W.E.B. Du Bois by Bill V Mullen, Pluto Press, £14.99
When W.E.B. Du Bois died in August 1963 he was, writes Bill Mullen, a “hero to friends” and a “pariah to mainstream America”. The nonagenarian raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts had always shown a talent for dividing opinion.
On one hand, his achievements were remarkable. Born just a few years after the formal emancipation of America’s slaves, Du Bois managed to carve out an impressive academic career in prejudice-riddled times: studying at Fisk University, Harvard (“the college of my youngest, wildest visions”), and in Berlin. He went on to become a formidable champion of civil rights, helping to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and, on the global stage, lending support to just about every anti-colonial struggle he encountered.
A passionate crusader for pan-Africanism, Du Bois “did more to educate African-Americans and people of the African diaspora about Africa than any other person in US history”.
He also found time to argue for women’s social equality, to grab headlines as a peace activist and, from his study, to shake up scholarly understandings of the Civil War – the image of benevolent white men saving feeble, ignorant black people from their fate gave way to a narrative in which slaves had agency, fleeing plantations in their tens of thousands and, in many cases, joining the Union armies.
Mullen has no hesitation in praising Du Bois as a “fluid, creative and inspiring revolutionary thinker” or admiring his lifelong “desire to see the wretched of the earth rise through self-emancipation”. This, though, is a book of consummate balance, so Mullen also recognises the less edifying aspects of Du Bois’s intellectual journey.
Unflinching support for despicable regimes heads the list. When Du Bois first visited the Soviet Union in 1926, it seems likely that his hosts carefully shielded him from any hints of repression, dissent or socio-economic turmoil. Du Bois’s “seemingly uncritical enthusiasm” for the place is therefore forgivable.
Long after evidence of Stalin’s crimes became common knowledge, however, Du Bois remained loyal. As late as the 1950s Du Bois, while admitting the tragic human cost of collectivisation, suggested that the process may have been necessary in face of counter-revolutionary threats. He likewise conceded that Stalin had sometimes been cruel, but insisted that “the total result was a glorious victory in the uplift of mankind”.
Nor did Du Bois learn his lesson. He never gave due weight to the atrocities of China’s Cultural Revolution and, Mullen writes, “either ignored or failed to report the millions of Chinese deaths caused by the great famines during the Great Leap Forward”. The photo of a grinning Du Bois greeting a beaming Mao Tse-tung in 1959 is difficult to stomach, even for Du Bois’s most ardent fans.
Needless to say, such overt communist sympathies did not go down well in the paranoid post-war United States, though this hardly excuses the shoddy way in which Du Bois was treated by the authorities.
In 1951, the Peace Information Center, with which Du Bois was closely involved, was accused of being a front for the USSR and its members were indicted. Du Bois stood trial in Washington and, although he emerged victorious, his blacklisted status lost him many erstwhile friends. When his passport was finally returned to him in 1958, he headed off into self-imposed exile, ending his days in Ghana.
In less than 200 pages, Mullen provides a rounded, thoroughly even-handed portrait of this complex life. He is particularly strong on Du Bois’s intellectual odyssey. Early on, Du Bois was something of an elitist, exhibiting a condescending, paternalistic attitude towards the black working class. They were, he seems to have believed, incapable of raising themselves up and required the efforts of a “talented tenth” as leaders.
This search for extraordinary men never quite left Du Bois, which may explain his blinkered support for the likes of Mao and Stalin. A radical, globalist, capitalism-hating worldview took shape although, rather surprisingly, Du Bois’s grasp of socialist theory was, on Mullen’s account, always fitful and imperfect.
Du Bois had more than his share of flaws and took some truly egregious false steps. There was also greatness about the man, however, not least in the way he articulated the plight and alienation of African-Americans. His notion of “double consciousness”, of being American and black, of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” is still haunting. The United States, Du Bois once wrote, “is my country and the land of my fathers. It is still a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still the home of noble souls and generous people. But it is selling its birthright. It is betraying its mighty destiny.”
Debate over the methods Du Bois chose to set all that right is as important today as it was back in August 1963, when the old man died in Accra.
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