The Black and The Red

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln called to the White House a distinguished group of free black Americans, the first time people of color were invited to meet a chief executive. Responding to the racial prejudice sweeping the country as the Civil War raged, Lincoln proposed recolonizing in Liberia, sadly concluding, “it is better, therefore, to be separated.” The guests politely refused the president’s recommendation and withdrew from the meeting convinced more firmly than ever that the real home for African Americans was America itself.

Exactly a century later, in 1962, W.E.B. Du Bois, America’s most eminent black academic intellectual, decided to become a citizen of Ghana. Two years earlier, at the age of 93, and after having spent almost his entire intellectual life skeptical of Marxism, Du Bois applied for membership to the Communist Party USA. In August 1963, as he lay dying in a hospital bed, he was visited by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of the Republic of Ghana. “I failed you--my strength gave out,” lamented the 95-year-old scholar regarding a collaborative project on an encyclopedia of African American history he knew he would not live to finish. “Forgive an old man.” Nkrumah left the room in tears. At that moment, in the nation Du Bois had abandoned, 250,000 black and white Americans were gathering before the reflecting pool of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial in what would be the greatest civil rights march in history.

David Levering Lewis, who holds the Martin Luther King Jr. Chair in History at Rutgers University, has produced the second volume of his monumental study of Du Bois, a figure whose life reads as something of a noble tragedy in American intellectual history. The first widely acclaimed volume, “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography of a Race, 1868-1919,” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1994. It dealt with Du Bois’ ancestral roots in Haiti and New Haven, his youth in Calvinist New England, education at Fisk and Harvard, early career as a historian and his rivalry with Booker T. Washington, who advocated broad technical education for black youths opposed to Du Bois’ preference for a classical curriculum aimed at the “talented tenth,” his phrase, often regarded as elitist, for outstanding members of the African American community.

In the present volume, recently nominated for a National Book Award, Lewis has come through once again with a work of keen scholarship that will appeal to the general reader responsive to graceful, lucid prose by an author with an eye for ironic situations and complex emotions. Publishers are generally weary of multivolume works. But as Hannah Arendt pioneered a certain literary form in her assessment of J.P. Nettl’s mammoth study of activist Rosa Luxemburg, so too has Lewis in his consideration of Du Bois’ life and work. “The definitive biography, English-style, is among the most admirable genres of historiography,” Arendt wrote. “Lengthy, thoroughly documented, heavily annotated, and generously splashed with quotations, it usually comes in two large volumes and tells more, and more vividly, about the historical period in question than all but the most outstanding history books.”

In the academic world today, much of the writing on Du Bois tells us little about the man or his world. The “discourse” is arcanely analytical. Was Du Bois a post-structuralist who saw life as socially conditioned, or was he an essentialist who saw race as innately given? Was he a pragmatist who, having studied with William James, believed we can get along without truth, or did he, like Lincoln, whom he admired, hold America up to standards of right and wrong? Lewis wisely avoids such theoretical issues as he unfolds a masterful narrative that tells us as much about America as about this grand mind who struggled with it.

The story opens with Du Bois seated in the office of the NAACP’s journal The Crisis, pondering whether to run a grisly account of one of the many race riots that exploded in the year 1919. As Du Bois recognized before anyone else, the “color line” would indeed become the searing problem of the 20th century. The NAACP had to stay clear of anarchist and Communist activists who thought the Bolshevik revolution could be repeated on the streets of Greenwich Village. Du Bois and the NAACP would continually be faced with the question of whether black Americans should maintain an autonomous identity or whether they should establish some semblance of solidarity with other groups and causes. How to empower the poor and powerless?

Du Bois was perhaps too elitist to trust everything to class politics. He knew full well what Marxists were reluctant to acknowledge: that organized white workers, even more than corporate capitalists, excluded blacks from economic opportunity. In the ‘30s, when Communists tried to play the race card to promote the cause of the Soviet Union, Du Bois cautioned: “American Negroes do not propose to be the shock troops of the Communist Revolution, driven out in front to death, cruelty, and humiliation in order to win victories for white workers.”

At the pan-African conferences in the ‘20s, Du Bois demanded of the League of Nations racial equality and national self-determination for Africa. He clashed with Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican who, opposing the NAACP’s policy of black-white cooperation, arrived in New York City to urge upon African Americans a separatist stance that would lead to resettlement in Liberia.

Lewis devotes considerable attention to Du Bois’ efforts to improve education for black students, matters which involved curriculum development, fund-raising and the roles of leadership, admission and promotion policies at universities such as Howard, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee. Du Bois vehemently protested the absence of black students at elite East Coast institutions such as Yale, Harvard and Radcliffe, Wellesley and Smith, while at the same time complaining of the paternalism and parochialism prevalent at black colleges.

In a rich chapter (“Civil Rights by Copyright”) on the Harlem Renaissance, Lewis is skeptical of culture serving in place of politics. Nevertheless, a good deal of the Harlem Renaissance had the support of the William Harman Foundation, the Rosenwald Fellowships, as well as the Guggenheim. A leading light of the Renaissance was the poet Countee Cullen. Du Bois’ daughter Yolanda married Cullen, and the proud father-in-law looked forward to the arrival of superior offspring. Although Du Bois criticized racist presumptions, Lewis observes: “As far as his own flesh and blood was concerned, he believed that genes were destiny.” Indeed, they are; the poet Cullen, refusing parenting, turned out to be homosexual. But Du Bois urged his daughter to remain married, hoping for a mating miracle.

In the late ‘30s, when the Depression seemed to have doomed liberal capitalism to the dustbin of history, and the world was poised between the forces of fascism and communism, Du Bois saw Stalin’s Russia as the answer to Hitler’s Germany and a beacon of racial equality. The outbreak of the Cold War left Du Bois increasingly isolated as he opposed the containment of communism, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the armaments race, the Korean War, McCarthyism, and even the Point Four Program for the developing world. Convinced that the United States stood in the way of social progress, Du Bois was welcomed as a prophet in China and Russia. In Ghana he went to his grave a true believer in two causes, African nationalism and Soviet communism, one a wasteland of killing fields and kleptomania, the other a living hell of show trials and slave labor.

Although Lewis’ knowledge of black cultural history is thorough, some of his generalizations about intellectual history are dubious. The “Lost Generation” hardly looked to art and literature as the “means to change society.” The philosopher Sidney Hook did not become “an anti-socialist par excellence”; he continued to admire Karl Marx as much as Ronald Reagan. And America did not have to wait for Herbert Marcuse to show us what Du Bois anticipated: “The investment of American workers,” as Lewis writes, “in the success ideology of capitalism.” That point had been made much earlier by thinkers as diverse as Tocqueville, Lincoln, Engels and, above all, Thorstein Veblen.

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But these corrections are minor matters in a major book that is a joy to read even if Du Bois’ final years are too sad for words. One of the strongest sections is the author’s astute and judicious analysis of Du Bois’ seminal book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” published in 1935. Here indeed, as Lewis demonstrates, Du Bois does presage current scholarship in showing that blacks in post-Civil War America were not passive objects manipulated by Northern carpetbaggers, but active agents trying to work out the condition of their own freedom and self-determination. Had emancipated blacks been given the land, animals and tools with which to work the earth (to say nothing about equal access to trade unions and jobs in the industrial north), America might have witnessed the possibility of black capitalism, and Du Bois might have given America a chance to make good on its egalitarian promises in the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln called the “sheet anchor” of the Republic and the “immortal emblem” for humanity everywhere in the world.