a proven expert, is not admissible in a trial. Anybody who reads detective stories knows that.

The prosecuting attorney admitted that he did not intend to introduce Rogge as an expert, that he did not intend to show that Russia was the real principal behind the World Peace Congress. He did expect to prove by circumstantial evidence that the Peace Information Center was the agent of the World Peace Congress.

“You have to show a direct connection, Mr. Maddrix,” Judge McGuire answered.

Whereupon he had recalled the jury and advised them: “You are now instructed by the court . . . that you are to disregard Mr. Rogge’s opinion of what he thought the purpose of the Stockholm Peace Appeal petition was. . . . You will disregard entirely the characterization of the witness with reference to what he thought the World Council for Peace had in view.”

John Rogge had been asked a few more questions, but was not permitted by the court to bring in his manufactured guesses and half-truths on which the government plainly depended.

In the cross-examination, Marcantonio introduced document after document to show Rogge’s part in forming the Peace Information Center, his deliberate attempts to convict the defendants, not for anything they did, but for unpopular political beliefs. At the close of the day the defending lawyers left the court in high spirits. But Du Bois could not help feeling sad at the sight of a human being who had betrayed those who had trusted him.

The first order of business next day was a discussion of Sylvia Soloff, the typist and clerk in the office. As soon as evidence was brought that she was a salaried employee with no part in policy-making, she was acquitted and released.

The government then brought to the witness stand a few more of its twenty-seven witnesses and then, to the surprise of everyone, rested its case without having brought in any evidence (real or manufactured) to show direct evidence of any contract between the Peace Information Center and any foreign principal.

Dr. Du Bois grew tense. He would be the chief witness for the defense. On his ability to convince the jury of the truth depended the freedom or imprisonment of himself and his four friends.

On the afternoon of November 20th, Vito Marcantonio made a preliminary argument for the defense. He urged chiefly that control of the Peace Information Center by the World Peace Congress and acceptance of that control would have to be shown to prove “agency.” Agreement of ideas was not enough. Belonging to both organizations was not enough.

The jury had not yet been summoned. The defense was still waiting for the “certain proof of guilt.” Had the prosecution depended on rousing hostile public opinion through John Rogge’s testimony? Had they simply failed to count on a fair and unbiased judge?

The end came suddenly. Before the jury was brought in,

Judge McGuire spoke quietly from the dais. “The moment comes in every criminal case,” he said, “when the court must rule as to whether the case shall continue, whether the defendants shall be required to answer the charge against them before the jury.”

“I may hate the very things you say, but I respect your right to say them, and as Americans we have confidence . . . in the validity of the institutions under which we live. . . .”

Slowly he listed the charges made by the prosecution, and concluded: “In this case the government has failed to support the allegations handed down in the indictment. So therefore the motion for a judgment of acquittal will be granted. The case is closed.”

Acquitted! That meant freedom. A gasp went through the courtroom. A patter of applause broke out, and the judge rapped for order.

In the front row, Shirley Graham Du Bois slumped against her friend and lost consciousness for a moment. Du Bois did not see her, He sat numb. Someone, probably Elizabeth Moos, kissed his cheek.

Free! Free to go home, free to work again, free to see the sun through trees and not through iron bars.

A gate in the rail was opened. His hand was in his wife’s hand. Slowly they moved through the crowd. A path opened to let them pass.

Newsmen gathered at the door. Cables were buzzing around the world. Eater—weeks later—Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois would put the story down in the book called In Battle for Peace—and Shirley would add her comments, their first collaboration in print. For today he wanted only to get away from Washington to his home in Gracie Court, Brooklyn, with the sun or the moonlight streaming in the windows and the sound of ships’ bells drifting from the harbor.

Chapter 16

On the Atlantic Ocean

August, 1958

“Hail, then, and farewell, dwelling places of yellow and black races. Hail, human kind!”

“All ashore that’s going ashore!”, The familiar call and the warning bells had sounded. The friends who had crowded the Du Bois cabin with flowers and wine had gone. The band on deck struck up a tune barely heard above the clatter of the ship’s departure. Flags fluttered, and the tooting towboats pulled and tugged. W. E. B. Du Bois’ fifteenth crossing of the Atlantic Ocean—so long delayed, so unexpected—had begun.

He drew a deep breath of salty air. Travel to distant lands was one of his deepest joys, but for seven long years, since his acquittal of the charge of treason, such travel had been denied him.

“I feel like a released prisoner,” he said to Shirley, as the New York skyline receded and they linked arms to take one turn around the deck. “A seven year sentence for the crime of acquittal!”

Those seven years had been in some ways the bitterest of his life. Its failure to make a case in court against him had not been forgotten by the government. The pro-war forces in the administration had used their power to keep suspicion against Du Bois alive. A veil of silence was let down between him and his public. No universities, no churches with black or white congregations, no NAACP branches requested him to address them. Not even his own fraternity dared provide a platform from which to bring his people his ideas. His older books were no longer listed by the publishers, who had let most of them go out of print. His manuscripts, and Shirley’s were refused publication.

In Battle for Peace, with its open thanks to the Communists of the world for their help in his trial, and his own bold defense of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, tried and executed for “conspiracy to give secret information to Russia,” increased the government’s hostility.

Many people believed that the Rosenbergs were traitors. Many believed them innocent of any wrong, victims of the fear and hatred of people who felt their privileges and power threatened. Dr. Du Bois knew how it felt to be called traitor. He felt deeply what seemed to him a great American injustice. So he spoke at their sad, little funeral.

Du Bois used to walk the short block to the waterfront.

He sat on a bench near the dock, staring at the ships going out to sea. Across the ocean were countries where there was no color bar, no mansions for the rich, no slums to be shared with rats and cockroaches for the poor. He wrote:

All things in the Soviet Union are not perfect. Mails miscarry, cables come a day late, styles are often queer; the world problem of domestic service has not been settled. The question of life careers and the decision between what one wants to do and what one is fitted to do and what efforts are needed—these matters have not yet found answers; but they are being frankly faced. . . . Nowhere are public questions so thoroughly and exhaustively discussed.

He longed to visit Soviet Russia to see the new cities rising in the Arctic and in the deserts.

Many other nations were adopting various paths to a different way of life, to socialism. He longed to visit them...to visit China where 700,000,000 colored people were creating a new society on the foundations of their ancient civilization. He longed above all to be present at the inauguration of his friend Kwame Nkrumah, as president of the liberated African state of Ghana.

The State Department said No! “Not considered to be in the best interests of the United States” was the blunt reason given. The visit to Ghana was refused because Du Bois refused to sign a paper stating that he was not a member of the Communist Party.

“As a matter of fact,” he explained, “I was not a member. Yet I refused to make any statement on the ground that the government had no legal right to question me concerning my political beliefs.”

An African nation freed of colonial rule was, for the old crusader, a dream come true. Yet he was willing to forego any participation in that great event rather than compromise his own conscience. So he remained, with one other black man, Paul Robeson, a prisoner of the State Department—an American citizen without a passport to travel abroad.

Then, suddenly, in the summer of 1958, the Supreme Court handed down a decision which said that Congress had never given the State Department the legal right to demand a political affidavit before issuing a passport. In July passports were issued to the writer, Corliss Lamont, and to several others, including Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, and W. E. B. and Shirley Du Bois.

Robeson and Eslanda had flown immediately to London where Paul had a contract to give a concert and later in the year to appear on the stage in Othello. Dr. Du Bois and Shirley engaged passage on a steamship for early August.

The long years of exile from the outer world were over. Bitter years, surely, for a man of Du Bois’ dedication to the cause of justice and peace. Yet, as the serene days on the ocean that connected his two worlds slipped by, he found that he remembered only the happy hours. The deep joy of home life with Shirley had brought back his youthful gift of fun and laughter. Warm and easy friendships with a few people had taken the place of great public meetings. Shirley’s “open house” on Sundays had led to long, intimate discussions with men and women of brilliant minds and open hearts. No worthwhile figure from the African Liberation Movement had come to the United Nations in Manhattan without crossing the bridge to visit the Du Bois home on Gracie Square in Brooklyn. None had gone away without a clear understanding of what it meant to be a black American and, at the same time, an African.

Through these contacts, through constant reading, through correspondence with European and African and Asian friends, Du Bois had kept abreast of the great world. He was not making this voyage as an uninformed tourist. He knew what he was looking for in Western Europe, in the socialist countries, in Africa rising, free to make its choices for a new life.

He meant to discover whether England and France, Holland and Belgium, which had for hundreds of years built their wealth and well-being on the toil of colonized peoples, were going to be willing to alter their way of life. Would they make war again as the United States’ imperialists seemed determined to do, or would they give peaceful change a chance?

He wrote:

Revolution had shaken the world—and now mankind in this center of Western civilization was trying to rebuild itself into something new. I, on the other hand, represented something old which had projected itself into a new America, and clothed in slavery and poverty, had begun a modern race problem. I looked therefore upon this world, as I had looked before, as a member of the darker race which had suffered from the oppression of the white European world. ... I came to Europe to learn if now European imperialism was about to disappear, and what hope we had of a future. Was a world of peace and racial equality about to emerge?

He wanted as well to see what the Soviet Union and the new socialist republics were doing with time bought by bloodshed and sacrifice; to see Communist China’s “leap forward” to the future. And above all, he wanted to bring advice and the wisdom of his long experience to the independent African countries being created, at least partly, out of his dreams.

Long ago in his student days, the young Du Bois had questioned: “Am I a genius or a fool?” Certainly time had proved him no fool. Some people called him a genius. But he did not call himself one. He had merely tried through a longer time than was given to most human beings to bring a greater joy of living to his people. And by “his people” he had come to include all humanity—black, brown, yellow, white of skin.

“When we get home again,” he told Shirley, “I will write one more autobiography to answer the question ‘Who and what is this I?’ ”

The waters of the Atlantic rolled outward, outward from the cutting prow of the ship, toward the limitless horizon. Du Bois walked the deck, arm in arm with his wife. He no longer felt it was a lonely thing to be a great man.

For almost half of his ninetieth year Dr. Du Bois pursued his search for truth across the continent of Europe. He visited all the Western countries he had known and loved in his youth for their age-old charm, their art and music. He was graciously received and honored everywhere, but he came away saddened. Nowhere did he find any willingness to do with less at home so that the peoples of Asia and Africa could have freedom to make decent lives for themselves. Nowhere did he see evidence that they were ready to give up the fruits of empire even when they had given up the name.

I came to the conclusion that the people of Britain were determined to proceed on the whole along the same paths which they had followed in the past—that they were determined to maintain their comforts and civilization by using cheap labor and raw materials, seized without rightful compensation, and to change their treatment of other people only if this required no essential yielding of comfort or even luxury.

Western Europe, like his own country, was not prepared to surrender the profits from its colonial investments. Least of all his much loved France, fighting fiercely to keep liberty away from Algerians and the people of Southeast Asia in order to have a little more money to spend at home.

France again was at war and preparing for war. There was death in her eyes, in her speech, in her gestures. . . . I saw Algerian boys searched on the public streets. Fear, hate and despair rode the streets of Paris!

Even Sweden, where Du Bois attended a World Peace Congress, seemed afraid to speak out for peace with their socialist neighbors.

Du Bois sensed no fear of this kind when he and Shirley flew into East Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic. The concern of the people was for the work yet to be done in making their country match their dreams.

He and Shirley visited several of the countries that lie between Western Europe and the Soviet Union, and reported:

These people differ in race and composition but have had a history with many resemblances. Most of their territory has long been ruled by a hereditary aristocracy of conquerors, invaders and great landowners. . . . These are the folk whom the Americans call “the captive peoples.” . . . There is no doubt that the present condition of the peoples of these countries is improving and is far better than it was 50 years ago. They have the support of the overwhelming mass of their inhabitants.

From city to city, Du Bois moved through these socialist republics, where honors and friendships were offered with a warmth he had never expected. A stranger in strange lands, he was given honorary degrees by great universities. The degree of Doctor of Economics at his own Berlin University (now called Humboldt University for the eighteenth-century German scholar) was followed by the degree of Doctor of History from Charles University at Prague, in Czechoslovakia. In Hungary the Academy of Arts and Sciences made him a member.

In Moscow the newly-built university made the black worker for peace a Doctor of Historical Science. Khrushchev, then the premier, conferred with Du Bois about the creation of a special university for African studies where young Africans could learn about their own history. This university was built, and came to be called Patrice Lumumba University in memory of the young assassinated leader of Congo liberation.

It was not the honors bestowed or the warm welcome to him and his wife that most moved Du Bois in the Soviet Union, but the pride and well-being of the people, especially the children and the old people. Du Bois and Shirley were in Red Square in November to celebrate the forty-second anniversary of the Revolution, in the presence of half a million Soviet citizens, none very rich, none very poor.

They marched, walked and danced. They ate and sang, they laughed and cheered. . . . The Soviet Union seems to me the only European country whose people are not more or less taught and encouraged to despise and look down on some class, group or race.

It was almost time to set out for Africa to attend the All-African Congress called at Accra, the capital of Ghana. Du Bois was preparing the address he intended to deliver there to those hundreds who called him Father. Physicians, however, urged him not to make the difficult journey, but to rest instead in a sanatorium by the seaside while his wife delivered his message to the African freedom fighters.

It was therefore through Shirley’s eyes he saw the new African states, through her voice that Africa received his carefully prepared advice:

Africa, ancient Africa, has lifted up her hands! Which way shall Africa go? First I would emphasize that today Africa has no choice between private capitalism and socialism. You can choose between blocs of military alliance; you can choose between groups of political union; you cannot choose between socialism and private capitalism because private ownership of capital is doomed.

Here then, my brothers, you face your great decision. Will you for temporary advantage—for automobiles, refrigerators and Paris gowns—spend your income in paying interest on borrowed funds or will you sacrifice present comfort in order to educate your children, develop your industry as best serves the great mass of people?

You can starve a while longer rather than sell your great heritage for a mess of capitalistic pottage.

Du Bois’ address closed with the words:

You have nothing to lose but your chains! You have a continent to gain! You have freedom and dignity to attain!

Freedom and human dignity—Du Bois believed he had seen it coming into its own in the Soviet Union. He saw it again when, in the early spring of 1959, he and Shirley made the flight to China. Socialism in China took on a different look, different ways:

As it should. The pattern of a new life is fashioned on the history of each country. China belongs to its people. Believing this they toil and sweat and cheer. . . . China has no rank or classes; her universities grant no degrees; her government awards no medals. But she has leaders of learning and genius, scientists of renown, artisans of skill and millions who know and believe these men and follow where they lead.

From China on his ninety-first birthday, Du Bois broadcast a message “to the people of China and Africa and through them to the world”:

Hail, then, and farewell, dwelling places of yellow and black races. Hail, human kind! I speak with no authority—I hold no position, I have no wealth. One thing alone I own and that is my own soul . . . on this basis and this alone I dare speak, dare advise. China after long centuries, has arisen to her feet and leaped forward. Africa, arise, and stand straight. Speak and think! Act! Turn from the West and your slavery and humiliation for the past 500 years and face the rising sun. . . . China is colored and knows to what a colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner. But China knows more, much more than this: She knows what to do about it. . . . The Essence of the revolution in the Soviet Union and China and in all the “iron curtain” nations is not the violence that accompanied the change; no more than starvation at Valley Forge was the essence of the American Revolution. . . . The real revolution is the acceptance of the fact that hereafter the main object of the nation is the welfare of the mass of the people and not of the lucky few. . . . Again China and Africa, hail and farewell!

In 1905, when Du Bois was still young, he had written in the Niagara Manifesto:

The morning breaks over the hills. Courage, brother! The battle for humanity is not lost or losing. The slave is rising in his might, the yellow millions are testing liberty, the black African is writhing toward the light and everywhere the laborer is opening the gate of opportunity and peace.

Now, more than fifty years later, he had seen his vision taking form in reality. He returned to his home in Brooklyn, content.

Chapter 17

Brooklyn,

New York

October, 1960

“I am applying for membership in the Communist Party of the United States. I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion, but at last my mind is settled.”

Again W. E. B. Du Bois’ calendar lay on his desk in Brooklyn. The hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years. . . . “With daily and hourly tasks, with plans for the week and next week, the month and the months ahead.” Goals for a year ahead were getting uncertain. He did not feel very different, being old, but he was a man who sternly faced facts, and ninety-two is an age few human beings reach.

Du Bois had been born in that valley between two New England rivers into a world of oil lamps and horse and buggy and outhouses for bathrooms, had grown to manhood in a time crowded with scientific discovery and invention. Gas light, electricity, the telephone, the automobile, skyscrapers and the whirl of airplanes had leaped into the age of Sputnik and space ships and bombs that could sweep all the inventions of science and all the beauty of the seasons of flowers and birds off the earth. He had seen almost all the world and held a great-grandson named for him in his arms.

Now in this strange, bursting year of 1960 he was seeing from the sidelines the ripening of seeds he had planted and nourished. Nineteen hundred and sixty was a year of harvest. In Africa, following the lead of Ghana, nation after new nation was taking its place in the United Nations, affirming by their actions what his Pan-African Congress had affirmed in words. And in the South the victorious battle of Little Rock was ended and the sit-ins had begun.

You’ve got to make it impossible for any human being to live in the South and not realize the barbarities that prevail here.

With these words, Du Bois had called the youth of the South, black and white, to the battle in his speech “Behold the Land.” Now the battle was on; the children of the children were moving. He asked no credit for the glorious moment.

“There is nothing I can teach those young men and women,” he said. “The students are teaching me.”

The place of the old is on the sidelines. Du Bois had finished his last autobiography. He had named the white scholar of black history, Dr. Herbert Aptheker, his literary executor. If he did not live to see it published, Dr. Aptheker and Shirley would take care of its publication.

Du Bois had walked to the corner, as was his custom on sunny days, to sit on the bench by the harbor. He rose now and started slowly back to the house. “Tomorrow,” possibly he was thinking, “I will wake up and say to myself, ‘This is the day I’m not writing a book.’ ” It is this to be old. But life had been lavish with its gifts. He would face the end as patiently as he could.

A long black car with a chauffeur at the wheel stood at the curb. When Du Bois opened his door, he heard voices in the living room, Shirley’s voice, rich as a violin well played, and another voice almost as familiar. Du Bois thought he was dreaming. Kwame Nkrumah was in Flagstaff House in Ghana. Then he remembered two short paragraphs in the Sunday Times: “Nkrumah, President of Ghana, will lead his delegation for the opening of the assembly of the United Nations.” And in another column: “Kwame Nkrumah will make a visit of State to the national capital.” It really was Nkrumah’s voice he heard in the living room.

“Father!” said the tall, heavy-set African, enveloping Du Bois in his arms. The Africans never called him “Doctor” or “Professor” as American friends did. He was “Father” to them or “Oldest Freedom Fighter.”

Shirley looked on, smiling as the two men settled down for a talk; then she slipped out to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee.

When she returned with the tray, she saw tears in her husband’s eyes. His lips trembled ever so slightly. Shirley looked quickly at the other man. What had been said between them?

Kwame Nkrumah explained with his usual calm.

“I have asked Dr. Du Bois if he would consider favorably an invitation from the Republic of Ghana to spend his last years in our country to plan and direct the preparation of an ‘Encyclopedia Africana.’ It would be a great honor to welcome the two of you in Accra.”

Shirley set the tray down and kissed her husband on the cheek. “The Encyclopedia was W. E. B.’s dream before you or I were born,” she said to Nkrumah.

“My son remembered!” Dr. Du Bois’ voice was exultant. He spoke with an energy he had not shown for months. He pulled his calendar toward him and in the blank space that marked the goal for 1960 wrote in careful script: Begin Encyclopedia. “How many times have I said that heaven for me is to have work I could do, that was needed by the world?”

Nkrumah stood up, well-satisfied. “I must go now. I slipped away between a conference and a dinner. You must give me a little time—three months, perhaps more. The appropriation for the work must be put through Parliament and a residence prepared to receive you. A home near my own. But the formal invitation will come. You can be thinking about a collaborator.”

“Alphaeus Hunton,” Du Bois said promptly. He looked at Shirley. “Don’t you think so, my dear?”

“Dr. Hunton is a good choice,” Nkrumah said. “I met him in my student days when he was teaching at Howard. He is a great scholar and a friend of Africa.”

“I hear that you are to get the red carpet treatment in Washington. Do not let them bribe you with their expensive dollars, my son.”

The president of Ghana smiled. This was the old Du Bois speaking. ‘‘I have taken your messages to heart, Father. Ghana will take the socialist path to freedom, but it will be easier with you at my side.”

Shirley walked with Nkrumah down the stairs to his car. “You have made my husband very happy,” she said. “It is not every man at ninety-two years of age who can make a new beginning.”

“Dr. Du Bois is not every man,” Nkrumah answered. “He is our Oldest Freedom Fighter. He belongs to Africa.”

“But he belongs to America, too,” Shirley said to herself as the long black automobile rolled away.

When she came back into the living room Du Bois was busily jotting down notes on a fresh writing pad.

“Shall we ask Alphaeus to come over'?” she asked.

Du Bois shook his head. “Not tonight. Before I start thinking about the ‘Encyclopedia Africana,’ I have something else to do—something I have put off too long. Would you get Jimmy Jackson on the phone, my dear?”

James E. Jackson II was a man somewhat younger than Shirley. He was a Communist, the son of an old friend of Du Bois, who had watched him grow up in the red hills of Georgia as a boy, watched him through Harvard, and later had carried on long discussions with him about communism in the world and especially its role in the black freedom movement in the United States. In 1947, after the inspiring Southern Student Congress, Du Bois had said to Jackson that he believed in communism but protested that he was too old to identify himself as a Communist.

“Most of my books were written before I read deeply of Marxism,” Du Bois had said at that time. “I would have to re-work or append afterthoughts to each of them. I couldn’t possibly live that long.”

He would have to be judged with his own generation, he said, as a fighter for political democracy for his people. Nevertheless the dialogue between Du Bois and Jackson—and other Communist friends—had gone on from time to time. Du Bois had written The World and Africa, and he and Shirley had written In Battle for Peace with its warm praise for the stand American Communists had taken since that time.

Shirley had taken part in these later discussions. She guessed why he wanted to see James Jackson. Her husband explained: “I think I’ve written enough new things and added enough new explanatory prefaces to a number of old works to take the title of Communist in good conscience now.”

He had said substantially the same thing in the last few years to other close friends, among them Bill Paterson, author of We Charge Genocide. Du Bois had added his name as a sponsor when the engrossing document on the mistreatment of Afro-Americans in the United States was presented to the United Nations. Du Bois had also discussed his joining the Party many times with Dr. Herbert Aptheker.

Shirley was not surprised, but on the contrary sympathetic and very pleased, and knew that other close friends would share and understand her feelings—Aptheker, for instance, and the Robesons in London.

“Simply write a letter of application for admission to membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A.,” Jack-son suggested that evening. “Address it to Gus Hall, the spokesman. He’s going strong even after his years in prison.” The letter when finished read:

To Gus Hall,

Communist Party of the U.S.A.

New York, New York

On this first day of October, 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in the Communist Party of the United States. I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion, but at last my mind is settled. In college I heard the name of Karl Marx, but read none of his works, nor heard them explained. At the University of Berlin, I heard much of those thinkers who had definitively answered the theories of Marx, but again we did not study what Marx himself had said. Nevertheless, I attended meetings of the Socialist Party and considered myself a Socialist.

On my return to America, I taught and studied for sixteen years. I explored the theory of Socialism and studied the organized social life of American Negroes; but still I neither read nor heard much of Marxism. Then I came to New York as an official of the new NAACP and editor of The Crisis Magazine. The NAACP was capitalist orientated and expected support from rich philanthropists.

But it had a strong Socialist element in its leadership in persons like Mary Ovington, William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell. Following their advice, I joined the Socialist Party in 1911. I knew then nothing of practical socialist politics and in the campaign of 1912, I found myself unwilling to vote the Socialist ticket, but advised Negroes to vote for Wilson. This was contrary to Socialist Party rules and consequently I resigned from the Socialist Party.

For the next twenty years I tried to develop a political way of life for myself and my people. I attacked the Democrats and Republicans for monopoly and disfranchisement of Negroes; I attacked the Socialists for trying to segregate Southern Negro members; I praised the racial attitudes of the Communists, but opposed their tactics in the case of the Scottsboro boys and their advocacy of a Negro state. At the same time I began to study Karl Marx and the Communists; I read Das Kapital and other Communist literature; I hailed the Russian Revolution of 1917, but was puzzled at the contradictory news from Russia.

Finally in 1926, I began a new effort: I visited Communist lands. I went to the Soviet Union in 1926, 1936, 1949 and 1959; I saw the nation develop. I visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. I spent ten weeks in China, traveling all over the land. Then, this summer, I rested a month in Rumania.

I was early convinced that Socialism was an excellent way of life, but I thought it might be reached by various methods. For Russia I was convinced she had chosen the only way open to her at the time. I saw Scandinavia choosing a different method, half-way between Socialism and Capitalism. In the United States I saw Consumers Cooperation as a path from Capitalism to Socialism, while England, France and Germany developed in the same direction in their own way. After the Depression and the Second World War, I was disillusioned. The Progressive movement in the United States failed. The Cold War started. Capitalism called Communism a crime.

Today I have reached a firm conclusion:

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.

Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life. It is a difficult and hard end to reach—it has and will make mistakes, but today it marches triumphantly on in education and science, in home and food, with increased freedom of thought and deliverance from dogma. In the end Communism will triumph. I want to help to bring that day.

The path of the American Communist Party is clear: It will provide the United States with a real Third Party and thus restore democracy to this land. It will call for:

1. Public ownership of natural resources and of all capital.

2. Public control of transportation and communications.

3. Abolition of poverty and limitation of personal income.

4. No exploitation of labor.

5. Social medicine, with hospitalization and care of the old.

6. Free education for all.

7. Training for jobs and jobs for all.

8. Discipline for growth and reform.

9. Freedom under law.

10. No dogmatic religion.

These aims are not crimes. They are practiced increasingly over the world. No nation can call itself free which does not allow its citizens to work for these ends.

W. E. B. Du Bois

However, Du Bois was not satisfied merely to have the Central Committee of the CPUSA know that he was taking his stand at their side. He wanted to make the letter public. He thought of all the people, white and black, who had worked with him over the years. And he thought of the black students being jailed and beaten and shot for their struggles against Jim Crow in the South. When the Freedom Rides began in the spring of 1961, he thought that public knowledge of his decision would hearten some of the participants. (It was all they could do, friends said, to keep the old crusader for freedom off the first bus that left from Washington.)

Du Bois’ comrades in the CPUSA counseled a different kind of patience. “Wait,” they urged, “to publish the letter until you are safely in Accra. Inform Nkrumah what you mean to do, then cable us. There are too many ways for the government to stop you from reaching Africa.”

On the day of departure old friends and new were at the airport to see the travelers off. Blond, husky Gus Hall was there with Bill Paterson and all the Apthekers — Herbert, his wife and fifteen-year-old Bettina. Alphaeus Hunton, who would join them soon in Ghana to begin work on the Encylopedia, had come. Also in the group were Du Bois’ granddaughter and a cousin, the Jacksons and the Robesons’ son.

They would be back from time to time for visits, Shirley said. The house in Gracie Court was still theirs. Du Bois, with his roots deep in America, expected to die in that house and be buried in the New England cemetery plot of his ancestors. His precious library and papers had been left in the house in care of Herbert Aptheker—all except the autobiography. Du Bois was not yet ready to give that into the hands of a publisher. He carried the bulky manuscript in a briefcase on the plane.

It was a happy send-off. Not as gay, Du Bois thought, as the bands and flags flying on an ocean liner—but quicker. And time, for a man ninety-three years old, no longer stretched indefinitely ahead.

Chapter 18

Accra, Ghana

August, 1960

"Always I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life . . . and that peace will be my applause.”

“All is well, Father,” Nkrumah said. “All in readiness for tomorrow. Our march in sympathy for your people gathering in Washington will be big and beautiful.” The busy president of the Republic of Ghana sat by Du Bois’ bed, lending his strength and youth. He had come every day this late August week, since the doctors had warned Shirley that the end was near.

Day by day Du Bois’ body had grown weaker. Not so his mind or spirit. Reports of the vast forces gathering across the ocean in the capital city of the United States had come to him in every mail. This march was in a sense Du Bois’ own—it was the culmination of the 1905 Black Manifesto with its demands for “manhood rights—for every single right that belongs to African Americans.” He saw clearly what such a protest march for jobs and freedom could and could not do, and proposed ways to deepen and broaden its effect. One of his proposals was that a march be planned to the American Embassy in Accra on the same day—to make clear the unity of the dark-skinned people of the world. Freedom in Washington must be human freedom, he had explained. Human freedom was Du Bois’ goal, and for this he drew on his last ounce of energy.

The old fighter knew, though Shirley and Nkrumah and his other friends kept a pretense of every-day cheer, that death was waiting for him in the wings. He had no fear of death—“the end of life is dying”—but the work, the great work must go on. The Washington march, black and white together, and the march of the youth of Accra. . . .

Du Bois raised his tired eyes to Nkrumah. “The drums?” he asked.

“The Fanti drummers will be marching,” Nkrumah answered. “And the dancers; the red umbrellas of the Ashanti. The workers from the Volta Dam—the old Africa and the new as you planned it, Father. The youth from the university and the school children.”

Shirley came into the room with flowers and a cable. Nkrumah stood up to go.

“All is well, Father,” he said again, taking the old man’s hand.

When he had gone, Shirley sat by her husband’s bed and opened the cablegram. It was from their California friend, Vivian Hallinan, who was planning a visit.

North, South, East, West they are gathering. The guess is 200,000 in Washington. I will stop to march, then fly to Ghana to make a report to W. E. B.

Du Bois smiled. Vivian Hallinan was like a fresh, inspiriting ocean breeze to him. When Vivian and Shirley laughed together, he was young again.

He had been a publicly proclaimed Communist for almost two years now, and the glow still lingered of the day he had cabled home: “Publish my letter.” There had been the expected criticisms. Capitalist newspapers had pointed to his age and called his decision to become a member of the Party the act of a senile old man. Others acted as if this great scholar, scientist, writer and educator had ceased to exist.

But the black folk who knew him best accepted his decision and understood. A well-to-do woman in Atlanta had been a student of Du Bois at Atlanta University. She read the widely published letter with care. Then she said: “He had a right.” That expressed the general sentiment.

When in 1962, after he completed the preliminary plan for the Encyclopedia, he wanted to return home for a brief stay, the State Department took its revenge. Dr. Du Bois and Shirley were refused an entrance visa into their own country. He would never see the house in Brooklyn again, would not be buried in the lovely New England countryside next to his ancestors. The action of the government was a blow, but Du Bois was in no way crushed. He promptly took out citizenship papers as a citizen of Ghana.

The young men at the university where work on the Encyclopedia was going forward rejoiced. “The Oldest Freedom Fighter belongs to us now. We shall have the last word on Dr. Du Bois!”

But as he lay on his bed, Dr. Du Bois knew this was only half-true. He felt himself, as he had from boyhood, two human beings in one body—an American, an African. The United States was to his mind the richer for having roots in many cultures. The inequalities of the position of Blacks in America would some day be wiped away, the stain of enslavement abolished. Then, with a just share of the economic and political decision-making power in the hands of every man and woman, America could move forward, as Ghana was moving forward, out of darkness into light. Comrades.

Du Bois closed his eyes. He was not asleep. He was remembering. Long ago in his dreaming he had prophesied that educated black Americans would be the ones to give leadership in the Pan-African struggles for liberation. He had been wrong. The leadership was in Africa herself. Not Ghana alone—though it was the first along the African path to socialism—but Kenya, Nigeria, the Cameroons, Gambia, Tanzania, all those nations with the beautiful African names rescued from the past, all of them one by one were bringing forth their political leaders, their scholars. Africa would guide the children of Africa in the United States and the West Indies and South America out of the problems of the twentieth century—into a future now but dimly seen. They would forget nothing, 'put everything in its place.

Shirley came into the darkening room from the kitchen, wheeling a tea-cart with supper trays. Du Bois had no wish to eat, but he sipped a little juice of an orange from the tree he had planted in their garden to celebrate their arrival at their new home in Ghana.

When his wife moved to return the tray, he said: “Forget the dishes this one night, my dear. Sit by me and hold my hand.”

In the twilight, Du Bois fell asleep. The moon was high when he stirred again. No one can know his thoughts. Was he planning ahead—thinking perhaps, “I will dress tomorrow and sit on the porch to watch the marchers go by. The Fanti fishermen and their drums—like Robeson singing spirituals. . . .”

So he fell asleep again. At about eleven-thirty—a half-hour before the beginning of the day when free Africans in their own land would march to help bring freedom to black America, W. E. B. Du Bois’ sleep passed into the sleep of death.

When morning came, the drums of Africa sounded, and the dancers danced and the school children walked gaily behind them in obedience to Du Bois’ last wish.

In the capital of the United States, between the Washington Monument and the Abraham Lincoln Memorial, about two hundred and fifty thousand Americans crowded, singing freedom songs and waiting for the speakers on the platform to begin. There was a hush when the executive director of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, stood and held up his hand. Wilkins’ words came slowly, announcing the death of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in the night of the 27th of August—“last night”—across the ocean in distant Ghana. Then he said the words of appreciation denied to Dr. Du Bois for so many years: “His was the voice that brought us here today.”

In the many-windowed house in Accra, Shirley Graham Du Bois opened an envelope entrusted to her several years earlier. It was not a will or testament, as wills are spoken of in law courts. If Dr. Du Bois had left such a legal document disposing of his few possessions, a lawyer would take care of it, or Dr. Aptheker, Du Bois’ literary executor. The short “testament” Shirley read was of a different sort. It was addressed to his people—and that meant to the whole world.

It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say good-bye to one’s loved ones and friends. And to all the familiar things of this life. . . .

I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life, that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed down to others. . . . And that peace will be my applause. One thing I charge you. As you live, believe in life. Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life. . . . The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the end comes slowly, because time is long. Good-bye.

Bibliography

Selected Works by W.E.B. Du Bois

BOOKS

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Harvard Historical Series, No. 1. New York: Longmans, Green, 1896. New York: Social Science Press, 1954. New York: Russell, 1965.

The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Together with a special report on domestic service by Isabel Eaton. (Publications of the University of Pennsylvania. Series in Political Economy and Public Law, 45.) Philadelphia: Published for the University of Pennsylvania, 1899.

The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. New York: Fawcett, 1964.

John Brown. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1909. New York: International Publishers, 1962.

The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911.

The Negro. Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, No. 91. New York: Henry Holt, 1915. London: Williams and Norgate, 1916.

Darkwater: The Twentieth Century Completion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Washington: A. Jenkins, 1920. Also another edition subtitled Voices from Within the Veil, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America. Boston: Stratford, 1924.

Dark Princess: A Romance. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Philadelphia: A. Saifer, 1952. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962.

Black Folk, Then and Now. New York: Henry Holt, 1939.

Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940.

Encyclopedia of the Negro: Preparatory Volume. With reference lists and reports. New York: The Phelps-Stokes Fund, Inc., 1945, revised edition in 1946.

Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945.

The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: Viking Press, 1947. Enlarged edition, New York: International Publishers, 1965.

In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday. With Comment by Shirley Graham. New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1952.

The Black Flame—A Trilogy: The Ordeal of Mansart; Mansart Builds a School; Worlds of Color. New York: Mainstream, 1957, 1959, 1961.

An ABC of Color: Selections from over a Half Century of the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1963.

The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: International Publishers, 1968. (Also in paperback.)

VOLUMES EDITED, PAMPHLETS, ESSAYS,

AND ARTICLES

Atlanta University Studies on the American Negro (Series of 15 books dealing with the proceedings of the annual conferences organized by Du Bois.) Adanta: Atlanta University Press, 1897— 1925.

Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. (A magazine founded and edited by Du Bois, to which he contributed numerous articles.) New York: 1910-1934.

“The Star of Ethiopia—A History of the Negro Race.” (A pageant) New York: Crisis, V. 11, Dec. 1915.

The Brownies’ Book (A monthly magazine for Negro children.) New York: 1920—1921.

The Amenia Conference: An Historic Negro Gathering. (pamphlet) Amenia, N.Y.: Troutbeck Press, 1925.

Africa: Its Geography, People and Products, (booklet) Girard, Kan.: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1930.

Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture. (A magazine founded and edited by Du Bois, to which he contributed articles.) Atlanta: 1940-1944.

“Behold the Land.” (Reprint of address to Southern Negro Youth Congress.) New Masses, January 14, 1947, 62: 18—20.

Appeal to the World. (Petition to the United Nations by the NAACP for redress of grievances of and discrimination against U.S. Negroes.) New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1947.

I Speak for Peace (A statement, published in pamphlet form, on his candidacy for the U.S. Senate on the American Labor Party ticket.) New York: September 24, 1950.

Socialism Today—On China and Russia, (pamphlet) Chicago: Af-Am Books, 1964.

For Further Reading

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Citadel Press, 1963.

-. A Documentary History of Negro People in the United

States. With an introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Citadel Press, 1961.

Davidson, Basil. The African Past. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1967.

-. Lost Cities of Africa. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.

Fauset, Arthur Huff. For Freedom. Philadelphia: Franklin Publications, 1927.

Garvey, A. Jacques. Garvey and Garveyism. Jamaica, West Indies: A. Jacques Garvey, 1963. New York: Collier Books, 1970.

-. Marcus Garvey. London: Cass, 1967.

Graham, Shirley. Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World. New York: J. Messner, 1946.

-. The Story of Phyllis Wheatley. New York: J. Messner, 1949.

-. There Was Once a Slave, (the story of Frederick Douglass) New York: J. Messner, 1949.

-. Your Humble Servant, (the story of Benjamin Banneker) New York: J. Messner, 1947.

Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted and Black. With an introduction by James Baldwin. New York: New American Library, 1970.

Hughes, Langston. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. New York: Knopf, 1932.

-. Famous American Negroes. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954.

-. The Panther and the Lash, (poems of our time) New

York: Knopf, 1967.

Hughes, Langston and Meltzer, Milton. A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. New York: Crown, 1968.

Hunton, William. Decision in Africa. New York: International Publishing, 1957.

Johnson, James Weldon. An Autobiography of an Ex-coloured Man, a Novel. New York: Knopf, 1937.

Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya, The Tribal Life of the Gikiuyn. New York: Vintage Books, 1962.

-. Harambee! New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Moon, Bucklin. Primer for White Folks. Garden City: Doubleday, 1945.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Dark Days in Ghana. New York: International Publishers, 1968.

-. Some Essential Features of Nkrumaism. Edited by the

Editors of The Spark, Accra, Ghana. New York: International Publishers, 1968.

Ovington, Mary White. Portraits in Color. New York: Viking Press, 1927.

Paterson, William. We Charge Genocide. New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951.

Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. New York: Othello Associates, 1958.

Torrence, Ridgeley. The Story of John Hope. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: A. L. Burt, 1901. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965.

Woodson, Carter. The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. Washington: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1919.

-. Journal of Negro History, 1916-1950. Washington: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1916— 1950.

-. The Mind of the Negro. Washington: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1926.

The Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (ten essays on various aspects of Du Bois’ career, preceded by personal recollections by nine close friends.) New York: Freedomways Memorial Issue, Freedom-ways Associates, 1965.

Index

Abbott, Simon

 ABC of Color

Abraham, Peter  

Accra, Ghana

Africa, ancient

distorted concepts of

Du Bois in

freedom for

heritage from

modem

See also Pan-African

African Methodist Church 

Alexander, Will

Algerians

All-Africa Congress

America, Du Bois, roots in

American Academy of Science

American Historical Society 

American Labor Party

 American Revolution

Amherst College

Aptheker, Herbert

Ashanti

Asia

Atlanta Conference Reports

Atlanta University

Atlantic Monthly

Atomic bomb, petition against

Autobiography, W. E. B. Du Bois

Azikiwe, Dr. Mandi

Baker, Newton D.

Baltimore Weekly

Banda, Hastings

Bantus

Barnett, Ida Wells

“Behold the Land ” 

Berlin, University of

Bethune, Mary McLeod

Black Codes

Black history

Black people

conditions of

during Depression

education for

in World War I

See also Segregation; Discrimination 

Black Reconstruction 

Boston Herald

Bontemps, Arna

Brooks, Angie

Broun, Heywood

Brown, John

Brownie’s Book

Burghardt, James

Burghardt, Othello

Burghardt, Tom

Calhoun, Lena

Cameroon, Republic of

Canada

Peace Congress in

Capitalism

Caribbean Islands

Casals, Pablo

Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Charles University

Childress, Alice

China, Du Bois on 

Churchill, Winston

Civil War

Clemenceau, Georges

Clement, Rufus

Cluny, Maud

Cold War

Colonial peoples

Columbia University

Communism

Communist Party (U.S.)

goals of

leaders jailed

Congo liberation

Congress of Races

Constitution (U.S.)

Continental Congress for Peace in the Americas

Coolidge, Calvin

Court cases fought by NAACP

Council on African Affairs

Cravath, Rev. E. M.

 “Credo,” quoted

Crisis, 

The founding of

Du Bois resigns from

in Harlem Renaissance

postmaster refuses to mail

Cullen, Countee, Jr.

Czechoslovakia

Darkwater

Das Kapital 

Davis, Benjamin

Davis, Jefferson

Democracy

Democratic Party

Declaration of Independence

“Defense Pilgrimage” 

Depression of 1929

Diagne, Blaise

Diggs, Irene

Dill, Augustus

Discrimination

in armed services

court cases on 

in education 

in employment

in hotels 

under New Deal

in travel

Douglass, Frederick

Du Bois, Alexander

Du Bois, Alfred

Du Bois, Burghardt

Du Bois, Dr. Louis

Du Bois, Mary B.

Du Bois, Nina Gomer

Du Bois, Shirley G.

See also Shirley Graham

Du Bois, W. E. B.

as agitator 

as American and African

as Communist 

as editor 

as historian 

as scholar

as senatorial candidate 

as sociologist

as teacher

birthplace of

death of

degrees granted to

education of 

marriages 

trial of

Du Bois, Yolanda

Dusk of Dawn

Eastern European countries

Education

as search for truth 

as weapon 

of Blacks

 of women 

Egypt

Einstein, Albert

Emancipation

Encyclopedia Africana

England

Ethiopia

Fanti

Fascism, rise of

Fauset, Jessie

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Field, G. D. 

Fisk University

Fonlon, Bernard

Foreman, Clarke

Forbes, George

France

Frazier, E. Franklin

Freedmen’s Bureau

Freedom Rides

Gambia, Gabriel

Garrison, William Lloyd

Germany

German Democratic Republic

Ghana

ancient

Republic of

Gordon, Andrew

Graham, Shirley

See also Shirley Graham Du Bois 

Great Barrington, Mass.

Griffin, Noah

Guardian

Haiti

Hall, Gus

Hallinan, Vivian

Hampton Industrial School

Harlem

Harper’s Ferry

Hart, Albert Bushnell 

Harvard University

Hayes, Rutherford B.

Hays, Arthur Garfield 

Hiroshima,

History of the Slave Laws

Hitler, Adolf

Hoover, Herbert

Hope, John

Hopkins, Harry

Hosmer, Mr. 

Howard University

Howe, J. Olin

Hughes, Langston,

Humboldt University, Hungary

Hunton, Alphaeus

Ickes, Harold

Imperialism

In Battle for Peace

Independent

Independent Labor Party

India

International Committee in Defense of Du Bois

Jackson, James E. II 

James, William

Jefferson, Thomas

Jim Crow

See also Segregation; Discrimination 

Johnson, Dr. Guy

Johnson, James Weldon

Josie (pupil) 

Justice Department

Jubilee Hall

Kenyatta, Jomo

Kenya

Khrushchev, Nikita

Korean War

Ku Klux Klan

Labor Department

La Guardia, Fiorello

Lamont, Corliss

Land-grant colleges program 

League of Nations

Liberia

Lincoln, Abraham

Lincoln University

Lindsay, Dr. Samuel

Lindsay, Vachel

“Litany at Atlanta” 

Little Rock, battle of

Logan, Rayford

Lowndes County, Ala.

Lumumba (Patrice) University

Lynching

march against

Macaulay, Thomas

Malawi

Marcantonio, Vito 

Marx, Karl

McCarthyism

McGuire, Judge

McKay, Claude

Meharry Medical School

Meroe

Miller, Arthur

Montgomery, Ala.

Moos, Elizabeth

Morehouse College

Morgan, Clement

Morgan, John

Moskowitz, Henry

Mussolini, Benito

Nance, Ethel

Nashville Banner

Nation, The 

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Negro, The

Negro people 

Du Bois’ identity with

See also Black people; Skin color 

New Age

New England

Niagara Manifesto

Niagara Movement

Ninety-Second Regiment

Nkrumah, Kwame

Oberlin College

O’Neill, Eugene

Opportunity

Ovington, Mary White

Padmore, George

Palmer, George

Pan-African Congresses

Pan-African Federation 

Parks, Rosa 

Pauling, Linus 

Peace Conferences 

All-Soviet

Canadian

at Mexico City

New York

Paris

in Prague

in Sweden

Versailles

Peace Information Center

Pennsylvania, University of

Pershing, General John

Philippines

Phillips, Wendell

Philadelphia

black folk in

Phylon

Picasso, Pablo

Porter, Otho

Potter, Bishop Henry C.

 Powell, Adam Clayton

Puerto Rico

Quest of the Silver Fleece

Race Prejudice

Race problem

modern

Race Relations Council

Race riots

Races, Congress of

Radcliffe College

Ralna, S.

Read, Florence

Reconstruction era

Reid, Ira

Republican Party

Revolution

American

Chinese

Russian

Robeson, Eslanda

Robeson, Paul

Rogge, O. John

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius

Ruffin, Birdie

Russia

see Soviet Union 

Russell, Charles E.

Scottsboro case

Segregation

Senegal

Sierra Leone

Shanghai

Shapley, Harlow

Sharecroppers

Sherrod, John

Skin color, question of

Slater Fund

Slavery

Small’s Paradise

Smith College

Smut, Jan

Socialism

Socialist Party

Berlin

United States

Sociology, as new field of study

Soloff, Sylvia

Souls of Black Folk

South Africa

Southern Education Board

Southern Negro Youth Congress

Soviet Union

Speeches of W. E. B. Du Bois

Spingarn, Arthur

Spingarn, Joel

Springfield (Mass.) Republican,

Stalin, Josef

State Department

Stockholm Petition

Storey, Moorfield

“Study on Condition of the American Negro” 

Study of the Southern Negro in the United States,

Sun Yat-Sen

Suppression of the African Slave Trade, The,

Tanganyika, Tanzania

Terrell, Mary Church 

“Testament to the People,” quoted

Trade Unions

Trotter, Monroe

Turner, Nat

Tuskegee Industrial Training School

Uganda

Underground Railroad

United Nations

founding of

African nations join

Secretariat of

Versailles Peace Conference

Vesey, Denmark

Villard, Oswald Garrison

Walling, William E.

Ware, Dr. Edmund

Washington, Booker T.

Washington March (1963)

Wendell, Dr. Barrett

West Indies

Wheeler, Colonel

White, George

White, Walter

Whittier, John Greenleaf

Wilberforce College

Wilkins, Roy

Williams, Aubrey

Williams, Du Bois 

Williams, Magnus

Wilson, Woodrow

Works Progress Administration

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

World and Africa, The

World Council for Peace, 

World Peace Congress

World War I

World War II

World War III, threat of 

Yergan, Max