BY HANK REICHMAN
W.E.B. Du Bois
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the greatest of all American scholars and intellectuals. To commemorate the occasion and explore the lessons of DuBois’s life and work for our time, the always thought-provoking Black Perspectives blog of the African American Intellectual History Society has this week sponsored an online forum on Du Bois. Two contributions address specifically Du Bois’s importance for higher education.
The first of these, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Souls of Academic Folk,” by Roopika Risam, Assistant Professor of English, Coordinator of the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program, Digital Humanities Coordinator, and Chair of the Program Area for Content Educators at Salem State University, considers Du Bois’s relevance to contemporary academia. Writes Risam:
In higher education debates, W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps best known for his longstanding disagreement with Booker T. Washington over African American education. Although both shared an investment in education for racial uplift, Washington favored industrial education while Du Bois advocated for liberal arts. For Du Bois, investment in liberal arts was not only a matter of educating Black students but also of the roles and responsibilities of academics. Exploring this dimension of Du Bois’s work is essential to recuperating the value of the academic in our contemporary moment.
Disputes over higher education in the U.S. continue to echo the Du Bois-Washington divide. The 2018 State of the Union Address remained quiveringly silent on postsecondary education, except for a call to “open great vocational schools so our future workers can learn a craft and realize their full potential.” This emphasis on professional education echoes ongoing debates over the value of the liberal arts. The nature of academic life is also under siege on a range of fronts. Some have merit, like outrage at the increasing casualization of the professorial labor force, criticism of overproduction of PhDs in relation to available tenure-track jobs, and concern about divides between the “ivory tower” and the public. Others are unreasonable, like attacks on academics from right-wing trolls and fears that universities are bastions of liberal brainwashing. At a moment when what it means to be an “academic” is being called into question, Du Bois offers a clear vision for academics as custodians of knowledge.
“As a scholar-activist,” Risam continues, Du Bois “moved seamlessly between the ‘ivory tower’ and the public sector, between university life and advocacy, engaging in the trinity of academic life—scholarship, pedagogy, service—throughout. His nimble leaps between institutions, associations, publications, and even academic disciplines and genres of writing are key to understanding that being a custodian of knowledge is not limited to university professors. These qualities offer a prototype for revisiting the definition of ‘academic’ life.” Du Bois was committed to “reimagining what academics could do, a task that remains critical to the souls of academic folk.” He envisioned himself as a “custodian of knowledge,” but he knew that “need not be the sole domain of professors, as many academics today are discovering.” Du Bois’s lesson for today, Risam concludes, is that “wherever we find our institutional homes, we have the opportunity to contribute to human knowledge—particularly for communities that have historically been objects, not subjects, of knowledge.”
The second contribution, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Representation of Black Higher Education,” by Lavelle Porter, assistant professor of English at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY), takes a look at Du Bois’s fictional portrayal of African-American higher education in his late career trilogy of novels, The Black Flame. The trilogy—consisting of The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds of Color (1961)—covers the years 1876 to 1954 and is “peppered with real persons and events.” It serves “as a fictional representation of higher education, and Du Bois makes a particular intervention by creating a main character, Manuel Mansart, who is the president of a Black college in Georgia, allowing Du Bois to analyze the realm of higher education as an important aspect of the Black political struggle for equality.” The second volume, according to Palmer’s account, is “the most relevant” to the question of higher education, covering the years from 1920 to 1946 during which the hero serves as president of the newly formed (fictional) Georgia A&M State College in Macon.
Porter’s conclusion is worth quoting:
What Du Bois and other Black academic novelists repeatedly address in their work is that the Black intellectual is one who is specifically identified and hailed by white supremacists as biologically and metaphysically incapable of being a scholar. The necessities of racial capitalism under slavery, and in its afterlife, mandated that Blacks be constructed as property, as the raw material for wealth extraction, and not as fully formed human beings capable of equal citizenship or intellectual development. And the academy played an important role in the perpetuation of these ideas, as Craig Steven Wilder elucidates in his important historical study Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2015). From Notes on the State of Virginia to The Bell Curve, white supremacy has marshaled all of its forces of pseudo-science, revisionist history, and racist theology in order to negate Black intelligence and a Black presence in history, even as, at the same time, it condescendingly admonishes Black people to use education and respectability as a means of upward mobility. T he Black Flame is such a remarkable and under-appreciated literary accomplishment because it shows Du Bois using the malleable form of the novel to include historical and sociological commentary on these ideas and creating a counternarrative of Black intellectual history. Collectively, The Black Flame serves as a document of Du Bois’s commitment to the creation of Black art, an attempt to fulfill his own admonition in “Criteria of Negro Art” that Black art is inherently propaganda and ever must be. As literature, The Black Flame certainly has its flaws, but the trilogy constitutes a record of W. E. B. Du Bois as an elder scholar, revisiting the Black freedom struggle, and the narrative arc of his own life, envisioning how far we had come, and how far there is to go.
In an essay published last week in The Paris Review, “The Soul of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Ibram X. Kendi, Professor of History and International Relations at American University, author of the National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning, and a member of AAUP’s Committee A, writes eloquently about the impact of a horrific Georgia lynching; the massacre of Black people in Wilmington, North Carolina; and the death of his own two-year-old son, a victim as much of segregated medicine as of the diphtheria he contracted, in the last years of the 19th century on Du Bois’s extraordinary 1903 book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. In that book “Du Bois argued, implicitly, that the world needs to know the humanity of black folk by listening carefully to the “strivings” in their souls.” As Kendi demonstrates, Du Bois in these years experienced a profound rethinking of his role as a Black intellectual, a rethinking from which American academics of all races and backgrounds can learn. Kendi writes:
At the beginning of his scholarly career, in 1894, Du Bois wrote: “The ultimate evil was stupidity” about black lives by “the majority of white Americans … The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.” But after the public lynching of Sam Hose, after the private lynching of his firstborn son, after being surrounded by black Southern poverty, Du Bois realized he “could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definitive demand” for his scholarly work: the world did not want to “learn the truth.” In 1899, his “young man’s idealism” had passed away like his young son. After laying his son to rest, Du Bois laid to rest his own detached scholarly identity and headed down a path that would lead to The Souls of Black Folk. It was a path paved with crisis—the crisis of American democracy. Du Bois believed that “the majority of Americans would rush to the defense of democracy … if they realized how race prejudice was threatening it.” It became his job to show how: he became a public intellectual. . . . .
Du Bois lived another sixty years after the publication of Souls, dying in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington. He was thirty-four years old when he assembled Soul’s essays in 1902, the same age I am as I write this. He did not bare his soul and then devour the acclaim, trash the criticism, and close the door on his thinking. He evolved as black thought evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Or did black thought evolve as he evolved? We should remember Souls not only as the poetry that so many black folk could relate to in 1903, like the spirituals they often sang in church, but also as the foundation on which Du Bois built a lifetime of ideas, and on which the black and antiracist intelligentsia continues to build today.
Reading these essays and thinking about Du Bois and his legacy, I began to think as well about Du Bois and the AAUP. I knew that Du Bois joined the Association in 1937, but resigned his membership in 1945, in protest of an AAUP meeting held in a segregated hotel, but I didn’t know the details. So I asked AAUP Associate Secretary Joerg Tiede, whose account of the AAUP’s formation, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors, has quickly become the standard work. Joerg is continuing his history of the AAUP but has also, he told me, been working on a piece about the history of the entry of African-American scholars into the Association. Black professors, mainly at what are now HBCUs, only entered the AAUP during the first years of the 1930s and they, including Du Bois, faced obstacles. In 1933 the AAUP held its annual meeting in Richmond, Virginia, at a segregated hotel. Black members protested. Joerg, who has seen some of the correspondence from the time, says it is heartrending to read. In 1939, the Association met in New Orleans and although Black members were permitted to attend, the white-only wait staff refused to serve them, prompting further protest.
This was, to Joerg’s knowledge, the last national meeting of the Association held in a segregated venue. During World War II, at the request of the federal government, the AAUP, like many other scholarly and professional organizations, did not hold national meetings so as to reduce the burden on the nation’s transportation resources. However, some time in 1945 a group of AAUP chapters held a meeting in Washington, D.C. at a segregated hotel and it was apparently this event that prompted Du Bois’s resignation. The Association’s staff and leadership responded, but apparently did not convince the great scholar to rejoin. Of course, Du Bois would soon become a major target of McCarthyite persecution and, let’s face it, the AAUP’s record during those years was not all that admirable, so it wouldn’t appear that he would have much incentive to come back to the fold.
Today the AAUP is committed to the fight for equal opportunity and diversity in higher education. The Association is also open to scholars of all categories — tenured and contingent, full- and part-time — and we embrace Du Bois’s vision of the scholar as both “custodian of knowledge” and activist for the common good. In the words of the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the university is “an intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though still distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen until finally, perchance, it may become a part of the accepted intellectual food of the nation or of the world.” This is what a college or university can, indeed must, be. But as the life and legacy of Du Bois demonstrate, this cannot be achieved without an active struggle. Although not a “Marxist” in any conventional sense of that term, Du Bois read, learned from, and admired Karl Marx. So I will conclude by quoting Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” And that is what the great scholar W.E.B. DuBois, born 150 years ago today, courageously did.
