In his exceptional satire on American race relations in the early 20th century, Black No More (1931), the black journalist George Schuyler caricatured W.E.B. Du Bois as the pompous Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard. The leader of the NSEL, the National Social Equality League (read: NAACP) and editor of the Dilemma (read: the Crisis), Dr. Beard denounces white “Nordics for debauching Negro women” while taking care himself to hire “comely yellow stenographers with weak resistance.” He fulminates against white institutions he secretly admires, and heroically endures “the perils of first-class transatlantic passage to stage Save-Dear-Africa Conferences.” Unfamiliar with the sufferings of poor blacks, Beard nevertheless bewails their hardships and poses as a Pink Socialist; but in time of war he rallies to the flag and “bivouack[s] at the feet of Mars” (as did Du Bois during World War I). When faced with a chemical amalgamating process whereby all blacks can be turned white, thus undermining black nationalism and eliminating the need for the NSEL, Beard-Du Bois intones: “The Goddess of the Nile weeps bitter tears at the feet of the Great Sphinx. The lowering clouds gather over the Congo and the lightning flashes o’er Togoland. To your tents, O Israel! The hour is at hand.”

Du Bois is by no means the only race leader held up to ridicule by Schuyler, who spares neither whites nor blacks, but Du Bois’s egotism and pretensions were an easy target by 1931. Schuyler was particularly offended that Du Bois, in his belligerent “Negrophilism,” could gloss over modern slavery in Liberia and excuse other African or Soviet failings while making a career out of increasingly fierce attacks on American and European ideals. Schuyler himself, to the horror of many black leaders, became more conservative over the years, whereas Du Bois marched steadily to the Left, at long last joining the Communist party in 1961 and exiling himself to Ghana.

Even though the federal government’s charges against Du Bois and others involved in the 1950 Stockholm Peace Appeal against nuclear armament were dismissed, his continued travels to Communist countries, where he proudly embraced every letter of totalitarian ideology and excoriated the Allies (the Soviets, he pointed out, had to “neutralize” Eastern Europe “in sheer self-defense against expanding Western capitalism”), inevitably gave grounds for the suspicion and harassment he claimed drove him from the United States. The last of his various accounts of his own life, the Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (1968), was published in abridged form in the Soviet Union, China, and East Germany before it appeared posthumously in the West, after the manuscript was retrieved from Accra in the wake of the 1966 military coup that ousted Ghana’s “Redeemer”-turned-tyrant, Kwame Nkrumah.

Would Du Bois, who became ever more contemptuous of the United States and the West, have viewed his inclusion in the standard-edition Library of America series as one more capitalistic assault upon the Pan-African ideal, a pandering to those bourgeois values that (as he said of civil-rights advances after World War II) tempted blacks “to ape the worst of American and Anglo-Saxon chauvinism”? Perhaps so; but for the rest of us, the new volume of his writings,¹ chosen and annotated by Nathan Huggins, affords a fresh opportunity to reassess Du Bois’s evolution from scholar to romantic ideologue to intransigent Marxist. Although slighting his historical and contemporary work on Africa, and mostly suppressing his considerable adulations of socialism and the Soviet bloc, Huggins’s choice of materials offers a clear picture of Du Bois’s mind. We have the complete texts of The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, The Souls of Black Folk, and Dusk of Dawn, and numerous essays on such topics as segregation, education, black arts, race pride, colonialism, and women’s suffrage, most of which first appeared in the Crisis and some of which were revised as chapters of Darkwater, Black Reconstruction in America, and Du Bois’s final Autobiography. With the conceivable exceptions of The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (as a pioneering work of historical scholarship) and The Souls of Black Folk (as a classic cultural study), no one work by Du Bois is great, and many are deeply flawed; rather, it is his entire production, at once energetic and diffuse, that merits reconsideration.

_____________

Du Bois’s story, if not exactly tragic in a grand sense, is an indictment of both his country and him. His life (1868-1963) and writings encompass the modern history of black life, from Reconstruction through the advent of the civil-rights movement, and in international terms from the European “scramble” for African colonies to the early years of African independence. “My autobiography,” he declared grandiosely but not inaccurately in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), “is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Born of parents whose lineage combined French, Dutch, and African ancestry, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was raised in close to middle-class comfort by his mother (following his father’s desertion) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where her family had been free for nearly a century. As early as 1883 the precocious Du Bois began to contribute articles on black life to the New York Globe, and by the time he became undergraduate editor of the Fisk University Herald he had developed clear, condemnatory views of race prejudice in America. Further study at Harvard and the University of Berlin, leading eventually to a doctoral thesis on the abolition of the slave trade, prepared him intellectually for a professorial career at Wilberforce, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University, while also preparing him socially to withstand the strain of being a talented black man in a white man’s world.

From the beginning, Du Bois’s double interest in historical science and romantic cultural study gave his work a visionary dimension. Both statistics and aesthetics carried for him the indelible marks of race, and he translated into black terms the fervent race nationalisms of the era. In his graduate training at Harvard during the early 1890’s under such men as William James, George Santayana, and Nathaniel Shaler, Du Bois absorbed a program that led from a philosophy of ethical responsibility to economic and social analysis. His two years of study at the University of Berlin under the economist Gustav Schmoller and the historian Heinrich von Treitschke were perhaps even more important in promoting his black nationalism.

In one of his first important essays, “The Conservation of Races” (1897), Du Bois called for “Pan-Negro” race solidarity in the post-Reconstruction period: “We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black tomorrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today.” Denying biological differences among races but accepting the idea of differing racial “gifts,” Du Bois even in this early essay promoted a separatist philosophy that was inspired in part by his professors in Berlin but also appeared to have deeper roots. As a student at Fisk University, in fact, Du Bois had already given a commencement oration on Bismark, whom he then considered a role model for black leadership; and in a similar, but more ironic, address at Harvard he chose as his subject the “Teutonic” Jefferson Davis. Although he would later determine that German imperialism had played a significant part in the colonial upheaval in Africa, and come increasingly to denigrate Anglo-Saxon nationalism, he remained entranced by the romantic idea of a nation’s or people’s “soul” and styled himself an autocratic race leader.

_____________

Du Bois’s understanding of the diversity of black American life was not completely theoretical. The rural teaching he did among poor blacks while attending Fisk introduced him to the worlds of poverty that lay outside the academy. His neighborhood study of blacks in Philadelphia, undertaken while he was a temporary instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, resulted in one of the first significant works of urban sociology, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Against the biological racism that prevailed in much of the period’s social science (and led to such ignominious works as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color), Du Bois’s early scholarship sought to work from extensive data toward sound descriptions of black achievements as well as black pathology, a project best reflected in the utopian plan he developed while teaching at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 to bring forth ten ten-year cycles of books on various aspects of black life in America. The volumes that did appear (The Negro Artisan, The Negro Church, The Negro in Business, among others) vary greatly in quality; but along with The Philadelphia Negro and The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, they established Du Bois as an excellent scholar. There seems little question that, had he not been black, Du Bois would have received a major academic appointment on the basis of this early work.

But he was black, and even he could barely profit from his idea that a “talented tenth” of blacks should through their professional success raise up the mass of their brethren. Alongside his sound academic scholarship, Du Bois became an essayist skilled in lyrical polemic, most notoriously in the attack—in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—on the strategy of progress by accommodation urged by Booker T. Washington, whose best-known work, the autobiographical Up from Slavery, had been published in 1901. Denouncing Washington’s Atlanta Compromise as a complete surrender of civil rights and his advocacy of black manual labor as a degrading capitulation to the “triumphant commercialism” of the Gilded Age, Du Bois laid the basis for the forceful arguments on behalf of suffrage, higher education, integration, and jobs that in coming years would characterize the agenda of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and his own writings in its official organ, the Crisis. If The Souls of Black Folk is occasionally marked by wild flights of lyricism about the potential for black development, this is because Du Bois saw clearly that the times demanded a rhetoric of empowerment to counteract both the legacy of slavery and the growing racist inclination to treat blacks at worst as “beasts,” at best as a scientific problem. “While sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes,” he remarked, “the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair.”

Bringing together essays that Du Bois had published in a variety of magazines, The Souls of Black Folk represents some of his best thought and writing. Besides a short story, a lament on the death of his son, a sketch of Alexander Crummell, and other essays on topics ranging from his own experience teaching in backwoods Tennessee to the “sorrow songs” of the slaves, the volume contains probing treatments of the labor problem in the postwar Black Belt, with vivid depictions of the desolate landscape of the “Egypt of the Confederacy.” It demonstrates the great range of Du Bois’s talents and painfully displays his contention that the American Negro always feels “his twoness—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.” In coming years, Du Bois himself would be torn asunder by the problem. Disclaiming America and embracing the supposedly transcendent idea of “Negro,” he would seek to overcome the question of color by rediscovering the mythic soul of the African diaspora.

The statement for which Du Bois became most famous—“the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”—appeared first not in The Souls of Black Folk but in an address to the initial Pan-African Congress in 1900. Both the Congress and the address contained the seeds of Du Bois’s philosophy over the next sixty years, in imposing a unity upon the darker races of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the world’s islands and setting them collectively against the ever “imperialist” white race, also a supposedly unified body. By 1939, when Du Bois came to speak of the “future of world democracy” in Black Folk Then and Now, the “problem of the color line” referred specifically to the world’s dark “proletariat,” which he saw “supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury, and extravagance.” Still, although many of his strongest positions on black nationalism and socialism seem implicit in his earliest work, it is possible that Du Bois, had he witnessed less vile treatment of blacks in his own country, would not have embraced Marxism and veered toward the anti-capitalist counter-racism of his more mature thought.

_____________

In 1905, spurred by his increasing impatience with Booker T. Washington’s moderation, Du Bois launched the Niagara Movement, a group demanding immediate equality in education and jobs. The group met sporadically and issued impressive statements, but made little headway against Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine,” which received the bulk of such existing support and accolades as the white establishment would offer.

It was the formation of the NAACP in 1909 that rescued Du Bois from the relative stagnation of his academic career. As editor of the Crisis, a post he commanded more and more imperiously until 1934, when he returned to Atlanta University, Du Bois often diverged from the NAACP leadership, but in the process created a forum for black opinion (much of it his own) unrivaled then or since. A number of the major literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s were promoted in the Crisis, and all of Du Bois’s significant positions were initially aired in his editorials and essays. In particular, his controversial philosophy of self-imposed black segregation and separatist economic development germinated in the Crisis, and the fiery polemics against American discrimination and on behalf of African internationalism that became his hallmark were evident from the beginning of his editorship.

Two events, the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 and World War I, thrust Du Bois to center stage. His notorious 1918 editorial, “Close Ranks,” asked blacks patriotically to put aside racial demands in order to further the military effort. Du Bois, for example, was willing to accept segregated armed forces in order to ensure the commissioning of black officers. Yet this move toward accommodation was somewhat deceptive, for even as Du Bois was taken to task, not only by staunch leftists like Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randoph but also by some among his own more conservative constituency, his optimism about black advances during and after the war proved to be short-lived. The riots and oppressive labor measures that greeted returning black veterans prompted some of Du Bois’s most bitter remarks and fixed in his own writing a counter-racism that would first reach full expression in Darkwater (1920).

“Close Ranks” is even more misleading as an index of Du Bois’s development when one takes account of his work on Africa, beginning in earnest with two publications of 1915 that coincided with his displacement of Washington as America’s most prominent black spokesman. The Negro, a relatively modest work on African historical traditions and race pride, would receive more detailed political elaboration in two subsequent revisions, Black Folk Then and Now and The World and Africa (1947). The book’s concluding arguments, that the enslavement of Africans in the New World was at the base of modern industrial development, and that the European exploitation of the dark continent had brought on a world crisis, influenced a number of black American intellectuals. These arguments were also at the center of Du Bois’s prescient essay the same year in the Atlantic, “The African Roots of War,” which anticipated Lenin’s thesis on colonialism and in effect projected Du Bois down the long road to Ghana.

Deriving mainly from the theory of underconsumption and financial “parasitism” espoused in J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902), Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) contended that “surplus capital” was used not to raise a nation’s standard of living but rather to increase profits by exporting capital abroad to “backward countries.” Likewise, Du Bois’s Atlantic essay made finance capital the root of the Great War. Ignoring numerous instances of imperialism without capitalism (including black intra-African empires), he too imagined that modern imperialism was fueled strictly by white capitalist greed: “With the waning of the possibility of the Big Fortune, gathered by starvation wages and boundless exploitation of one’s weaker and poorer fellows at home, arise more magnificently the dreams of exploitation abroad.” There is no doubt that much colonial policy was ruthlessly disruptive of native society. However, neither Lenin nor Du Bois (nor many radical theorists in their wake) cared to take account of the fact that the great bulk of “imperial” investment occurred not in nonindustrial nations but in Europe, the United States, and Canada, or that such investment in Africa and Asia was made at great risk and, when it produced profit at all, often did so by creating wealth that had not previously existed in the colony. Concluding that all the violence and inhumane practice in Africa were imposed from without by bankers and bejeweled socialites, Du Bois made the dark continent the heart of capitalism’s world crisis. Cecil Rhodes, he said, was responsible for World War I.

_____________

Whatever its shortcomings as a theory, “The African Roots of War” (later expanded as “The Hands of Ethiopia” in Darkwater) brought into focus ideas on imperialism and the color line that Du Bois had begun to formulate even prior to the period of the Boer War and the first Pan-African Congress in 1900, but that now began to approach the mystical proportions of his later Pan-African manifestoes. Between the 1920’s and the 1940’s, Du Bois adapted two rigid positions: romantic faith in the Third World and its history and, as a corollary, contempt for Western (capitalist) values.

The longed-for brotherhood of the world’s dispersed darker peoples was a symbol of Du Bois’s frustration with American prejudice that paradoxically fueled his own form of segregationist thought. In an age of intense race nationalism, Du Bois sought salvation in the unity of color. True, his powerful pleas for black suffrage, civil rights, education and jobs, and black cultural nationalism in America never fell back upon a proposed emigration to Africa, but they did require faith in the idea of Africa as a spiritual, even a political, homeland.

Extending one of the central analogies of anti-slavery rhetoric—the slaves’ delivery from pharaonic bondage—Du Bois often compared Pan-Africanism with Zionism. “The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews,” he wrote in the Crisis in 1919, “the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial fount.” (Du Bois sometimes expressed admiration for the economic achievements of the Third Reich, but from the early 1930’s on he also publicly condemned Hitler and the German regime’s “race hate,” likening it to prejudice against American blacks.) In fact, however, the diverse colored races of the world had no such clear fount of unity, and his repeated attempts to discover one in the multitudinous conflicts of Africa, Japan, China, India, and Latin America often led to bizarre contentions—for instance, that Japan’s expansionism was an attempt to rescue Manchuria from the West and make it “Asiatic by force.” Unsatisfactory in its specific claims and premature in its judgments, Du Bois’s thesis of a unified color militancy and anti-colonial revolt has nevertheless been partially borne out—most of all, perhaps, when such revolt has been driven by Marxist subversion.

_____________

From 1915 on, Du Bois advocated a Pan-African socialist ideal. The first important international statement of his position came at the 1919 Pan-African Congress, which was held at the same time as the Peace Conference in Paris. The Congress’ membership of fifty-seven was predominantly American and West Indian, and among the Africans the Senegalese minister Blaise Diagne and others proved somewhat embarrassing in their support for European colonialism. The Congress did, however, propose that Africans be granted gradual participation in their own governments, and asked that the League of Nations create an agency to oversee legal and economic guarantees.

Subsequent Pan-African Congresses in 1921, 1923, and 1929 largely produced rhetoric without substance (the “rape of land and raw material” by “white capital” was a constant theme), but they furthered the imagined reality of black internationalism and confirmed in Du Bois his opinion of his own messianic power. Du Bois’s version of Pan-Africanism, however, both ignored obvious cultural conflicts among black Africans themselves and put American blacks, an oppressively “colonized” nation within a nation, in a central and supposedly inspirational role that many Africans found incomprehensible or foolish. By the same token, Du Bois rejected out of hand Marcus Garvey’s “Back-to-Africa” schemes (denouncing Garvey as a “demagogue,” a “little, fat black man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head”); and he seldom gave any recognition whatsoever to early race nationalists like Edward Blyden, whose concept of “African personality” he certainly adopted, to important contemporaries like Carter G. Woodson, or to such later proponents of négritude as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, all of whom contributed intellectually to the movements for African independence.

His first trip to Africa in 1924 provoked the purest expression of Du Bois’s romanticism. “The spell of Africa is upon me,” he wrote in a Conradian moment in the Crisis:

The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning my drowsy, dreamy blood. This is not a country, it is a world—a universe of itself and for itself, a thing Different, Immense, Menacing, Alluring. It is a great black bosom where the Spirit longs to die. . . . One longs to leap against the sun and then calls, like some great hand of fate, the slow, silent crushing power of almighty sleep—of Silence, of immovable Power beyond, within, around. Things move—black shiny bodies, perfect bodies, bodies of sleek unearthly poise and beauty.

Significant though such a view was for the cultivation of an Afro-American heritage, it was in essence Euro-American, as much a fantasy as the imperialist conception of African savagery. Du Bois’s Africa was to a great degree literary. His visit to the motherland confirmed the ethereal symbolic role Africa had already begun to play for him in Darkwater, a volume of poetry, autobiography, essays, and fantasy that anticipated Jean Toomer’s Cane in its mix of literary genres and themes. The volume’s celebration of African primitivism and the native sensuousness of black artistry was in accord with the dominant mood of much of the literature and art of the Harlem Renaissance, and its mixture of politics and literature testified to Du Bois’s evolving position on the social purpose of art. Riddled with vituperation for the “pits of slime” of the dark colonial world, a world that bears “the white man’s burden / Of liquor and lust and lies” while awaiting the appearance of a “black Christ,” Darkwater swings between rigorous economic and political analysis and asethetic fancy.

By 1926, the year he first visited the Soviet Union, Du Bois was firm: “All Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailings of the purists.” Far from working in tandem, however, Du Bois’s art and his propaganda often led him to simplistic views or contradictory dead ends. With a few important exceptions such as “A Litany at Atlanta,” written in response to the 1906 race riot, his own poetry (on topics ranging from black women to the Rosenbergs) is largely a combination of heated polemic and saccharine aestheticism. His first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is a strong realistic portrait of the cotton market and its labor; but his 1950’s trilogy, The Black Flame, traces United States race history in a plodding, self-indulgent epic; and his own favorite among his novels, Dark Princess (1928), is a stilted fusion of militancy and allegorical romance that forecasts the realization of a political-spiritual “Black Belt” running from India and Africa through the Caribbean to the Southern United States, and ends with the birth of a colored savior of this united Third World.

_____________

Like the strain of deliberate exoticism in the Harlem Renaissance, the Pan-African mythology sought power but risked creating a literature of alienation. Central to Du Bois’s “Ethiopianism”—that is, his infatuation with the ideal of a sensuous, pacific Africa destroyed by European imperialism—was the view that Africa and Africans, with few exceptions, were morally sacrosanct. It was such slippery mythologizing that led Du Bois to proclaim in The Gift of Black Folk (1924) that the black worker’s spirituality, thanks to its roots in the “communistic” proto-industry of Africa, could be made an antidote to the Western work ethic. Although he had much of value to say about the transition from the slave trade to colonialism, Du Bois systematically undermined his critique by asserting, for example, that Bantu aggression and Ashanti slave-trading were solely the result of the European “degradation” of Africa. Similarly, in the blinkered assessments of Liberia he made as an envoy of President Coolidge, Du Bois overlooked the standing practice of “pawning”—the economic exchange of human chattel, especially children—and the selling of slave labor to France and Spain, and chose to imagine all of the country’s economic problems to be the result, not of Liberian inefficiency or corruption, but of white imperialist pressures epitomized by the largely progressive and economically regenerative Firestone rubber concession.

As in the case of Africa, Du Bois’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1926 merely confirmed his existing inclinations. It was a conspiracy of capitalism that had so far prevented a realization of the workers’ paradise (a view Du Bois would still hold on his deathbed). Standing “in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia,” Du Bois announced in the Crisis, “I am a Bolshevik.” The Depression further radicalized Du Bois, although his defenses of Marx in the 1930’s (as in “Marxism and the Negro Problem”) coldly rejected an American Communist solution to black discrimination: “No soviet of technocrats would do more than exploit colored labor in order to raise the status of whites.” Yet he continued regularly to announce the doom of capitalism and the death of what Dusk of Dawn referred to as the “Beast” of “White Imperial Industry,” which “kills men to make cloth, prostitutes women to rear buildings, and eats little children.”

No wonder that by the time he wrote Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Du Bois chose to characterize slaves and ex-slaves as an industrial proletariat whose surplus labor was the cornerstone of global capitalism. This unorthodox appropriation of the pro-slavery “mud-sill” theory of society allowed Du Bois to rethink his earlier accounts of Reconstruction (which had argued simply that positive black political and economic advances had been hindered and finally reversed by white racism) and to propose the dubious theory that Reconstruction had been a successful Marxist experiment destroyed by a capitalistic “counter-revolution of property.” If Du Bois’s claims for black revolutionary action in the Civil War and its aftermath were farfetched, however, this volume contained sound, often brilliant, critiques of standard white accounts of Reconstruction. His exposure of Southern racism and his elevation of black political and economic achievements entirely changed the historiographical record and continue to command attention in scholarly reinterpretations of Reconstruction.

_____________

With the exception of the founding of the journal Phylon in 1939 and a brief, mainly honorific, return to the NAACP from 1944 to 1948, Du Bois’s late career involved more urgently radical stances and activities. The movements toward African independence found in Du Bois a willing spokesman, and the cold war found in him a likely martyr. At the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, the first at which anything of lasting historical consequence can be said to have been accomplished, the now venerable Du Bois did little but give testimony to his own importance in the movement. But the change in the character of the Pan-African Congresses from 1919 to 1945 is a significant index of changes in Du Bois’s thinking as well. Led by the West Indian George Padmore, and featuring abundant African representation (including Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta), the 1945 Congress explicitly adopted a socialist program, called for labor and political organization of the black masses, and threatened violent resistance to colonial rule. As Nkrumah noted in his autobiography, at the 1945 Congress the prevailing ideology “became African nationalism—a revolt by African nationalism against colonialism, racialism, and imperialism in Africa—and it adopted Marxian socialism as its philosophy.”

The spectrum of pronouncements at Manchester predated by a decade the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, often considered the benchmark of anti-colonial organization. Négritude, the romantic philosophy of worldwide African cultural and political unity, now came to full flower. Although Padmore himself would give more inspirational credit to the “Black Zionism” of Marcus Garvey than to Du Bois, the Conference—like Bandung in 1955, the Paris Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in 1956, and the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Accra—prominently featured the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid views Du Bois had long held and recently expressed most completely in Color and Democracy (1945) and The World and Africa. Having failed earlier to implement his visionary doctrine, Du Bois, by endurance and the force of will, at last became the honorary father of Pan-Africanism.

During these same years Du Bois was also active in radical groups like the Council on African Affairs. In I Take My Stand for Peace (1951) and In Battle for Peace (1952), he mounted fierce attacks on postwar American policy (and his own harassment by the government) and in public pronouncements adopted the typically eccentric view that civil-rights progress such as the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education would not have been possible “without the world pressure of Communism led by the Soviet Union.”

_____________

Du Bois’s visits in 1958-59 to China (“Mistakes are but stepping stones upon which one may climb higher and higher,” Mao told the admiring Du Bois) and to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, where he helped found an Institute of African Study and received the Lenin Peace Prize, were penultimate acts to his final declaration of faith in the Communist party and retirement to Ghana. There he hoped to oversee the composition of a huge Encyclopedia Africana, a key to all Pan-African mythologies. Du Bois died without undertaking the encyclopedia, but his life’s voluminous work had itself become a key to black history and Pan-African thought in the modern era.

If Du Bois’s vindictive plunge into totalitarian philosophy, at just the time significant civil-rights progress was taking place, may be understood in part as an act consonant with his romantic faith in nationalistic power, it could as well be construed as further evidence of his prophecy. The Third World is never likely to coalesce idyllically as Du Bois imagined, but there is little question that he foresaw in rough outline—and perhaps helped indirectly to create the conditions for—the pattern of anti-colonial revolt.

Given his remarkable body of work and his important contributions to black American and Pan-African cultural studies, it is striking how little attention Du Bois has received in intellectual history. In the United States both his ardent work for the NAACP and his wide-ranging scholarship make him unique among analysts of black history, and his idiosyncratic plea for Third World unity has turned out to be an uncanny harbinger of contemporary anti-Western thought.

To be prophetic is not, of course, the same thing as to be right. Du Bois’s career and work are worthy of study for their scathing commentary on the failures of American race relations, and on the failure of the West more assiduously to cultivate freedom in the post-colonialist world. But they must also be read as a case study in conversion from democratic faith to faith in tyranny—to faith, ironically enough, in slavery. Or, as he remarked in an essay of 1961, Africans “will make up their own minds on Communism and will not listen solely to American lies. The latest voice to reach them is from Cuba.”

_____________

¹ Library of America, 1,334 pp., $27.50.