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

However, as Dr. Nellie McKay, the Evejue-Bascom professor of American and African American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, points out, Du Bois was never able to implement his radical principles in his dealings with the women in his own life: his first wife, Nina, who suffered from his serial affairs; his daughter, Yolande, of whom he was alternately demanding and neglectful; and strong-minded women such as the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, with whom his clashes were legendary, and others.

But as Du Bois said of his sometime-nemesis, Booker T. Washington, "Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force." For Du Bois, a man of capacious and even voracious intellect, all relationships in the personal realm suffered.

"People basically couldn't stand him--but that didn't alter the fact that he was still the towering intellectual on the American continent," Marable says.

Throughout the course of his long and extraordinarily varied life, "the Doctor," as he was not always affectionately known, showed a real genius for making enemies. Indeed, Du Bols joked in his autobiography that he would have been sincerely mourned had he died at age 50, but "at seventy-five, my death was practically requested."

His death, when it came, was quite dramatic. "He knew how to make an exit," Marable says. The report of his death came during the 1963 March on Washington--moments before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took the podium. As NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins asked for a moment of silence, one aged Black woman in the crowd is said to have wept: "It's like Moses. God had written that he should never enter the promised land." The words were to prove prophetic.

"Great leaders see things further than others and desire things more greatly. Great scholars like Marx, Freud, Du Bois, Einstein see further than other people, see the deeper patterns of history," Marable says.

Du Bois was, in effect, "trapped by history," Marable explains. He was a great forerunner and visionary who was also blunt, curt, apolitical and, most of the time, abominably rude. He battled Washington and the Tuskegee Machine --though the dimensions of that conflict have been overdrawn in many accounts, note Lewis and Marable--he feuded with Oswald Villard and Walter White over leadership of the NAACP, and took on Marcus Garvey. A grudge match with the U.S. government eventually led to his seeking expatriate status in Ghana.

Feagin is deeply chafed by the fact that "no major American university ever offered Du Bois a position. People knew he was a giant. Any dummy did by 1915. And with Black Reconstruction in the '30s, everybody knew," Feagin says. But Du Bois remained marooned in Black colleges with their comparatively heavy teaching loads, low salaries and poor libraries.

"His counterparts at Harvard--and who's heard of them today--would quibble and gripe, `The citations aren't as precise as they should be. There aren't any original sources.' How racist can you get!" Feagin exclaims.