The Tragedy of W.E.B. DuBois
BRODERICK, FRANCIS L.
The Tragedy of W.E.B. DuBois by FRANCIS L. BRODERICK W. E. B. DuBois is a lonely and tragic Negro. Once a national audience, black and white, heard his plea for Negro equality. Now few listen, and...
...His goal remained the same—full rights for all Negro Americans immediately...
...Washington's death in 1915 removed the great rival, and no one took Washington's place...
...The NAACP, a sort of Twentieth Century abolitionist society, concentrated on civil and political rights, using civil suits, organized protest, and education as its weapons...
...The Crisis and the Association gave him a springboard to power, for in the Negro world he became the symbol of their work...
...A mulatto of French Huguenot, Dutch, and Negro ancestry, DuBois —the name is pronounced Du-Boyce —had grown up in Great Barring-ton, Massachusetts, and had been educated at Fisk, Harvard, and Berlin...
...Executive officers of the NAACP, white men all until 1920, came and went, and none ever made his will felt as an independent force...
...world socialism was remote, and domestic socialism, Communist or non-Communist, promised the Negro nothing...
...Then he broke with the forces for civil rights and with his own great past just as the struggle was about to register real gains...
...For fifteen more years DuBois stayed on with the NAACP as editor of his almost personal magazine, the Crisis...
...The United States could expect his loyalty, but Russia won his hopes...
...On essential points—-peace, socialism, education, race prejudice —Russia, in DuBois* view, had no peer...
...As a result of the "Atlanta compromise," Washington became the Negro's unofficial ambassador to white America, and his prestige in the white world, particularly among politicians and philanthropists, gave him almost regal status in the Negro world until his death in 1915...
...the younger generation rarely heard his name...
...A shrewd, calculating judge of people, he had the soft speech and the accommodating manner which made him equally at home among sharecroppers and at the President's table...
...By the end of the decade, DuBois reached his pinnacle...
...Then he mounted the "peace" crusade as a featured speaker: New York in March 1949, Paris in April, Moscow in August, and Prague the following year...
...The year after Washington's death, Negro leaders of all views and all sections arrived unanimously at a statement of policy not measurably different from DuBois' views...
...His old programs frustrated, his new plan rejected, DuBois went back to Atlanta University, as alone as he had been in his undergraduate days at Harvard...
...He found two possibilities: dark-skinned men everywhere in the world who were growing restive under their white colonial masters, and the Russian revolutionists...
...His people facing disaster, he turned to the only allies on whom he felt the Negro could count: his twelve million Negro fellow Americans...
...Despite endless denials, White was friendly to the Truman Administration, this at a time when DuBois thought that President Truman was supporting colonial powers at the expense of subject peoples and was looking for a capitalist war to crush Russia...
...American Communists and others similarly well disposed to Russian policy welcomed their new ally...
...When these views led DuBois to support Henry A. Wallace publicly in 1948, White used the occasion to have DuBois fired...
...He could get away with this tone with many Negroes...
...Washington had the appearance of a sturdy farmer in his Sunday best...
...This article is a summary of a book he has just completed on Dr...
...Forgotten were the epithets on both sides...
...Since white America, even liberal white America, had done so little for the Negro, DuBois looked about for new allies...
...For an angry moment, DuBois recommended violence as the answer to violence...
...Now few remember him, and of the few, part remember only his pro-Soviet posture...
...DuBois had a remarkably busy career with his new friends...
...Though Washington never explicitly disclaimed a single Negro right, his accommodating, diplomatic words made white Southerners think they could deal with the Negro on their own terms...
...membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters...
...DuBois, editor of the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, supported these activities, yet at the same time he was impatient with the Association's merely negative program of fighting obstructions...
...Yet with all these reservations, the essential fact remains that no other Negro in 1920 reached a national audience so effectively...
...How much office space was the Elder Statesman to have...
...In DuBois' view these forces were best represented by Russia...
...The final break put a tragic end to DuBois' career, for the Negro in America owes him much...
...Segregation without discrimination, he called it...
...He was easier to venerate than to work with, and Negro leaders ready to canonize him as the patron saint of Negro equality were not ready to surrender power to him...
...In this context DuBois' enthusiasm for Russia had no domestic effects...
...Ever conscious of his responsibility as the race's leader—he never doubted it even when others did—DuBois searched for a way out...
...When DuBois set that goal sixty years before, black Americans were still moving in a dark night of discrimination—segregation, disfranchisement, lynching— with the darkest hours still ahead...
...DuBois matured in the world of Booker T. Washington, whose speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895 was a landmark in Negro history...
...The Great Depression created a new situation...
...The less educated elements of the Negro population might put up with DuBois' arrogance as the price of his intellectual greatness...
...But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik...
...I may be deceived and half-informed...
...Hammering away at America's conscience and at the Negro's pride, arguing, cajoling, threatening, retreating when necessary, advancing when possible, he staked out the Negro's claim so unmistakably that others could carry on when he faltered...
...the Truman Doctrine armed Greece against Russia for the benefit of Great Britain...
...DuBois, unapproachable and unafraid...
...Now few listen, and fewer still heed him...
...he all but forgot it himself...
...Policy divided them even more decisively...
...He became chairman of the Peace Information Center in New York City, the American agency for collecting signatures to the "Stockholm peace petition...
...For more than thirty years he prodded the white man's conscience and the Negro's courage...
...At both meetings DuBois' program spoke the mind of the articulate race leaders...
...Now he, like Paul Robeson, embarrasses them...
...The Soviet Union was a more rewarding enthusiasm, for socialism, as DuBois saw it, gave voice to the depressed masses, black and white...
...The one led to the Pan-African movement, the other to a steady enthusiasm for the Soviet Union...
...When he was dismissed from the Association, Masses and Mainstream and the Daily Worker screamed condemnation...
...Slight and nervous in his movements, DuBois never for a moment forgot his educational background...
...For DuBois the pattern of the postwar world was clear: England and the United States were imperialist and discriminatory, Russia was neither...
...Their universities could plan for them, their businessmen could organize, their artists could enrich...
...But he lost this role too when he preached the Soviet Union's version of socialism and peace...
...To be sure, DuBois never inherited Washington's authority...
...Behind the Crisis and the Association, they saw a single figure—the austere, uncompromising, scholarly Dr...
...A large crowd appeared overflowing into 135th Street...
...Furthermore, within the range of his influence DuBois handicapped himself by righteous, tempestuous arrogance...
...The indictment marked the final turning point in DuBois' career...
...Negatively, it gained by the hatred of those white powers which bore the special brunt of DuBois' disapproval...
...Men need long memories and a sense of history to do him justice, for recently he has had little of value to say to the Negro...
...Broderick is on leave from Phillips Exeter this year working on a biography of the late Monsignor John A. Ryan, pioneer in Catholic social thinking...
...A decade passed at Atlanta, with a good deal of homage to an old man no longer at the center of power...
...When the case came to trial, the presiding judge dismissed it because the government failed to establish a nexus between DuBois' group and any foreign principal...
...The two communicated through memoranda...
...Both possessed titanic ambition...
...But men of comparable intelligence and training—Professor Alain Locke of Howard University was a Rhodes scholar —were not ready to accept DuBois' view of himself at its face value...
...Like Pan-Africa, Russia seemed to offer a glimpse of the future, especially because of its "workingman's psychology" and its freedom from a color line...
...He told his people to look for economic security in voluntary segregation— the formation of a Negro economy within the American economy...
...Behind his conflict with Washington was the clash of two discordant personalities...
...Pan-Africa was dead for the moment...
...At home, and abroad as well, in South Africa as well as in the United States, his writings gave colored men courage for their fight...
...Then when anger burned itself out almost as completely as the idealism of the war years, he settled down to a long struggle...
...The Crisis became the record of Negro achievement...
...DuBois' return to the arena created difficulties...
...The Negro and his white friends had worked with the old DuBois, uncompromising fighter for full equality, too long to turn to a new DuBois who sounded like Booker T. Washington...
...no Negro did...
...These conditions worked in DuBois' favor...
...The conflict between them became official in 1903 when DuBois published an attack on Washington in his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk...
...He wanted the Negro to plan the development of his own group through building and loan associations, cooperatives, even a Negro party (though this last was muted...
...They accomplished little beyond forcing DuBois to do some fresh thinking about colonial problems...
...Washington, thick set and slow moving, had the confidence of a self-trained man...
...His program was designed to soothe racial tensions by allaying white apprehension of aggressive Negro demands, by guaranteeing a stable Negro labor force in the South, and bargaining for security and education for the Negro...
...it was more like the loudest voice in a large and dissonant chorus...
...His monthly editorials held up the strong, re-charged the wavering, and flayed the compromisers...
...The Pan-African movement took the form of a series of congresses at which colored men representing no one but themselves gathered in Europe to condemn white colonialism...
...Chasing after a pipe dream of Negro separatism, he found himself far from the battlefield when his side started winning, and when he finally did return, there was no room for him in the top command...
...Progressivism had let the Negro down, and when the Negro returned from the Great Crusade, he was met by the "Red Summer" of 1919 which, according to John Hope Franklin, "ushered in the greatest period of interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed...
...A master of equivocation, he could make platitudes pass as earthly wisdom, and he could take back unnoticed with one hand what he had given with the other...
...White America had done little, even in prosperous years...
...Then in 1944 his contract at Atlanta was abruptly terminated, and he returned to New York and to the NAACP for another round of controversy...
...Long the victim of a tradition of "last hired, first fired," the Negro suffered out of proportion to his numbers as the economy slid downward...
...Negroes are looking for equality by 1963, the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation...
...honorary degrees from Atlanta, Fisk, and Wilberforce...
...Nice things were said, by Van Wyck Brooks and E. Franklin Frazier among others...
...Yet as a result of the trial, DuBois cut himself loose from the American struggle for equality and associated himself with a "world concept of human uplift," the forces fighting for peace and for the working classes...
...Through the Crisis and the Association and through an annual nationwide lecture tour, DuBois' voice became the loudest in the race...
...its columns gave recognition to success in every field, and young artists could find there a place for their creations...
...DuBois was wooed with vigor...
...The sentiment was reciprocated: the Communists labeled DuBois an imperialist follower of Booker T. Washington, a "betrayer of the Negro people" and a spokesman for "Negro bourgeois reformism...
...Arrogant and outspoken, he held aloof from the Negro masses, but felt at home with a small company of his peers, with whom he could be witty and convivial...
...On the other hand, no tarnish dulled the luster of the Soviet Union: Molo-tov was "the one statesman at San Francisco who stood up for human rights and the emancipation of colonies...
...For four years tensions about administration taxed the patience of both sides...
...Ralph J. Bunche, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize for achieving a truce between Israel and the Arab states, had made the Negro an unwitting partner to the betrayal of democracy in Israel when he should have "stood firm against vacillation, compromise, and betrayal by our Department of State...
...To the NAACP, with which he had been associated for the 24 years since its beginning, segregation, however veiled, was anathema, and the organization let him go...
...was for a few years—venerated as the Negro's elder statesman...
...Even so, he could have been—indeed FRANCIS L. BRODERICK is an instructor in history at Phillips Exeter Academy...
...The austere Dr...
...What's more, the Negro was leaving the farm, and more important, he was moving North in substantial numbers: in the decade from 1910 to 1920, Chicago's Negroes more than doubled, and Detroit's multiplied seven times...
...Business interests controlled America's direction: the Baruch plan was a trick to prevent the peacetime use of atomic energy...
...the Negro could flourish in cooperative sufficiency...
...People forgot about his plan for Negro self-sufficiency...
...Gathered in Northern urban ghettos, they had strength of numbers and the right to vote, powerful weapons in their own defense...
...Walter White, with whom DuBois had feuded bitterly before the break in 1934, was now in charge...
...Even DuBois' aloofness became an asset— it removed him in Negro eyes from everyday life and, by giving him a transcendent quality, it raised the goal of aspiration...
...After his dismissal from the Association, he joined the Council on African Affairs as vice-chairman (Paul Robeson was chairman...
...but when he complained about the incompetence of the Negro press and the rascality of Negro clergymen, he was needling his most important potential allies...
...One cannot say that the Negro's progress since 1903 is the result of DuBois' agitation: DuBois' ideas belonged to others as well, and many forces other than agitation have contributed to the Negro's advance in fifty years...
...But except for the Amsterdam News, right in the neighborhood, the Negro press ignored the event...
...Yet DuBois, more than anyone else, pointed the way for the Negro by his steady refusal to allow the Negro comfort in anything less than his full rights as an American...
...The plan ended DuBois' career as a leader of the race...
...When they met in an elevator the size of a large broom closet, they managed not to see each other...
...Let Negroes work for their own people, using their purchasing power to support their own...
...Then in February 1951, a Washington grand jury indicted DuBois and others for failing to register the Peace Information Center as the "agent of a foreign principal...
...As a result, local branches of the NAACP all over the nation identified the work of the Association with the vigorous editor whose views the members—70,000 by 1919—received every month...
...Yet the paragon existed at a distance, and DuBois' enthusiasm for Russia did not extend to American Communists, the "young jackasses" who mouthed Marxist cliches without understanding American conditions...
...The present had consumed the past, and an old man was reminded that people have short memories...
...Mulling over the post-war world and his own trial, sorting out friends and enemies, he charged that colored leaders all over the world had abandoned their people to become lackeys of capitalism...
...DuBois' voice carried further than any other single Negro's, but it never rang with command...
...After jobs at Wilberforce and at the University of Pennsylvania, he had gone to Atlanta University as a professor of sociology, a pioneer in collecting data on Negro life...
...The older generation paid him the respect due to a great pioneer...
...Once Negro leaders looked to him as the patron saint of their struggle...
...The New Masses published his articles, gave him an award, named him a contributing editor...
...The clarity of this balance gave order in a complex world...
...Last May when the Schomberg Collection, the branch of the New York Public Library which specializes in Negro history, had a little ceremony to unveil a bronze head of DuBois by William Zorach, it was a chance to go behind recent events and give the man the recognition which, 25 years before, everyone knew he had earned...
...Though originally friendly to Washington's position, DuBois soon joined up with a group of noisy dissenters—mainly northern, urban, educated Negroes—who charged that Washington was selling out the Negro's heritage as a man and as an American for a mess of economic pottage...
...Because Negro leaders refused to copy his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, because Negroes generally failed to heed and to succor him, he publicly turned his back on their efforts...
...Where Washington was accommodating, DuBois was fretful and aggressive...
...When the Supreme Court handed down its desegregation decision in the spring of 1954, who thought to say that the modern movement for Negro rights, of which the Court's decision was a momentary climax, owed more to DuBois than to any other single man...
...In the fall of 1950, he ran for the U.S...
...There Washington offered the white South an attractive deal-—in exchange for economic opportunity, that is, industrial education and jobs, the Negro would put off his insistence on political, civil, and social rights...
...Who was to open the mail...
...After America's entry into the war, Negro leaders gathered in Washington to promise support of the war, but also to insist on the training of Negro officers, an end to lynching, universal suffrage, universal and free common school training, abolition of the Jim Crow car, repeal of segregation ordinances, equal civil rights in public institutions...
...Let white men flounder in capitalist greed...
...Initially cautious, he soon pronounced Russia "the most amazing and hopeful phenomenon" in the post-war world, and after a subsidized trip to Russia in 1926, he told his Crisis readers: "I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me...
...Senate against Herbert H. Lehman and Joe R. Hanley on the American Labor Party ticket...
...Seven years later he left Atlanta to join white progressives like Oswald Garrison Vil-lard to set up the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP...
...a testimonial 70th birthday party...
...Now at the end of a long life—he will be ninety this month—his immediate past blots out the remoter past...
...But the war had chilled his expectations from white America...
...DuBois, with a well-trimmed goatee, looked like a Spanish aristocrat...
...After such a career, it was a stark valedictory...
...Negroes had moved far in fifty years—they could move no farther unless they fought American capitalist-imperialists hell-bent on curbing social welfare and destroying Russia...
...For this group Washington's views no longer had meaning, and they were ready to hear the more uncompromising DuBois...
...White was a gregarious, nimble, talented negotiator who used first-name diplomacy to expand Negro opportunity...
...He wrote a weekly newspaper column, published a book, founded Phylon, a sociological quarterly, and organized regional conferences of Negro land-grant colleges...
...Back at the Association's offices, where once he had thundered, his role was narrowed to post-war colonial policy and "special research," while other hands—to DuBois, cold hands —wove the fibers of policy...
...Later on he became "one of the greatest living Americans," and finally the "recognized 'Dean of American Letters.' " For his part, DuBois said he would be a "fellow traveler with Communist or capitalist, with white man or black," as long as "he walks toward the truth...
...the Marshall Plan promised large profits to American investors and sought to re-establish European wealth at the expense of the colonies...
...DuBois reminded Negro intellectuals that courage and talent could carry a man—and a race—far...
Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2
