'The souls of black folk,' a century hence

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2003 by Lewis, David Levering

Until the ascendancy of the Great Accommodator, the leaders of the Negro people had been selected, according to Du Bois, "by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save Frederick Douglass, little known outside their race." But Washington was the celebrity born of a singular event, the instantaneous wonder of an afternoon's deed in Atlanta in 1895, a leader more acclaimed by the other race than by his own.

Washington was the leader "not of one race but of two," Du Bois charged, and his creed was a modern one of an almost religious materialism combined with an old one of collusion with oppressors. Indeed, Du Bois leaves no doubt that he abhors the exuberance of Washington's business ethic as much as his adversary's Faustian bargain with the Jim Crow South - Washington's gospel of "Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life." Here, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" struck a defining note that would reverberate across six future decades of Du Bois' often seemingly contradictory human rights crusade beginning in Edwardian progressivism and ending in totalitarian communism - a visceral repugnance at seeing values reduced to money. The Great Accommodator hawked a creed, Du Bois warned, that "practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races" as part of a bargain of timid, circumscribed, material advancement. Washington would have his people renounce three means of empowerment: political power, civil rights and higher education.

History, Du Bois asserted as he marched proudly to his conclusion, offers no example of possible progress through such concessions. "In the history of nearly all the other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses. . . that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing." Du Bois saw what was fundamental then as now to every bargain between contending parties - the power ultimately to make the parties to the bargain keep it. "The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence - else what shall save us from a second slavery," he proclaimed in 1903. Thus, Souls transformed race relations in the United States with what now seems instantaneous speed, and by redefining the terms of a 300-year-old interaction between Blacks and Whites, reshaped the cultural and political psychology of peoples of African descent not only through the Western hemisphere but on the African continent as well.

Aftershocks from two of his century's three human earthquakes - the First World War and the Russian October Revolution - did as much to shake Du Bois' social-science confidence by the mid-1920s as did the rigidifying relations between the races. A quarter century after uttering his famous 1899 tag-line, a 57-year-old Du Bois reflected upon the staying power of his pronouncement in the magazine Foreign Affairs. "Once upon a time in my younger years and in the dawn of this century I wrote: 'The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,'" he stated. "'It was a pert phrase...which I then liked and which since I have often rehearsed to my soul and asked: - how far is this prophecy or speculation?'" Du Bois decided that the color line, or race, was still the central challenge of the century. But now, in 1925, he also paired class with race, stipulating in Foreign Affairs that "our present Problem of Problems is what we call Labor." The maldistribution of wealth and the oppressive conditions in which the majority of workers toiled had long been integral themes in Du Bois' writings, of course. The temptation to divine the what-if judgments Du Bois would deliver upon the contemporary political scene is so often irresistible for the very good reason that he spoke rather precisely to these times in an essay composed a mere three years before his death. That essay, "A Program of Reason, Right and Justice for Today," could be reprinted today in The Nation, The Progressive or The Crisis without changing a word. "My friends note, an election is coming up. So what?" he asks.