CHAPTER 1
“The present war in Europe is one of the great disasters due to race and color prejudice and it but foreshadows greater disasters in the future.”1
DU BOIS FEARED FOR his family’s safety. It was August 1914, and war engulfed Europe. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Yolande, and his wife, Nina, were scheduled to leave for England at the end of the month.2 Yolande had received admission to the prestigious Bedales boarding school in Hampshire, where, as her father intended, she would be “trained to become a healthy woman, of broad outlook and spiritual resources, able to earn a living in some line of work which she likes and is fitted for.”3 Du Bois believed that Nina should dutifully relocate as well and settle in nearby London to provide motherly support whenever necessary.
War complicated their travel plans. The European crisis had been long in the making. The forces of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism swelled in the decades following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, gripping the continent with fear, envy, and mistrust.4 Colonial rivalries and a precarious alliance system exacerbated tensions. The fatal spark occurred in the Balkans. On June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the Archduke of Austria and heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, along with his wife, Sophie, in the capital city of Sarajevo. The assassination presented Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II with an opportunity to push for the conflict they had long prepared for.
On July 28, Austria-Hungary, with Germany’s backing, declared war on Serbia. The dominoes quickly began to fall. Two days later, Russia came to the defense of its Serbian ally. Germany responded in kind and, between August 1 and August 4, declared war against Russia, France, and Belgium. “Whatever our lot may be,” Imperial Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg avowed before the assembled members of the Reichstag, “the 4th of August, 1914, will remain through all eternity one of Germany’s greatest days.”5 As the sun rose on August 5, Great Britain had entered the mess, creating a Triple Entente with France and Russia against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. All sides mobilized every young, able-bodied man for military service, with The New York Times estimating that seventeen million men stood at the ready to fight and possibly die in “the Colossal European War.”6 Soldiers of various nations, clad in crisp, clean uniforms of blue, red, khaki, and gray, buoyantly filled trains and prepared to travel to the front by foot and by horse. The war would be over in a matter of weeks, they believed. However, some military leaders and heads of state imagined a more ominous future. On the eve of his nation’s declaration of war, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, solemnly predicted, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”7
Germany, with nearly four million well-trained soldiers, advanced weapons, and seemingly boundless martial spirit, envisioned a swift and decisive victory. The Kaiser’s forces, adhering to the Schlieffen Plan conceived in 1905, invaded neutral Belgium.8 The initial wave of German cavalry and infantry experienced stiffer than expected resistance and took surprisingly heavy losses at the opening Battle of Liège. Nevertheless, Belgium’s plucky defenses proved no match for Germany’s deep reservoir of soldiers, superior firepower, and ruthless tactics, marked by the burning of villages and executions of civilians.9 By August 20, Brussels had fallen, and Germany focused attention on its ultimate goal: crushing France.10
As Du Bois followed early news of the European disaster, he wrote to a longtime friend and London resident, Frances Hoggan. With August 28 ship passage booked for Nina and Yolande, he wanted an up-close opinion about the situation abroad and how it might affect his family. The war had quickly disrupted social and economic life in capital cities and rural countrysides alike,11 and while Germany had not yet decided to unleash its U-boats, the safety of transatlantic travel was uncertain. Hoggan, sharing the optimistic sentiments of most middle-class Londoners in the early days of the war, informed Du Bois in her August 15 letter that though room and board had become more expensive, “life goes on almost normally.” “There is not much risk in coming over,” she assured him and, regarding Du Bois’s loved ones, promised, “I should do my part for them in case of need.” Hoggan acknowledged that “uncertainty is the great feature at present,” but she believed that “as things now stand Germany will be forced by failure of supplies for the army and other armies to make peace within a not very long period.”12
Du Bois was steadfast that his daughter, war or no war, would attend Bedales. Yet he decided to err on the side of caution and delay Yolande and Nina’s Atlantic crossing until after mid-September. “I would not want them in any danger or great deprivation,” he told Hoggan, although the pair, he presumed, “would not mind small inconveniences.” About the war itself, Du Bois, at least for the moment, could not muster the words: “This sudden failure of civilization is simply beyond comment.”13
* * *
BY AUGUST 1914, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois had scaled heights thought unimaginable for a Black person in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. “I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro slaves,” he wrote in the last of his many autobiographical remembrances.14 The only child of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt, Du Bois came of age in the small, quintessentially New England town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Driven to succeed despite challenging familial circumstances, he excelled academically, devoting himself to reading Greek and Latin and browsing the shelves of the local bookstore.15 On June 27, 1884, at the age of sixteen, the light brown–skinned prodigy graduated from high school, the star of his small class of thirteen students.16
Following the sudden death of his mother in March 1885, young Du Bois set out to make a name for himself and his family by obtaining the best education possible. He enrolled and, three years later, graduated with pride from Fisk University in Tennessee, his first experience below the Mason-Dixon line, a world, he recalled, “split into white and black halves.” He loved Fisk, crediting the school with exposing him to this new world of Black folk—full of both suffering and striving. Fisk also set in stone his racial identity. On these formative years, Du Bois reflected, “A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro.”17
But he’d long desired to attend Harvard. Admitted to pursue a second undergraduate degree, he arrived on the Cambridge campus in September 1888. Later recollecting that he was “in Harvard, but not of it,” he nevertheless made the most of his time, learning from some of the nation’s intellectual giants—William James, George Santayana, Albert Bushnell Hart, Nathaniel Shaler, Josiah Royce—and honing a humanistic approach to the study of life and a commitment to democratic reasoning.18 After graduating cum laude in 1890, he continued at Harvard to obtain a doctorate in history, stopping along the way to spend two transformational years—from 1893 to 1894—at the University of Berlin. The lessons he reverently absorbed in classes taught by Gustav von Schmoller, Heinrich von Treitschke, and other German luminaries fortified his approach to history as a science, with the power to shape the way nations and their people understood the past, present, and future. Du Bois’s experience in Germany profoundly shaped his intellect, cultural tastes, and character. He would sport a well-groomed Vandyke beard and handlebar mustache for the rest of his life.19
Yet this product of Victorian New England and European Enlightenment thought was Black, and unashamedly so. Late into the night of his twenty-fifth birthday, in 1893, homesick and contemplative in the solitude of his candlelit Berlin boarding room, Du Bois determined to dedicate his life’s cause to the Black race. “I therefore take the work that the Unknown lay in my hands and work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world,” he penned in a letter to himself. “These are my plans,” he added, “to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race.”20 This project of racial uplift, the calling of many like-minded educated African Americans in the late nineteenth century, steeled Du Bois’s sense of purpose.21
He could soon boast of fulfilling his personal charge from that Berlin evening. He received his Harvard Ph.D. in 1895—the first African American to do so—with his doctoral dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” earning distinction as the inaugural publication of the Harvard Historical Studies series. He briefly taught classics at Wilberforce University in Ohio, an unpleasant experience save for the friendships he made and the charming, dark-eyed student, Nina Gomer, he became enamored with and married on May 12, 1896. The young couple moved to Philadelphia, where Du Bois spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania researching and writing what became The Philadelphia Negro, a pioneering work of sociology. The segregated state of the academy ruled out the possibility of a full-time position at Penn, so in 1897 Will and Nina packed up and moved south to Atlanta University. Here Du Bois truly made his mark, producing a series of studies that cemented his status as the nation’s foremost Black social scientist interrogating what had come to be known interchangeably as the “race question” and the “Negro problem.”22
As the new century approached, the hopes of African Americans for basic equality and recognition of their humanity looked dire. The post–Civil War years had offered the promise of freedom and political inclusion in the nation’s reconstructed democracy, yet the dream ended prematurely with the election of 1876, as the federal government absolved itself of responsibility to protect its Black citizens.23 Southern white supremacists were determined to keep the Negro in his place. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not guarantee individual civil rights and that Congress, as it had affirmed in 1875, lacked the power to outlaw racial discrimination. One by one, Southern states, redeemed from Republican rule, devised ways to strip African Americans of political power and access to the ballot.24 Informal rules of segregation became sanctioned and codified with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, broadening a system and culture of Jim Crow that seeped into every aspect of Southern race relations.25 The vast majority of Black Southerners toiled in near-slavery conditions as sharecroppers, trapped in a crushing cycle of debt and servitude.26 Justice was synonymous with terror. A brutal convict leasing system, taking advantage of the Thirteenth Amendment’s allowance of involuntary servitude “as punishment for a crime,” epitomized the racist structure of the law and the systemic criminalization of Blackness.27 Lynching and mob violence became endemic throughout the South and beyond. In the decade between 1890 and 1900 alone, more than twelve hundred Black people lost their lives at the hands of persons unknown.28
Du Bois felt the realities of race personally. Whether being a young schoolboy in Great Barrington, taking his first ride on a Jim Crow car as a Fisk undergraduate, or experiencing loneliness at Harvard and Berlin, he’d reckoned with the emotional weight of being Black.
His days in Atlanta, while remarkably productive, were also traumatic. On the evening of May 24, 1899, his two-year-old son, Burghardt, died, succumbing to a ten-day bout of diphtheria that may have been treatable had he been born on the other side of the color line. Du Bois and grief-stricken Nina, who would never be the same, buried their son in Great Barrington, not wanting his final resting place to be in the red soil of Georgia.29 This tragedy came on the heels of the April 23 lynching of Sam Hose, a Black farmer who, after being accused of murdering his employer, was burned and mutilated before two thousand white men and women, many still adorned in their Sunday church best. An appalled Du Bois set out from his office to register a protest with editors at The Atlanta Constitution, but decided otherwise upon learning that Hose’s charred knuckles sat on display in a downtown store window. “Something died in me that day,” he reflected decades later,30 having realized that “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”31
Fueled by this moral commitment, he poured all his brilliance and anguish into writing The Souls of Black Folk. Released in 1903, the collection of new and previously published essays—revised and organized with philosophical clairvoyance, historical audacity, literary imagination, sociological precision, autobiographical introspection, political urgency, musical lyricism, and poetic emotion—together amounted to a text that defied classification. The Souls of Black Folk launched Du Bois as America’s foremost prophet on what he declared was “the problem of the Twentieth Century … the problem of the color line.”32
In spellbinding prose, Du Bois articulated the ways in which race shaped the everyday lives of African Americans and constructed their identity. The color line, he imagined, functioned as a “vast veil,” physically and spiritually dividing the Black and white worlds. The veil obscured the vision of white people, thus rendering the Negro a homogeneous “problem.” As Du Bois guided his readers in the book’s fourteen chapters through life on the other side of the veil, he demonstrated that Black people were not a “problem” to be resolved but a proud, gifted race, full of triumphs and sorrows, tragedies and hopes, pain and faith. Navigating the color line endowed Black people with the “peculiar sensation” of “double-consciousness,” what he described as the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” He added, in words that encapsulated for millions the fundamental tension of being Black in America, “One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”33
While Du Bois made clear from the book’s outset that he was “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil,” The Souls of Black Folk resonated most powerfully among college-educated African Americans who were engaged in the task of racial uplift.34 In the chapter “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois articulated the responsibilities of the “Talented Tenth”—not so much an exclusive group of Black intellectuals, but an aspiration and a calling for anyone striving through work, education, artistry, and professional excellence to represent the race and contribute to its progress. This included lawyers, doctors, teachers, athletes, ministers, businessmen, and soldiers.35 Du Bois’s framing of Black leadership, like much of his thinking about the history and meaning of racial struggle, was deeply gendered and laced with patriarchy. Women, to be sure, had a place in the Talented Tenth and deserved full social and political rights. But they were the mothers of the race and, as Du Bois believed, should play their natural role while Black men stood on the front lines.36
Debates about the type of education African Americans should receive and its use fueled his conflict with Booker T. Washington, the powerful principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. A former slave from Virginia, Washington built Tuskegee from the ground up, advancing a gospel of industrial training that grated against Du Bois’s liberal arts sensibilities. Washington coupled this with a politics of racial conciliation, reassuring Southern white supremacists—as he did in his famous September 18, 1895, speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta—that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington, having offered the ideal solution to the “race problem,” gained the favor of white Gilded Age philanthropists and a choke hold on money flowing into Southern colleges, including to Du Bois’s Atlanta University. Using his vast connections and the muscle of what came to be known as the “Tuskegee Machine,” Washington sought to crush all threats, real or perceived, to his dominance.37
Du Bois, believing that the time had come for open, honest criticism and asserting his manly responsibility to voice it, used the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in The Souls of Black Folk to methodically lay bare his ideological differences with the Tuskegee “Wizard.” The race, Du Bois insisted, needed the ballot, civic equality, and higher education beyond training for life as manual laborers, writing, “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”38 He also painted Washington as outside the historical tradition of Black leadership, instead anointed by white capitalists North and South to legitimize the social, political, and economic marginalization of the race.39
The Souls of Black Folk and his confrontation of Washington thrust Du Bois into the role of civil rights leader and spokesman for the anti-Tuskegee wing of the Talented Tenth. In 1905, along with his former Harvard classmate, the Boston firebrand William Monroe Trotter, Du Bois established the Niagara Movement, a collection of race men and women committed to the cause of full political equality and racial justice for African Americans. Against Washington’s considerable resistance, the group struggled for widespread support, but nevertheless laid the groundwork for the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).40
Du Bois, relocating to New York City, assumed the position of director of research and publications for the upstart, overwhelmingly white-run organization and editor of its monthly magazine of news and opinion, The Crisis. His pride and joy, The Crisis provided him with a platform to display the full arsenal of his intellectual, political, and artistic gifts. Upon receiving their copy in the mail, readers immediately turned to his editorials for information and inspiration. To those who followed his lead and hung on to his every word, Du Bois appeared larger than life.41
However, beneath his unassailable veneer lay a man with faults, frailties, and vulnerabilities. He possessed an ego that far exceeded his mere five-foot-five-inch stature. Keenly aware of his significance, walking cane always in hand, Du Bois could be notoriously cold and aloof.42 He possessed little patience for people he deemed intellectually and politically inferior. While committed to hard truth-telling, he was not above strategic dishonesty when it best suited him.43 Unable to conceive of, much less admit to, wrongdoing, Du Bois radiated a confidence that both attracted and repulsed. He especially clashed with his white colleagues at the NAACP, who waged a constant battle to coalesce his voice as editor of The Crisis with the agenda of the organization in its masthead. By late 1914, many board members wanted him out.
Joel Spingarn knew and understood Du Bois better than any other person in the NAACP. The wealthy son of Jewish immigrants, headstrong and pugnacious, Spingarn made a name for himself as a brilliant scholar of comparative literature, teaching for twelve years at Columbia University. A dispute with Columbia’s president prompted his departure from the university, opening the door for a new career in civic activism that, in 1911, led him to the NAACP. His younger brother, Arthur, a founding member, headed the nascent organization’s legal committee. As Du Bois’s future wife, Shirley Graham, told the story years later, “Upon visiting the offices of this association,” Joel “met a small, alert brown man who was enthusiastically getting together a magazine which he called The Crisis. Such a literary effort alone would have deeply interested the former English professor, but the man himself with his Harvard accent and continental manners intrigued him.”44
Intrigue blossomed into admiration and ultimately a deep friendship. In Du Bois, Spingarn saw a man of letters, erudition, and the potential of a suffering race. In Spingarn, Du Bois saw an intellectual and temperamental equal who, as part of a fellow persecuted group of people, held a fierce commitment to equal rights. “He was one of those vivid, enthusiastic but clear-thinking idealists which from age to age the Jewish race has given the world,” Du Bois remembered.45 Spingarn was also proudly American, having eschewed his hyphenated identity, and he saw no reason why Black people should not be embraced as full Americans as well. He immersed himself in the work of the NAACP with fervor, spreading the gospel of the “New Abolitionism” and assuming the chairmanship in 1913. “We fought each other continuously in the councils of the Association,” Du Bois recalled of these early days of, at times, painful growth, “but always our admiration and basic faith in each other kept us going hand in hand.”46 Their relationship symbolized, for both men, the promise of American democracy.47
Spingarn also possessed the mettle to honestly criticize his friend when the occasion arose. At the height of a bitter disagreement in October 1914 between Du Bois and the NAACP over the role of The Crisis and the autonomy of its editor, Spingarn wrote to Du Bois, fully aware that “I may wound your feelings deeply.” “You have an extraordinary unwillingness to acknowledge that you have made a mistake, even in trifles,” he brazenly diagnosed, “and if accused of one, your mind will find or even invent reasons and quibbles of any kind to prove that you were never mistaken.” White coworkers and acquaintances, Spingarn believed, felt “a mingled affection and resentment” toward Du Bois. “They have come to feel that you prefer to have your own way rather than accept another way,” and trembled at the possibility of “wounding your own sensitive nerves.”48
Copyright © 2023 by Chad L. Williams
