W.E.B. Du Bois, by David Levering Lewis

...As previously suggested, however, his acute awareness of white working-class racism and trade union discrimination prevented him from embracing the socialist movement...

...To simplify a tangled story, Washington offered Du Bois a position at Tuskegee, which the latter turned down, perhaps because he did not relish being in the shadow of the older and more famous figure...

...The Albion Tour,* who is referred to as a "southern expatriate" or "southern renegade" was actually a white northerner who had gone south after the Civil War as a "carpetbagger" and had returned north after the fall of Reconstruction...

...Lewis also sheds new light on Du Bois's experiences as a graduate student in Germany, showing that his failure to receive a doctorate was due to the rigid enforcement of a residence requirement...

...He argues quite persuasively that Du Bois's philosophical predilections were for post-Hegelian idealism rather than for the pragmatism that James was offering as an alternative...

...Lewis does not make this error...

...But Du Bois's concept of liberation extended beyond race and nationality...

...Du Bois was a titan among African-American intellectuals and the central figure in black protest politics during the first half of the twentieth century...

...After joining the Communist party in 1952, he became a prominent victim of McCarthyite persecution...

...After studying at Fisk on a fellowship provided by local Congregational churches, Du Bois went on to Harvard, where the racial snobbery he encountered was to some extent neutralized by the warm personal attentions of a very distinguished member of the faculty...

...But Lewis adds some details and enhances our understanding of the serious tensions that developed between the editor of the Crisis and the association's white leaders and financial supporters...

...There may be other small errors that this reviewer lacked the knowledge to spot, but such mistakes are almost inevitable in a work of this size and scope...

...Lewis finds that his early embrace of the late-Victorian view that race consciousness was the key to the progress of peoples and nations proved somewhat counterproductive once he had gone to battle against some of the manifestations of Caucasian race consciousness in the United States of the Jim Crow era...

...He would not bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world...

...His political and social thought during the period covered here contained elitist and authoritarian elements hard to reconcile with the commitment to radical democracy that some historians have seen as the essence of his thinking throughout his career...

...Although he had little difficulty in agreeing with the basic socialist argument that capitalism stood in the way of genuine human emancipation, Du Bois saw working-class white racism (manifested especially in the discrimination of unions against black workers) as an insuperable barrier to a black alliance with socialists and communists until the onset of the cold war convinced him that the Soviet Union was sincerely committed to the struggle against European imperialism and white supremacy, while the United States was working to sustain racist and colonialist domination throughout the world...

...More than making up for such minor lapses is a wealth of new facts about Du Bois and many fresh insights into what made him tick...

...He was the first black American to do graduate work in Europe, the first to earn a doctorate from Harvard (or any other American university), and the first historian, white or black, to publish in the prestigious Harvard Historical Studies...

...Earlier one-volume biographies by Francis Broderick, Elliot Rudwick, and Manning Marable were too brief to do full justice to their subject...

...For Du Bois," Lewis observes, "the relationship between the NAACP and The Crisis was governed by the otherwise repellent doctrine of separate but equal...

...The clash between Du Bois's desire for what was probably the top position a black could attain in American public education and Washington's belief that the best place for him was as an underling at Tuskegee bred deep personal animosity...

...But Du Bois did not in fact anticipate the radical black nationalists of the 1960s by calling on African Americans to engage in some form of autonomous revolutionary action...

...Unlike many socialists, he did not believe that racial equality had to be postponed until after the demise of capitalism or even that socialism would bring an end to racism—unless the egalitarian reforms that he believed possible in a democratic capitalist society had already been achieved...

...The forebear with whom he could most readily identify was his relatively affluent and aristocratic grandfather Alexander Du Bois...

...Du Bois is, incredible as it may seem, the first full-scale biographical treatment of any substantial segment of the life of this key figure in African-American history...

...He later firmed up his position as the pioneer of African-American sociology by directing the eighteen-volume Atlanta University Studies, which surveyed virtually all aspects of black life in the United States in the early twentieth century...

...He fondly recalled this encounter in the autobiography he wrote at the end of his life, contrasting his grandfather's dignified demeanor as he raised his wine glass to toast a friend with the crude "jokes and backslapping" of the maternal relatives who surrounded him at home in Great Barrington...

...Lewis even finds instances when personal ambition for place or office influenced his public stances on controversial questions...

...Not an easy man to work with, be married to, or have as a father, Du Bois could be arrogant, abrasive, and inconsiderate of others...

...He notes that the famous passage in The Souls of Black Folk describing the "double consciousness" of African Americans does not propose that blacks resolve the conflict between Africa and America by embracing one side or the other, despite the acute discomfort of having a dual identity at a time when most whites disparaged Africa and mocked the pretensions of blacks to be full-fledged Americans...

...he died in 1963 after emigrating to Ghana and in effect giving up on the domestic struggle for equal rights...

...We learn, for example, that both he and his father were of illegitimate birth, and that the latter, whom Du Bois never actually met, lived on for many years after he had abandoned the family he had established through a bigamous marriage...

...The whites tended to have as their sole interest the removal 292 • DISSENT Books of the legal barriers to equality under the law and at the ballot box that they believed had been accorded to African Americans by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments...

...There is also a misquotation from historian B. Joyce Ross, who described Du Bois's NAACP associate Joel Spingarn as a "non-economic liberal" (meaning that his liberalism did not extend to economic issues) rather than an "economic liberal," as Lewis has it...

...Turning from history, sociology, and literature to protest politics and propaganda, Du Bois became the principal instigator of the twentieth-century civil rights struggle, founding the Niagara Movement in 1905 and joining with a few white Progressives and other black radicals to organize the NAACP in 1909-10...

...L ewis's W.E.B...

...First attracted to socialism by Eugene Debs and the American Socialist party of the first decade of the twentieth century, Du Bois began an extended love-hate relationship with white American radicalism...

...calling attention to them is not meant to raise serious doubts about the reliability of the work as a whole...

...As such, he deserves to be characterized accurately by historians of the African-American freedom struggle...

...On the contrary, he saw this tension as a permanent condition that could become a source of creativity and strength rather than a debilitating weakness...

...Alexander later left him a small inheritance and became even more of a role model for his grandson when historical research revealed that he had been active in the black antislavery movement...

...Lewis interprets his basic views on American race relations as the advocacy of a middle position between separatists and assimilationists...

...One wonders what would have happened if Hosmer had been like the white teacher who squelched Malcolm X's youthful ambitions by contemptuously dismissing his aspiration to be a lawyer...

...A "life and times" rather than merely a chronicle of Du Bois's experiences, it treats fully and incisively the racist climate of opinion and the larger AfricanAmerican response to it that conditioned almost everything that Du Bois thought and did...

...Du Bois: BIOGRAPHY OF A RACE, 18681919, by David Levering Lewis...

...The hope that Du Bois nourished fitfully through most of his life that white Americans had the capacity to overcome their racial prejudices and treat blacks as equals may have been first aroused by the behavior of his high school principal, Frank Hosmer...

...The most striking example was the notorious "Close Ranks" editorial in the Crisis in 1918 when Du Bois advised blacks to forgo all protest against racial injustice so that they could wholeheartedly support the war effort— this at a time when he was angling for a commission in the Army Intelligence Corps...

...As a middle-class black fighting for the liberation of his people from the American racial caste system, the Du Bois of Lewis's biography saw the fight against segregation and discrimination as the first order of business...

...He shows that Du Bois had some sympathy for the democratic socialism of Eugene Debs and was moving toward the conclusion that capitalism would eventually have to be superseded by a more humane social and economic system...

...The debate about who was right—the embittered old revolutionary or the relatively hopeful reformer so well captured in this splendid biography—continues to rage...

...and the subordination of the former to the latter if need be...

...The job he most coveted was the position of superintendent of schools for the District of Columbia, a federal patronage position that Washington controlled...

...The knowledge that Du Bois later became a Marxist and a communist has led some writers to read too much of his later socialist activism back into his thinking before 1919...

...He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the door of opportunity closed roughly in his face...

...Finally, Lewis has Du Bois dining with his old Harvard professor William James in 1918, which would have been quite remarkable since the philosopher died in 1910...

...Du Bois never lost the attachment to the elite side of his ancestry and its Victorian ideals of gentility that the encounter had awakened in him...

...The teenage "Willie" traveled to New Bedford to visit his grandfather for the first time in 1883 and came away with a new sense of "what manners meant and how people of breeding behaved...

...Although he fully endorsed this aim, Du Bois also used the pages of the Crisis to encourage a cultural nationalism and Pan-Africanism that seemed to white progressives to promote tensions between the races rather than the harmonious relations they hoped to nurture between the white and black citizens of a unified nation...

...Mary White Ovington, the white social worker of abolitionist lineage who as an officer of the NAACP was normally supportive of Du Bois, reacted to the tendency of the Crisis to denounce whites in general by asking if the association was for Du Bois "a work for colored and white people to do together" (as she had supposed) "or a work of revolution for the colored people only...

...But Lewis leaves us in no doubt that this less-than-perfect human being was a profound thinker and an indispensable contributor to the cause of black liberation, not only in the United States but throughout the world...

...Only much later did he conclude that no real progress toward racial equality was possible without a social and economic revolution...

...Lewis is the first scholar to make full use of the voluminous Du Bois papers, and he has apparently read everything Du Bois published that has survived, which according to my count includes twenty-three books, not including the Atlanta 290 • DISSENT Books series, much of the contents of the Crisis, and, just for the period before 1919, dozens of other articles appearing in a range of periodicals...

...His The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was not only the first significant sociological study of an African-American community, but also the first extensive, empirically based socialscientific investigation of any American population group...

...As readers of Lewis's earlier books are well aware, he is a master stylist and a skilled storyteller...

...The Broderick and Rudwick works also suffered from a lack of free access to Du Bois's papers...

...But Lewis does suggest that the quarrel might not have become so bitter and divisive if it not had been fueled by personal resentments on both sides...

...Lewis quotes in full what he takes to be Du Bois's prescription for the "robust" development of "the Negro self...

...Almost forty years after publication of The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America in 1896, he produced his monumental Black Reconstruction [1935], a SPRING • 1994 • 289 Books work that has come to be recognized as one of the classics of American historical writing...

...294 • DISSENT...

...For most blacks, as for other workers, class disadvantage was a reality, but the racism that added greatly to the misery of SPRING • 1994 • 293 Books African Americans was a force in its own right and needed to be confronted directly...

...along with William Lloyd Garrison, he was honored as a white "friend of freedom" at the first meeting of Du Bois's Niagara Movement...

...Du Bois thus anticipated as early as 1903 the cultural pluralism of the 1920s and at least one version of the multiculturalism of our own time...

...Although most African-Americans have come to accept, at least implicitly, Du Bois's dual agenda of public equality and ethnic self-realization, no one since has put the case for a positive dualism—or benign hyphenization of "African-American" —as clearly and effectively...

...His record of achievements during his long life (he lived to be ninety-five) is astonishing in its diversity and significance...

...Besides being as thorough and richly detailed as the subject demands, Lewis's account of Du Bois's first fifty years is beautifully written and thoroughly absorbing...

...But Lewis is skeptical of recent claims that James was a major intellectual influence as well as a friend...

...Du Bois provided an excellent analysis of some of Du Bois's main ideas and how he expressed them but had no biographical pretensions...

...Nor was equality a goal so unlikely to be attained that blacks should give up on America and separate themselves completely from whites...

...If he was a dualist on the question of African-American identity, he was also a dualist on the question of whether race or class was at the root of black inequality...

...This slip is worth mentioning because Tourg6e was the single most conspicuous white supporter of the legal and political equality of African Americans in the last two decades of the nineteenth century...

...Because the NAACP papers have long been available to scholars, the main outlines of Du Bois's activities in the association during its first decade are well known...

...A participant in the first PanAfrican conference of 1900, he organized a series of such conferences in the 1920s and was present in London in 1945 when the PanAfrican movement became the direct inspiration for the decolonization of Africa after World War II...

...As the editor of the association's organ the Crisis for the next twenty-five years, he gave voice to the two-sided black freedom struggle, the battle for equal rights in American society and the effort to develop a proud and distinctive African-American cultural identity...

...But he reveals for the first time the extent to which the disagreement was "professional and then bitterly personal before it became ideological...

...To struggle for legal and political equality and against legally enforced segregation did not in his mind contradict the need to affirm and develop a positive AfricanAmerican identity, as assimilationists claimed, but was an essential precondition for its full attainment...

...Lewis shows that this bearer of the best traditions of New England abolitionism took his only black pupil under his wing, guiding his extracurricular reading and encouraging him, with no hesitation, to prepare for college...

...In this work, the personal and private Du Bois comes alive but not in such a way as to obscure the historical context within which he operated as a publicist and protest leader...

...Arnold Rampersad's The Art and Imagination of W.E.B...

...His subsequent novels, essays, and autobiographies never quite duplicated the power and intensity of Souls, but they nevertheless solidified his preeminence as an African-American man of letters...

...Like Hosmer, William James treated him without apparent bias or condescension...

...Which is not to say that Du Bois's public disagreement with the Tuskegee model of black schooling as vocational training and his defense of a broad liberal education as essential to the development of black leadership were insincere...

...The book is not entirely free of inaccuracies...

...Du Bois solicited Washington's support and believed he had received it, only to feel betrayed when Washington backed another aspirant...

...Lewis believes that Du Bois's SPRING • 1994 • 291 Books response to "the corrosive, humiliating part of [his] heritage" was "transcendence through ability, aplomb, and carefully calibrated amnesia...

...Lewis has relatively little to add to our understanding of the substantive issues involved in the much-studied controversy between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington that came into the open in 1903...

...He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world...

...At the beginning of his account of the first fifty years of Du Bois's life, David Levering Lewis describes with bittersweet irony the announcement of Du Bois's death at the March on Washington, an event that to many Americans signified the fruition of the struggle that he had instigated more than a half-century earlier but had recently abandoned...

...More successfully than almost anyone else I can think of, he has managed to bridge the gap between academic historical scholarship and popular narrative history...

...Neither hagiographic nor debunking, it combines sympathy for its subject with a recognition of his shortcomings and inconsistencies...

...His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) was of course a landmark in American and AfricanAmerican thought and literature—as Henry James realized at the time, and as the efforts of recent scholars and critics to probe the depths of this extraordinarily rich and complex work have more than verified...

...He became perhaps the most prominent black intellectual in the world when he played a central role in the founding of the Pan-African movement...

...The book also merits praise for its judiciousness and avoidance of constrictive partisanship...