segregation and Jim Crow laws in the south.

In 1896, Frederick Hoffman published a book claiming that where Blacks had once been “healthy” and “cheerful,” they were now heading for “extinction,” a position which Du Bois challenged. Du Bois was worried, however, by the fact that Blacks did indeed have higher arrest and prison rates, unsure whether this really meant that they committed more crimes. He rightly felt that prejudice was in fact behind the arrest rates, but his speeches reinforced racist ideas, such as that crime rates could be lowered through education and that it was the duty of Black people to “solve” the problem of their women’s “unchastity.” He also suggested that there should be gradual decolonization in Africa but felt that Black people there were not yet ready for freedom, echoing ideas at the time that an American Empire should follow the 1898 Spanish-American war. Unlike Booker T. Washington, however, Du Bois did not give wealthy whites what they wanted—racist jokes and a minstrel show—and thus never gained a similar following.

The idea of the new American Empire was gaining traction with the election of McKinley, who insisted it was the duty of Americans to “look after” those people who could not look after themselves. The last Black representative in Congress, George White of North Carolina, gave a farewell address in 1901 stating that Black politicians would rise again. But Black people had been disenfranchised en masse, and most did not believe him. Textbooks at this time characterized the white South as having been victimized by incompetent Black politicians, if they mentioned Black people at all.

Chapter 23 

When Booker T. Washington published his slavery memoir, Du Bois could no longer remain silent about “accommodators,” of whom he felt Washington was one. He criticized Washington openly. Meanwhile, another Black man, William Hannibal Thomas, was describing Blacks as “lawless” and Black women as “lascivious,” with only a few—like himself—having overcome their inherent inferiority. Activist Addie Hunton described Thomas as “Black Judas,” a name which stuck.

In 1901, new president Theodore Roosevelt thoughtlessly asked Booker T. Washington to dinner. For segregationists, this crossed a line, suggesting that Blacks were equal to Whites. In response to the resultant uproar, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays which emphasized that Black people were fully human and that America as it was only allowed Black people to view themselves through the lens of others. The book was applauded, but also decreed dangerous for Black people to read, as it railed against segregationist policies.

Chapter 24 

In 1906, Du Bois met Franz Boas, a Jewish emigrant from Germany, where American racial classifiers about Blackness were being applied to Jews. Boaz helped Du Bois to understand the lack of evidence for any concept of biological race. He astonished Du Bois and others by recounting the greatness of many precolonial West African kingdoms, emphasizing that there was no basis for arguing Black inferiority. Meanwhile, Roosevelt was arguing that lynchings would lessen if Black criminality lessened, lowering him greatly in the eyes of Black America.

The boxer Jack Johnson shone a further light on American racism in 1908 when, having defeated a white man, he then went on to “flaunt” his partner, a white woman, in public. He was arrested on charges of “transporting a prostitute” and lived abroad for seven years before turning himself in. Many Americans were eager for the restoration of white masculine superiority. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fictional Tarzan series went some way towards doing this; it emphasized the idea of Africa as savage and was replicated time and time again in Hollywood plotlines.

In 1910, Du Bois left Atlanta University to edit the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s first newspaper. The NAACP was launched, crucially, just as the eugenics movement rushed into popular culture. In response to the march of 5,000 Black suffragists on Washington, Du Bois published a forum on women’s suffrage aimed towards Black women. Activist Nannie Burroughs argued that Black women were stronger than Black men and that they would use their vote properly. In 1915, president Woodrow Wilson attended the first screening at the White House of The Birth of a Nation, a deeply racist silent film that glorified the KKK. This film quickly became hugely popular but was protested everywhere by Blacks.

Chapter 25 

With World War One came labor shortages, which brought northern recruiters to southern Black communities. Thus began a mass migration of Blacks out of the Jim Crow south and into northern cities, only for racism to greet them again. A smaller number of Caribbeans and Africans also arrived in the northern USA, including Marcus Garvey, who visited the NAACP in New York before founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

An idea was growing at this time that biracial people were a racial middle class and that all Black achievements were actually those of biracials. The eugenecist ideas of the time influenced Adolf Hitler, in Germany, to write Mein Kampf in prison in 1924. Around the same time, Lewis Terman’s IQ Test was created to support preexisting ideas that Black general intelligence would be lower. Returning American soldiers had faced increased racism after the war, as Wilson feared their relative good treatment in Europe would “go to their heads.” Indeed, many did return expecting better lives, their eyes opened. The result was the “Red Summer,” a wave of white invasions of Black neighborhoods and enormous violence; newspapers generally cast white criminals as the victims and Black victims as criminals.

The Communist Party of America was formed in response. Communists felt that capitalism and racism went hand in hand, and they urged poor Black and white Americans to forget racism and adopt class antagonism.

Du Bois’s essay “The Damnation of Women” praised Black women, which was highly unusual, but underscored the narrative of the absent Black father, which would be perpetuated thereafter. Months afterwards, however, a new form of blues music—pioneered and fronted by Black women—swung into being, embracing African-American culture. These Black female blues artists were therefore despised by assimilationists.

Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey was proclaiming that he would organize all the Black people in the world into a group who would free Africa together. Du Bois was sure this movement would soon collapse. He disliked that Garvey made it clear that light-skinned Blacks had privilege over dark-skinned ones. In 1923, Garvey impersonated Du Bois on a trip to Liberia. Du Bois publicly attacked him as a dangerous enemy of Blacks, and shortly afterwards Garvey, convicted of mail fraud, was deported.

Chapter 26

Du Bois hoped that the media could be used to persuade away racist ideas. To this end, he involved the Harlem Renaissance movement of poets and writers, as well as proponents of the “New Negro” movement. However, many young Black artists had no interest in assimilation and wanted to express themselves in their own way rather than “race towards whiteness,” as Langston Hughes put it. Meanwhile, dance critic John Martin argued that Blacks had an “intrinsic” and innate capacity for dance: by striving for assimilation, they were running away from their own “savage” greatness in pursuit of something they could never achieve.

White people became interested in the Harlem Renaissance—the blues, the dancing and the music—but viewed its central figures as curiosities. Black elites tried to distance themselves from the idea of Black commoners as “sexual, uneducated, lazy, crude and criminal” and yet often viewed Black commoners in this way themselves.

In 1928, as the Repulican Party took southern states in the presidential election, Claude G. Bowers strove to remind white southerners that the Republicans were to blame for Reconstruction. He wrote of a “tragic” era in which whites were tortured. By contrast, Du Bois argued in 1935 that Reconstruction was actually the only time the US had been a democracy. 

The Great Depression in 1929 quickly sent both poor whites and poor Blacks into a period of immense economic difficulty. Hollywood tried to distract people from this, but films such as King Kong infuriated Black viewers. Black stereotypes were everywhere, and unfortunately, Black people in need of employment often participated in such radio and film work.

Chapter 27 

Du Bois had now become firmly antiracist and increasingly socialist, arguing that the US had become a society in which whites constituted the aristocracy. He also now felt that persuasion was a waste of time and that Black solidarity should be the goal. The Roosevelt “New Deal” had dealt terrible blows to Black communities in the areas of employment and housing. Du Bois now saw that “uplift suasion” could never work: laws actively made Black people poorer, but then they were blamed for their own poverty.

On a research trip to Berlin in 1936, Du Bois noted that the Jew “was the Negro” in Germany. In this year, Black American Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Olympics and returned to a parade, but he only succeeded in solidifying racist ideas about Black athletic superiority.

The term “racism” was first used by Ruth Benedict in 1940. Further studies in the 1940s found that many Black children associated lighter skin tones with intelligence and refinement and would prefer a white doll over a Black one. This was unsurprising, given the proliferation of racist literature at the time. But in 1949, James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody's Protest Novel” received acclaim and drew attention to the issue of misrepresentation in literature.

Chapter 28 

During World War Two, Du Bois was energized by the Black community’s “Double V Campaign” for victory over racism at home and fascism abroad. In a 1944 study commissioned by the Carnegie foundation, the Swede Gunnar Myrdal employed both Black and white scholars to conduct a survey which identified the racial problem as a “moral” one and concluded that whites had “astonishing ignorance” about Black people. Du Bois thought the work “monumental” but disliked its continued emphasis on assimilation. With the end of the war, in 1946, Dean Acheson warned that the discrimination in America could lead to negative relations with other countries, but southern segregationists fought hard to retain the status quo. Theodore Bilbo issued a call to arms to whites to keep Blacks away from the polls.

Increasingly, however, eugenic ideas were being rejected, especially after DNA was discovered in 1953. But new racist ideas simply argued that African populations contained fewer “good” genes than European ones.

The Truman Doctrine of 1947 did acknowledge that civil rights shortcomings in the USA were a serious obstacle in US foreign policy, but only seven percent of the population were in favor of granting all rights at that time. Still, Truman was voted for by the majority of Black voters that year, and Major League Baseball was desegregated. The open housing movement was also galvanized, with Shelley v. Kraemer putting an end to housing segregation in the north. But the white middle class had been galvanized, too, by the GI Bill, and economic gaps continued to grow, as whites rejected Blacks from their neighborhoods. Du Bois, aged 82, was arrested for protesting, and the US performed damage control by finding some patriotic Blacks to go on speaking tours and argue that race relations in the US were not too bad.

The question of desegregation in schools was rising, however. Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954 demanded the right of one little Black girl to attend school alongside white children. Chief Justice Warren argued that segregation had a negative effect on Black people and caused them to despise their own blackness. Ultimately, the ruling was in favor of desegregation. Southern segregationists resisted violently.

Chapter 29 

The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 was part of a reaction to this case. Till was beaten violently and pictures of his dead face shown around the world. Du Bois was stunned by the Montgomery Bus Boycott during the 1956 election year, as Black protests continued. He thought the emerging Martin Luther King to be “an intellectual giant” and wrote to him to encourage him. The Nation of Islam, based in Chicago, was also growing. When Black students in Little Rock were blocked from entering a high school, Eisenhower realized that this was harming America’s reputation on the world stage and sent in federal troops to protect the students.

Aged ninety, Du Bois toured Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Communist China to describe the situation in America. Meanwhile, the resistance continued with sit-ins at colleges and high school, to Du Bois’s approval. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird further galvanized the Civil Rights movement.

In 1961, Du Bois traveled to Ghana to meet President Kwame Nkrumah to undertake a project. Once there, he succumbed to an infection.

Back in Alabama, George Wallace was inaugurated as governor and demanded “segregation forever.” Later in the year, King kicked off demonstrations in Birmingham, and was jailed. He responed to critics of his violent tactics in a letter, which conflated opposing groups: antiracists who hated discrimination and Black separatists who hated White people. King distanced himself from both, representative of a wider split in the movement.

In June, Kennedy pressed for Civil Rights legislation, and the March on Washington followed, with little civil disobedience and the support of the Kennedy administration. W. E. B. Du Bois had died in Ghana the previous day, and he was honored at the march.

Analysis 

The remarkable life of W. E. B. Du Bois spans a turbulent period in American history, from the end of the Civil War until the 1963 March on Washington during the Civil Rights movement. Accordingly, his lifetime saw a transition from slavery to freedom for many Americans. But, as this section shows, while Du Bois initially felt sure he could use his intellect to change ideas about Blacks, many Americans did not want to have their minds changed. 

No matter what Du Bois did, he was viewed as an “extraordinary” Negro, rather than simply as evidence that Black men could be brilliant, too. His early hopes for full assimilation were slowly diminished as the twentieth century progressed and Jim Crow laws showed no signs of being broken down. On the contrary, although Du Bois never espoused the colonization idea, he began to move more towards sympathy for separatist Black activists as an old man. Having spent the vast majority of his life trying to explain to white people that Black people like himself did indeed have “souls” and the capacity to prosper, white society continued to see this as the exception, rather than the rule. And for much of Du Bois’s life, lynchings and Klan violence proliferated in the economically deprived South. Du Bois’s experiences changed him from a firm believer in uplift suasion to a man who could understand the drive towards embracing Africanism and the 1960s Black identity.