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There are few sociologists or historians as visionary and sagacious as the late W.E.B. DuBois. Dr. DuBois died in 1963 in Ghana on the eve of the great March on Washington, but his prophecy has been revealed and is still a useful, vital tool for analyzing current issues. His prediction that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, " first appeared in 1903 in his seminal collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, and we need only scan the local tabloids to see the truth of his words.
Like his insight in the field of race relations, Dr. Du
Bois was also quite prescient in the political realm and on socialeconomic
matters. Again his acumen is disclosed in The Souls of Black Folk. It is
in his oft-quoted chapter, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,"
that Du Bois outlines his full opposition to the founder of the powerful
Tuskeegee Machine, and discusses an alternative plan which would be at the core
of the subsequent struggle for civil rights and Black Power.
The Black men to America have a duty to perform, " Dr. Du Bois said near the end of this essay, "a duty stern and delicate-a forward movement to oppose part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr . Washington preaches thrift, patience and industrial training for the masses we must hold up his hands and strive with him ... But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinction, and opposes higher training and ambition of our brighter minds-so far as he does this ... we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.
While DuBois's literary classic heralded a new approach to social reform, as Saunders Redding and others proclaimed, there was no basic economic blueprint, no plan from DuBois that suggested the self-determination proposals he would author during the Great Depression. And the arrival at this analysis is rather ironic since it dovetails with Washington's ideas about self-reliance. By the 1930's with social realism suffusing esthetics and socialism edging its way into politics, it is not hard to see how DuBois and other advanced thinkers might have been attracted to programs that challenged a conservative status quo.
Even before he began espousing a quasi-socialist outlook, DuBois was always one who believed that only through control over their own economic and political life could black Americans gain any parity or equality in American society. In 1934 after he had resigned from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People-an organization he had helped to found DuBois, in a speech titled, A Negro Nation Within a Nation, placed the plight of Black America in an economic context. The main weakness of the Negro's position, DuBois said, is that since emancipation he has never had an adequate economic foundation. Thaddeus Stevens recognized this and sought to transform the emancipated freedmen into peasant proprietors. If he had succeeded, he would have changed the economic history of the United States and perhaps saved the American farmer from his present plight. But to furnish 50,000,000 acres of good land to the Negroes would have cost more money than the North was willing to pay, and was regarded by the South as highway robbery.
What DuBois is alluding to here is something that he fully assessed in his classic study, Black Reconstruction-the issue of forty acres and a mule. The whole attempt to supply land and capital for the recently freed slaves never materialized, and Du Bois would submit some fifteen years after Washington's deatli that he alone had a comprehensive economic plan.
He had a vision," DuBois conceded, "of building a new economic foundation for Negroes by incorporating them into white industry. He wanted to make them skilled workers by industrial education and expected small capitalists to rise out of their ranks.
But Washington, DuBois continued, assumed that the economic development of America in the twentieth century would resemble that of the nineteenth century, with free industrial opportuni~ ty, cheap land and unlimited resources dominated by small competitive capitalists. Washington, DuBois said, "lived to see industry industry more and more concentrated, land monopoly extended, and industrial technique changed by wide introduction of machinery.
In short, Washington's program was outmoded even at its inception. When he was pushing his students to make their own bricks, technology was rapidly advancing to make them and their process obsolete; also, the opportunity of becoming a small capitalist was increasingly slimmer, even for white Americans, DuBois noted. To be completely honest, DuBois might have also admitted his own deficiency at that time, his own inability to forge a viable economic proposal for Black America. Indeed, the socialist euphoria of the thirties had influenced DuBois, but as Harold Cruse detailed in his book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, by the 1940's he had modified his stance, particularly as it might have been construed as representing a nationalist tendency.
It seems, Cruse wrote, not to have occurred to DuBois that any thorough economic reorganization of Negro existence imposed from above, will not be supported by the popular masses unless an appeal is made to their nationalism. '
In DuBois's worldview, albeit an everchanging one, there was no room to compromise nationalism with a Communist ideology. It was at this juncture of his analysi.,;', upon the schools of these' 'two difficult sets of facts, Cruse posited, that DuBois was stifled: From this dilemma, "DuBois never developed his basic theoretical premise, Cruse contended.
Somehow by the end of his voluminous book Cruse either ignored or forgot an earlier . conclusion he had made of DuBois's economic views, a view that he would later, to some degree, endorse himself. As an outgrowth of his call for voluntary segregation, DuBois proposed a vast program which covered the full spectrum of planned cooperative consumer and producer enterprises under the control of black entrepreneurs. But for many factors, especially the advent of World War II, this notion of a cooperative commonwealth was never carried out.
Why DuBois did not resurrect these ideas after the war is open to speculation, although by then the world had changed dramatically and so had the political firmament. Furthermore, it must be understood that DuBois was an early socialist who was always on the Communist path. When he at last officially joined the Communist Party in 1961, any discussion of an economic program in opposition to Communist doctrine was out of the question. As in the past, DuBois was convinced that capitalism could not reform itself, "it is doomed to self-destruction, " he asserted. ' 'Communism ... this is the only way of human life.
Thus, by his last years, DuBois made his final decision about the economic destiny of Black America. The only real salvation was to adopt a socialist outlook. Black Americans "should support all measures and men who favor a welfare state, " he said in a speech a few years before joining the Communist Party . "They should vote for government ownership of capital in industry; they should favor strict regulation of corporations or their public ownership; they should vote to prevent monopoly from controlling the press and the publishing of opinions. They should favor public ownership and control of water, electric, and atomic power; they should stand for a clean ballot, the encouragement of third parties, independent candidates, and the elimination of graft and gambling on televisions and even in churches.
Most of these ideas offered by DuBois undergird the programs of many social and political activists, be they environmentalists, feminists or human rights advocates. In these days when there is such a paucity of theory and insight, there is a crying need to rediscover the ideas of one of the nation's most learned thinkers, W.E.B. DuBois.
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