"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line."
The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is, in its way, a tragedy. And that's despite that he became a famous man, that he lived to ninety-five and kept his marbles until the end. But he wanted America to work, and did what he could to make it so, and it didn't, for him.
W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in Western Massachusetts in 1868 and died in Ghana in 1963. He began writing this autobiography at the age of 90. (There are earlier autobiographical texts.) It was largely completed at his death, but didn't appear in print until 1968. The day after he was born Andrew Johnson was impeached; by his death he's campaigning against the nuclear bomb.
His mother comes from a family of free blacks of long standing; his father was from Haiti; his great-grandfather Du Bois was a French-American Huguenot and a slave owner propagating childen on his slaves.
His father can't get a job in Great Barrington, but his mother is unwilling to leave her family, and his parents break up; young Du Bois stays with his mother and his mother's family. Supported by his mother's extended family, his childhood is pleasant enough. While he gradually realizes he can't be invited to dinner at his white playmates' houses, in less formal circumstances there's friendship, and his teachers quickly realize he's a bright young man. He's taught Latin and Greek, requirements for a college career at the time. He decides on Harvard.
But Great Barrington's public high school isn't considered good enough to get him straightway into Harvard, so he goes to Fisk University in Tennessee, one of the historically Black universities. While there he becomes more interested in music, and teaches school in rural Black communities in Tennessee. But Fisk is too poor and too ill-equipped; he remains determined to go to Harvard.
And he does. He's not the first Black student at Harvard, though there's only been a handful. He will be their first Ph.D. with a thesis on the slave trade. He's regularly invited to William James' house, and intends to be a philosopher, until James points out that 'the world is not in the habit of paying philosophers.'
He does advanced studies in Berlin at Humboldt University, where he meets Max Weber. Harvard doesn't have the department at the time, but he comes to think of himself as a sociologist, and that field is where all his research work is done, either as a professor or working for different government agencies.
He's also a public figure. In 1903 his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, appears. (It's on Modern Library's list of the best non-fiction in the 20th Century, and deservedly so.) It's largely pieces that had earlier appeared in The Atlantic magazine. At the time there was discussion in the Black community and their friends about the best way forward. Booker T. Washington had proposed the Atlanta Compromise: that the Black community didn't, just then, need the vote, or access to higher education; they needed to be secure in their persons, vocational training, and to acquire property. Du Bois disagreed, that the vote was a fundamental right of men (and, of course, it was just men) and that those who could benefit from it, deserved access to higher education. He felt that the Black people could be led forward by their own Talented Tenth, if that tenth had access to the tools. Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement to advocate the way forward as he saw it. The Souls of Black Folk covers this conflict, but also has wonderful, touching stories about his time teaching in rural Tennessee.
The Niagara Movement was an important precursor to the NAACP, and when that organization was formed Du Bois was considered for its chairman, but he turned it down; fundraising was going to be a crucial part of that job, and Du Bois felt he was too prickly to take on that job. (He might have been right...) Instead he becomes the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. He makes into an astounding success; at its peak it has a print run of a hundred thousand copies. In addition to reporting, it also serves (under the literary editorship of Jessie Redmon Fauset) as a major outlet for the new writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
With the depression he gives up the editorship of The Crisis in 1934; sales are down. So long as The Crisis was sending money to the NAACP, Du Bois was given a free hand as editor; now that the NAACP will have to send money to The Crisis, he's worried he won't have so free a hand. But he editied for a good run of twenty-four years. His book Black Reconstruction in America comes out in 1935, he makes a trip around the world in the later 30s, he's a professor at Atlanta University, he returns to the NAACP as director of special research.
Had nothing gotten better for Black America over those years? Maybe not much. The Ku Klux Klan was founded during Du Bois' lifetime and had not gone away. Du Bois moves from an advocate for integration to one for Black separatism, eventually giving serious thought to the Back to Africa movement. (He does die in Ghana.)
At the same time the Soviet Union was waging a serious charm offensive on Black American cultural figures. The two big captures were Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the singer. Du Bois says he never became a member of the Communist party, and that's probably true: his prickliness would have kept him from joining. But the US wouldn't give him a passport for most of the 1950s, until finally they were forced to by court order. His support for the Soviet Union makes the first fifty pages of the Autobiography difficult reading: he defends the indefensible, such as the 1956 invasion of Hungary and the Gulag. He writes rather cringingly about the brilliance of Marxist thought. Was America so hopeless that one had to fawn at the Soviet Union? (Don't ask how I would have felt a month ago.) Du Bois needed to take on board the old Russian joke: "They tell us, comrade, and it is true, that under capitalism man exploits man. Fortunately under communism, it is precisely the reverse."
But after those first fifty pages, the Autobiography becomes an autobiography and is a great read about an important man. Still, before I read the Autobiography, the book I had as my spin book, I read The Souls of Black Folk (available from Project Gutenberg) which is, by far, the better book, and the one I should have put on my Classics Club list in the first place...
Having finished my post for the last spin, I can now sign up for new one. 😉
