ESSAY PAPER: A CAUTIONARY LIFE

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AGAINST RACISM: UNPUBLISHED ESSAYS, PAPERS, ADDRESSES, 1887-1961 By W. E. B. Du Bois. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. Illustrated. 325 pp. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $25.

ALTHOUGH the name is familiar, one feels always the need to introduce W. E. B. Du Bois to American readers. Yet Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the most outspoken and published Americans of his time. Many of his letters have appeared in the three-volume ”Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois,” which, like ”Against Racism,” was edited by Herbert Aptheker, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Santa Clara and is the director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies. This volume reminds us that we never really knew Du Bois.

His life doesn’t quite support the conventional view that intelligence and hard work at the service of worthy ends will result in progress. Rather, Du Bois’s life and work force us to confront the paradoxes of democratic society – that it is unable to rid itself of irrational and self-destructive tendencies, and that it sometimes confines truly exceptional and original human spirits. We are not comfortable with these ideas, so it has been simpler to dismiss Du Bois as a curious black American who lived a life that always seemed off-center.

Du Bois was one of the great American minds of the 20th century – great in his comprehension of what was known and thought in the Western world and great in his power to find order in disparate data and construct sensible remedial programs from social science research. William James and Albert Bushnell Hart – his teachers at Harvard University, where Du Bois studied between 1888 and 1892 – considered him the brightest, most gifted student they had known.

After graduating from Fisk University and Harvard, Du Bois worked toward his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin, where he imbibed a heady concoction of Romanticism and the then new science of sociology. He never lost faith in the idea that science, reason and will would transform ignorance and prejudice into enlightened social interest. Were he not black, with a primary interest in black people, he would have doubtless been regarded as one of the fathers of American sociology. As it was, he completed landmark sociological works such as ”The Philadelphia Negro” (1899) and ”Black Reconstruction” (1935) and established a serious social science program at Atlanta University. But the University of Pennsylvania (which sponsored ”The Philadelphia Negro”) was embarrassed to list him among its faculty, and Atlanta University on two occasions forced him to resign in deference to white philanthropists who supported the school.

Sobered from his early optimism, Du Bois became an avowed Socialist. He was considered all the more radical by both white and black leaders during the McCarthy era, when his political activities resulted in overzealous scrutiny by the State Department and the F.B.I. In 1950-51, he was indicted, tried on the charge that he had failed to register as an agent of a foreign government and acquitted. Perhaps in defiance of such harassment, he joined the Communist Party in 1961 and accepted President Kwame Nkrumah’s invitation to move to Ghana. He became a citizen of that country in 1963, the year of his death.

One view of Du Bois is that he spent his last years as a dupe of the Communist Party. No doubt he was used and became the darling of the party, but the positions he was taking – for world peace and for social and racial justice – were legitimate and were the same ones he had taken all his life. He would never have allowed himself to be trotted out to say things he didn’t believe. He made speeches in the Soviet Union and came to be identified as a spokesman for that nation at a time when the gap between East and West was growing. Even the black leadership was purging itself of leftists to put distance between itself and the party. Du Bois, then, was isolated from the mainstream of American politics and an easy target.

Du Bois’s frustrations are the true measure of the great waste racism has caused America. He would have completed a comprehensive social survey of black Americans in the first decade of this century; he would have used Southern land-grant colleges to assemble data on blacks in the South; he would have completed the Encyclopedia of the Negro. He failed to gain support for these projects because whites (and sometimes blacks) feared he would upset the delicate balance of American racial accommodations.

The essays collected in ”Against Racism” span the period from his school days at Fisk to his expatriation in Ghana. One expects to see changes, but the steadiness of vision reflected in these pieces is remarkable. ”An Open Letter to the Southern People” (1887) minimizes the importance of ”social equality,” concedes that ”the vast majority of the Negro race, thanks in great measure to your own lack of foresight, are not intelligent” and appeals to the common sense and self-interest of whites. After 1910, he makes no such concessions and stresses more the economic basis of racism and colonialism. Yet he is always consistent in his view that racism is a social perversion, that prejudice and ignorance would yield to science and that people would want to know the truth and would be persuaded by it.

”Celebrating His Twenty-fifth Birthday” (1893), the most personal and moving piece in this volume, is Du Bois’s journal account of an almost religious rite. It reflects on family and his transcendent success at Fisk, Harvard, Berlin. ”I remembered how when wandering in the fields I chose the realm of Mind for my territory and planned Harvard and Europe,” he writes. It is a self-anointment like that of a Wagnerian hero. ”These are my plans: to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race. Or perhaps to raise a visible empire in Africa thro’ England, France or Germany.” ”THE NEGRO AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION” (1936), the longest essay here, was written for a proposed booklet that was to be funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Rosenwald Fund. A fully developed argument for ”Negro self-sufficiency,” it accepts ”self-segregation” as a possible strategy for blacks, anticipating ”black power” and the black nationalist ideas of recent decades. Apparently the publishers did not share Du Bois’s views, and rejected the essay. In 1934, these same views provoked Du Bois’s resignation from the board of the N.A.A.C.P. and as editor of the Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. magazine he founded. The essay presents a trenchant analysis of the consequences of America’s shift from a producer-oriented to a consumer-oriented society, an insight that later in the hands of David Riesman and John Kenneth Galbraith would have profound influence on American social thought.

This volume is not all essays. There are letters, a list of his courses at Fisk, brief expository exercises for his Harvard composition class, a plot for a story and so on. Those familiar with Du Bois’s life and works will find no surprises but should be pleased to have this material published. There are three or four excellent pieces; the rest will be of interest to historians and scholars. Even the college exercises provide rare glimpses into the youthful mind and imagination. On balance, the book is a good end to an important, necessary series.

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