A timeless legacy: celebrating 100 years of W.E.B. Du Bois' the souls of Black Folk - A Salute To Black History Month

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 13, 2003 by Kendra Hamilton

"The fundamental conflict between Asia, Africa, Latin America and what he calls the `islands of the sea' and the advanced industrial societies and their imposition of colonialism and racial apartheid," is articulated here, Marable says. And what's particularly prophetic about Du Bois' analysis of the issues involved is that he sets them not in a Black-White-U.S. paradigm, but in a global one.

To frame matters in contemporary parlance, Marable explains, "The problem of the 21st century is global apartheid: the conflict between predatory global states and the underdeveloped world; the fact that the 100 wealthiest people on this planet have a greater net wealth than the bottom 2.5 billion people --half the world's population.

"That's a contradiction that Du Bois would today absolutely be interrogating with his international, pan-African vision," Marable says.

THE TALENTED TENTH: One doesn't hear much about "the talented tenth" today. The notion smacks of a hopelessly dated emancipation day tea with the Links elitism that was thoroughly discredited by the "power to the people" rhetoric of the 1960s.

Following is what Du Bois wrote in "Of the Training of Black Men": "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in golden halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension ..."

What Du Bois is, in fact, advocating is higher education and culture for African Americans--an elite of culture and education to lead the illiterate and barely literate millions of 1903.

"So many people have gotten hung up on the concept of the `talented tenth,' Lewis says. "That concept is central, but it does not and did not mean rule by an elite. Du Bois was talking about the responsibilities of leadership, the duties that must be embraced by people who have advantages."

That's a concept that has great relevance today, Marable says. "There's a real crisis today in terms of the need for a committed intellectual leadership."

Adding that there's a chapter in his newly released book, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life, entitled "The Death of the Talented Tenth," Marable adds, "The Black elite in this nation has disavowed its link to the Black working class. Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice do not emerge from a vacuum."

FEARLESS AUDACITY

Du Bois' was a voice that, for the times, was dating to the point of audacity. His challenge to Booker T. Washington was virtually without precedent: "In the history of nearly all other races and people the doctrine preached ... has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing," he wrote.

He called the South "an armed camp for intimidating Black men." He charged that racism and lynchings were not regional issues but national ones, requiring national attention and solutions. And he said these things, and more, in a manner that had never been seen. Mingling historical, political and sociological essay with fiction, poetry and even song, he marshaled fact and emotion in so masterful a fashion as to create a message that could not be ignored.