W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963 - Hardcover

Lewis, David Levering

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805087699 ISBN 13: 9780805087697

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2009

Synopsis

The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois from renowned scholar David Levering Lewis, now in one condensed and updated volume

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of this monumental figure that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era. In his magisterial prose, Lewis chronicles Du Bois’s long and storied career, detailing the momentous contributions to our national character that still echo today.

W.E.B. Du Bois is a 1993 and 2000 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction and the winner of the 1994 and 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

About this title

About the Author:

David Levering Lewis is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He has been awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Lewis lives in Manhattan and Stanfordville, New York, with his wife.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

Postlude to The Future

The announcement of W.E.B. Du Bois’s death came just after Odetta finished singing, a mighty trumpet of a voice that had accompanied the nonviolent civil rights movement from early days. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), broke the news in his precise midwestern voice that always reminded you of a proper Protestant pastor or one of the older men behind the counter at Brooks Brothers. From late morning into mid-afternoon, the scalding sun and suffocating clamminess had exacted their toll from more than 250,000 men, women, and young people who crowded the length of the Reflecting Pool of the nation’s capital in extraordinary response to the charge of Asa Philip Randolph, grand old man of civil rights and the moving force behind the March on Washington. Tall, white-maned, and as ebony as an African chief’s walking stick, Randolph had summoned Americans to Washington that twenty-eighth day of August, 1963, in all their professional, social, and ethnic variety to act, as he said in his cathedral baritone, as "the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom."1

Before Wilkins’s brief, epochal announcement, speaker after speaker had stepped up to the altar of microphones to music and song by Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Pete Seeger; Marian Anderson; and Mahalia Jackson. As the sun blazed down, the marchers witnessed a who’s who of America’s civil rights, religious, and labor leadership. Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches, with a speech too dry for this evangelical occasion, was followed by young John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose speech in its original draft, threatening to lay waste to the white South, had brought down upon his militant head the collective wrath of the civil rights elders and Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of the Washington archdiocese. Lewis finally agreed to soften his words, but not by much, and the crowd cheered when he intoned, "Listen, Mr. Kennedy, listen, Mr. Congressman, listen, fellow citizens—the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a ‘cooling-off’ period.” The United Automobile Workers’ ebullient Walter Reuther almost matched Lewis’s cautionary rhetoric, telling a nation on guard against Soviet imperialism that it could not “defend freedom in Berlin, so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham.” Then came Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to read James Farmer’s powerful speech. Had Farmer not insisted on staying in jail in Plaquemine, Louisiana, his baritone delivery would surely have made eyes water and pulses rise even more than the intense McKissick succeeded in doing. Whitney Young Jr., the handsome, gregarious new head of the National Urban League (NUL), was more at home in the boardrooms of corporate donors than in trying to stir crowds, and his too rapidly read message showed it.2 When Matthew Ahmann of the National Conference for Interracial Justice (NCIJ) used up his ten minutes in moral generalities, the thermometer stood at eighty-two humid degrees and attention spans evaporated.

Now Roy Wilkins was at the microphone, to be followed by Rabbi Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress. But instead of beginning his prepared address straightaway, Wilkins opened by saying that he was the bearer of news of solemn and great significance. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois was dead. He had died in his sleep around midnight, on the twenty-seventh, in Ghana, the country of his adopted citizenship. “Regardless of the fact that in his later years, Dr. Du Bois chose another path,” Wilkins told the suddenly still crowd, “it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause.” The NAACP head asked for silence, and a moment almost cinematic in its poignancy passed over the marchers. Saddened, though unsurprised by Wilkins’s announcement, Rachel Davis DuBois (“the mother of intercultural education”) wondered aloud at that moment if Du Bois’s spirit, “now free from his body, in some mysterious way might have hovered in our midst.” Unrelated by ties of blood or marriage to the legendary old icon, she had known and loved him deeply much of her life. Jim Aronson, another white Du Bois stalwart, would write in the Socialist weekly, the Guardian, of an aged, black woman in the crowd weeping, “ ‘It’s like Moses. God had written that he should never enter the promised land.’ ”3 Aronson left unsaid what all who had known him at the end understood, that Du Bois had finally concluded that this weeping woman’s promised land was a cruel, receding mirage for people of color. And so he had chosen to live out his last days in West Africa.

Legendary Dr. Du Bois (for few had ever dared a more familiar direct address) appeared to have timed his exit for maximum symbolic effect. Someone told the actor Sidney Poitier and the writers James Baldwin and John Killens the news while they were standing with several others in the lobby of Washington’s Willard Hotel early that morning. “ ‘The Old Man died.’ Just that. And not one of us asked, ‘What old man?’ ” Killens recalled.4 In a real sense, Du Bois was seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, as the paramount custodian of the intellect that so many impoverished, deprived, intimidated, and desperately striving African-Americans had either never developed or found it imperative to conceal. His chosen weapons were grand ideas propelled by uncompromising language. Lesser mortals of the race—heads of civil rights organizations, presidents of colleges, noted ministers of the Gospel—conciliated, tergiversated, and brought back from white bargaining tables half loaves for their people. Never Du Bois. Not for him the tea and sympathy of interracial conferences or backdoor supplications, hat in hand and smile fixed, in patient anticipation of greater understanding or guilt-ridden, one-time-only concessions. From an Olympus of scholarship and opinion, he waved his pen and, as he wrote later, attempted “to explain, expound and exhort; to see, foresee and prophesy, to the few who could or would listen.” Many, many listened, and one who did, Percival Prattis, the aggressive editor of the influential Pittsburgh Courier, wrote proudly at the time of the Old Man’s McCarthy-era trial as a foreign agent, “They could not look at him and call me inferior.”5

Born in Massachusetts in the year of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and dead ninety-five years later in the year of Lyndon Johnson’s installation, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois cut an amazing swath through four continents (he was a Lenin Peace Prize laureate and his birthday was once a national holiday in China), writing sixteen pioneering or provocative books of sociology, history, politics, and race relations. In his eighties, he found time to finish a second autobiography and produce three large historical novels, complementing the two large works of fiction written in the first two de cades of the twentieth century. The first African-American to earn a Harvard doctorate, he claimed later that it was a consolation for having been denied the few additional months needed to take a coveted doctorate in economics from the University of Berlin. The premier architect of the civil rights movement in the United States, he was among the first to grasp the international implications of the struggle for racial justice, memorably proclaiming, at the dawn of the century, that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line.

Du Bois was one of the founders of the NAACP and fearless editor of its monthly magazine, the Crisis, from whose thousands of heated pages scholarship, racial propaganda, visionary pronouncements, and majestic indignation thundered and flashed across America for a quarter of a century. In its peak year, the magazine reached one hundred thousand devoted subscribers. Professor, editor, propagandist, he was also once a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and, at least until the last decade of his Promethean life, civil rights role model to an entire race. In its transcendence of place, time, and, ultimately, even of race, his fabulous life encompassed large and lasting meanings. Always controversial, he had espoused racial and political beliefs of such variety and seeming contradiction as to bewilder and alienate often as many of his countrymen and women, black and white, as he inspired and converted. Nearing the end, Du Bois himself conceded mischievously that he would have been hailed with approval if he had died at fifty. “At seventy-five my death was practically requested.”6

Wilkins was into his speech now, mincing no words about the “sugar water” of civil rights proposals of the Kennedy administration. As the ovation for the NAACP secretary died down, Mahalia Jackson electrified the great crowd with “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” A few minutes later, at 3:40 p.m. on that catalytic August day, Martin Luther King Jr., the new shepherd of the ’buked and scorned, soared into one of the noblest speeches in the history of the American republic. Meanwhile, in Accra, Ghana, preparations for the elaborate state funeral were already well along that Wednesday, before the network-television eyes for the planet turned away from the March on Washington at 4:30 p.m. Osagyefo president Kwame Nkrumah of the Republic of Ghana had commanded that the farewell for his friend and teacher, the Father of Pan-Africa, be movingly splendid. The Osagyefo was the second African to take command of a state south of the Sahara (even seasoned Africa watchers routinely forgot that the leader of the Sudan had assumed his duties in January 1956, more than a year before Nkrumah); his title was a self-created one derived from the Akan language, and roughly meaning “Redeemer.” With three hundred million pounds sterling in its treasury and the most educated population in the sub-Sahara, Ghana’s ruler advertised his republic of seven million as the lodestar of black Africa, the beacon for independence and unity throughout the continent. The state funeral for W.E.B. Du Bois on Thursday afternoon, August 29, 1963, was meant to celebrate and symbolize Ghana’s claim to Pan-African leadership.

The body lay in state in the spacious white bungalow at 22 First Circular Road. It was a long barge of a house, a gift of the Ghana government, moored gently in Shirley Graham Du Bois’s flourishing garden. This was the second Mrs. Du Bois, musicologist, novelist, playwright, former American Communist Party (CPUSA) activist, now, by her own admission, in her fifty-seventh year of tempestuous willpower and talented improvisation. A handsome African-American woman of fair complexion and features strongly imprinted by Native American ancestry, her take-charge personality, piercing eyes, and prominent nose made her seem even handsomer and taller than her five feet two inches.7 From 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. on the twenty-ninth, Shirley Graham Du Bois had received those coming to pay final respects. Efua Sutherland, a tall, cocoa-brown woman of great beauty, arrived to console and stayed to help with the last-minute oversights of African occasions. She was the director of the Ghana Drama Society and had brought William Branch, a young black American actor and freelance journalist, with her. Branch’s coverage of the funeral in Harlem’s Amsterdam News would be a trove of detail. A broad spectrum of the diplomatic corps (but no one from the embassy of the United States), officials of Ghana government, representatives from state-supported academic and cultural organizations, and many people from the large resident African-American community came to offer condolences, to express what the widow’s husband had meant to the world, to Ghana, or simply to themselves, and to gaze silently for a few seconds upon the remains in the bronze casket. Du Bois lay deep in his burnished vessel, bronzed flesh encased in bronzed metal, cravated and light-suited, his features even more refined in death, the finely spheroidal cranium and trimmed Wilhelmine mustache and goatee completing the effect of assured apotheosis.8

The script for the last rites called for a triple ceremony of leave-taking: first, in the bungalow, largely among close family friends and a few persons of position in government, diplomacy, and the burgeoning cultural community of the capital; a second, public and photographed, on the grounds of the compound beneath a thatched, stone-pillared gazebo that had been completed too late for the deceased to enjoy in the evenings; and a final march and symbolic fanfare among thousands by the ocean. Shortly after two, a general’s signal sent a detachment of infantry in full dress to enter the rear of the bungalow. Shirley Graham Du Bois stood silently, comforted by Efua Sutherland and others, as the soldiers entered in lockstep, closed the lid of the coffin, and removed it to the red-carpeted gazebo. A traditional libation was poured on the ground. The coffin, resting on a silver catafalque, was reopened. Four soldiers in crimson jackets, heads bowed, rifles reversed, stood beside each pillar. Above the body lying in serene repose, a Chinese lantern glowed and, occasionally, swayed slightly.9

By then, the grounds of the bungalow were packed with the grieving and the curious. Men, women, and children of all classes—market women, cabinet ministers, and Europeans—reverently filed past the bier. The easy fellowship of the day was underscored by a pennanted Rolls-Royce gliding up to disgorge Prime Minister Hastings Banda of Nyasaland, an energetic little man who self-importantly acknowledged greetings as he bounded through the crowd into the gazebo. President Nkrumah was convinced that such freewheeling contact with his own people was too dangerous. A bomb in a potted plant in a far-north place called Kulungugu had nearly killed him the year before. Shortly before 3:00 p.m., therefore, the commissioner of police ordered the compound cleared. Fellowship gave way to maximum-security autocracy in a wail of sirens and backfiring motorcycles as a behemoth Russian Chaika limousine arrived. (There were only three of these machines in the country—Nkrumah’s, the Du Boises’, and the Soviet ambassador’s, whose country’s gift they were.) The leader of Ghana, a trim, slight man with a polished forehead, descended briskly, wearing his customary frown of deep concentration. He was dressed in an impeccably tailored, black version of the Nehru jacket, now his signature on state occasions.

As Nkrumah strode down the red carpet to the gazebo, Mrs. Graham Du Bois, in black dress and veiled hat, descended the steps of the bungalow to greet him. She leaned slightly upon the chief of state’s left arm as they approached the casket together. Nkrumah stood head bowed for three minutes. Then, solemnly, he placed his right hand upon Du Bois and allowed something of the moment’s deep emotion to play across his face. Shirley Graham Du Bois followed, repeating the gesture, her tender expression of the moment before giving way to one of ineffable grief. The stillness was broken by what the Evening News described as the chanting of a “state linguist” (the witch doctor of mocking Europeans) pouring a traditional libation upon the ground and asking God in Akan “to lead Africa’s son into the next world.” The newspapers tell us that “at that precise moment,” rain fell in sheets, an unmistakable sign to Ghanaians that the gods had granted Du Bois citizenship in their world. Nkrumah briskly returned to his limousine, under an attendant’s umbrella. As he drove away, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had come.10

Precisely on the hour, the chief of the d...

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0805087699
• ISBN 13: 9780805087697
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 912