Rayford Logan lecture, "W.E.B. DuBois: An Overview," at the University of Iowa, June-July 1972

Speaker 1: The following is an address recorded at the Fourth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture, held at the University of Iowa, June 25 through July 7th, 1972. Speaking on W.E.B. Du Bois, An Overview, is Rayford Logan, Professor of History at Howard University. Introducing Professor Logan is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at the University of Iowa and chairman of the Institute. Professor Charl...: This is the last event of the Institute on Du Bois, and in my mind of modest judgment the most successful Institute of the four that the program in Afro-American Studies has sponsored. And before I forget about it, it seems to be appropriate for me, before I introduce the guest speaker of the evening who will give the public lecture, which will be the terminal event of the Institute, I do want to thank the members of my staff, especially Professor Corrigan and Mrs. [Johnston], for contributing to this successful Institute. Professor Charl...: Now one of the very strong reasons for the success of the Institute has been the presence of the distinguished man whom I shall introduce, that is to say Professor Rayford Logan, a university Professor of History at Howard University. I know that the members of the Institute are familiar with his achievements, but our visitors this evening may not be. And so, I shall list just a few. Professor Logan has an undergraduate degree from Williams College, and graduate degrees from Harvard. He has taught at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta University, and Howard University. Professor Charl...: He has a record of having been head of the department of history at Howard for nearly 30 years. That is to say from 1938 to 1965, an achievement which I think must deserve a medal of some kind. He is widely known and much valued for his books. Several of his works deal authoritatively, with the problems of what we once called the undeveloped countries. These were The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, the Operation of the Mandate System in Africa, The Senate and the Versailles Mandate System, The African Mandates in World Politics, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Professor Charl...: Equally important, are the works that explain the life and the contribution of American Blacks, The Negro and the Post-War World: A Primer, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901, The Negro in the United States, The Betrayal of the Negro, The American Negro; Old Backgrounds and New World Experience. Now it is true that I have intended to impress you with numbers. But I do not simply wish to play the numbers game this evening. Rayford Logan provided in these American works, and accurate and a balanced picture of the role of the Black man in our culture, at a time that American historians automatically deny the Black man his humanity. Professor Charl...: In this respect, Professor Logan has paved the way for [Qualls] and Franklin, and for the profound reexamination of American institutions like the reexamination of the institution of slavery, which is going on now. Professor Logan, as many of us know, was associated with Dr. Du Bois from 1921 on. From the time almost a half-century ago, more than a half-century ago, when as a young man fresh from Williams and from the baptism of war, he served as Secretary of the Pan-African Congress in Paris. A post assumed again in London, and Lisbon in 1923, and again in New York in 1927. Professor Charl...: There is nothing quite like hearing the voice of an actor in historical events. And the Institute has had the rare privilege to be Professor Logan's listening audience. Professor Logan edited a volume of essays in 1944 entitled What the Negro Wants. And he is engaged now in a monumental project, The Dictionary of American Negro Biography, which will help us to understand what the Black man is. The topic this evening is W.E.B. Du Bois, a great American. And I can only say in introducing Professor Logan, that we have the rare opportunity of having one great Black American discuss another, Professor Logan. Professor Rayfo...: Thank you, Professor Davis. Were it not for the fact that it would be an act of Supererogation, and an inordinate expression of immodesty, I would say to you Professor Davis, Professor Corrigan, all the members of your staff, the visiting lecturers, and especially the participants, this is the best Institute you have attended or are likely to attend for a long, long time to come. Professor Rayfo...: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois died at the age of 95 in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963. A span of well nigh a decade permits a tentative conclusion whether he was truly a great American. The determination must be tentative for three reasons. One, the probably discovery and publication of new materials. Two, the ever changing interpretations of his life and works. Three, valid differences about the criteria of greatness. Du Bois carried on such a voluminous correspondence in so many different parts of the world, that scholars need to continue to the search in public depositories and in private hands. Professor Rayfo...: Professor Herbert Aptheker's Volume One of the Du Bois correspondence, covering in some 900 pages the period through the summer of 1934, will contain as he wrote me on July 13, 1971, only a selection of his vast correspondence. Volume Two will go through 1958. In addition, Professor Aptheker is editing in 14 volumes the published works of Du Bois, plus one volume of an annotated bibliography. He is also editing in five volumes, the papers, journals, prayers, stories, essays, speeches, et cetera, if they have not been previously printed. When all these have been published, scholars will be able to make a more definite evaluation. The American Historical Association has provided significant examples of changing interpretations. Professor Rayfo...: In 1891, while still a graduate student at Harvard University, Du Bois read a paper on the enforcement of slave trade laws before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, which was published in its annual report for 1892. In July 1910, shortly before he edited the first issue of The Crisis, the American Historical Review published his article on Reconstruction and its benefits, still indispensable as an early revisionist interpretation. 30 years later, when he was chairman of a session at the 66th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, he stated deadpan, "For the first time in its history, the Association is devoting an entire session to the Negro. I call this slow, but steady progress." Professor Rayfo...: The progress moved with something less than deliberate speed. A generation later, Professor John Hope Franklin deplored in his address at the Du Bois memorial in Carnegie Hall, 1964, the fact that the American historical review, "Merely reported that he, Du Bois, had died, thus indicating its own inability, or own willingness, to comment on the impact of Du Bois on the field represented by that journal." On December 28, 1968 however, the American Historical Association made us [foreign language]. It devoted the opening session to the topic W.E.B. Du Bois 1868-1968, in observance of the 100th anniversary of his birth. By contrast, Phylon, the Atlanta University review of race and culture, which Du Bois had founded in 1940, and edited until 1944, made no reference to his death. Professor Rayfo...: This despite his teaching at the old Atlanta University, 1897-1910. His editing of 16 Atlanta University publications, and his teaching at the new Atlanta University, from 1933 to 1944. A generation before his death, the friends and associates of Du Bois, had honored him on the 70th anniversary of his birth, February 23, 1938. At a special University Conrecation in Sister's Chapel Spelman College is standing room only audience paid tribute to the great man, and listened with rapt attention while he read a portion of his A Pageant in Seven Decades. I have the honor of presenting the portrait bust by Alexander Portnoff to Dr. Rufus E. Clement, President of Atlanta University. Professor Rayfo...: That evening at [inaudible] in the Atlanta University dormitories, William Stanley Braithwaite read his commemorated poem, from which I quote these lines. "And we shall honor him today as one who gave the cause a power born of grace, for he proved that beauty knows no race. Oh bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil he cried, there are wrongs he showed, there are hopes he set blaze. He patterned one in literature of flesh, the other his art made luminous with praise, and now at 70 abides our praise. James Weldon Johnson, and Joel Spingarn reminisced about their group work together with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Professor Rayfo...: Especially significant in view of the disagreements between Spingarn and Du Bois, is a letter that Dr. Spingarn had written to me as Secretary of the Commemoration on February 17, 1938, "I shall be at the university convocation at 11:00 a.m. In fact, a little earlier in order to put on academic dress the first time I have worn it in 28 years. I hardly think that I would wear it, except for Du Bois and Atlanta University. On March 10, 1938, Mrs. Du Bois wrote to my wife and me, that the commemoration quote, "Was a wonderful tribute, and a courageous undertaking by the committee." Professor Rayfo...: Perhaps the committee was courageous in 1938. Certainly a generation later, Phylon was cowardly. He probably feared to follow even the almost ritualistic [foreign languge], because Du Bois had been invited to leave the university in 1944, publicly announced in 1961, his application for membership in the American Communist Party, renounced his American citizenship, and become a citizen of an African nation. But Great Barrington, where he was born in 1868, a century and a year later, authorized after a long and bitter controversy, a memorial park surrounding the site of the Du Bois family home. I hope that here long his remains will be brought home from Accra, and interred beside Nina Gomer Du Bois and Burghardt Du Bois, close by a yet to be constructed fitting monument. Professor Rayfo...: Among the pilgrims on that occasion should be representatives of the University of Iowa, for doubting to hold in this new era of mini-McCarthyism, an institution to evaluate the career of a man whom some still look upon as a traitor, and a threat to white supremacy. A continuing evaluation is necessary because of the probable discovery and publication of new materials and because every generation writes its own history. Du Bois changing views about himself, account in considerable measure for the various and conflicting interpretations about him. In an address, Two Bronze Titans, Frederick Douglass, and William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, February 22nd, 1971, I traced his inconsistencies and paradoxes in these words. Professor Rayfo...: "He grew up during the restoration of white supremacy in the southern states." Its abject acceptance by the federal government nor the newspapers and magazines, social gospel, the secular clergy, business and organized labor. He later witnessed the rise and fall of the populist movement. Theodore Roosevelt's wooing simultaneously or by turn, the mutually hostile Black and Tans, Lily Whites and white Supremacy Democrats, the speeches, progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, World War I, the Red Summer that followed it, the establishment of the Soviet Union, the ineffably stupid return to normalcy under Warren Harding, the keep cool with Cal who was bumbling which hastened the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt's inadequate New Deal, the waning of Truman's sturdy efforts to make civil rights meaningful for Negros, Eisenhower's less than enthusiastic support of these rights, Kennedy's support prompted at least in some measure by the brutal violence inflicted upon Freedom Riders, and others engaged in non-violent resistance. Professor Rayfo...: This summary explains in large measure his shifting views about the goals of integration, voluntary segregation, and search for identity. I believe that this espousal of these conflicting games is evidence of his greatness. A lesser man would have remained stubbornly wedded to one unchanging view. I believe further, than in 1972, as we groped for a stance, we must read and study again and again, where and why he stood at a given time. Above all, I insist that we recognize in 1972 that the strategies and goals of earlier years are not necessarily those of today, or of the future. And that we may have to pursue two or more simultaneously, or by turn. Professor Rayfo...: This I believe is a novel interpretation of his greatness. Yesterday I developed the thesis that his views about Pan-Africanism changed from prophesy to specific plans for self-government and independence. At the London Pan-African Congress, July 1900, he prophesied that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, and in the Souls of Black Folk, 1903, he added the words, "The relation of the darker to the lighter races of men, in Asia, and Africa, in American and the Islands of the sea." I stated yesterday also my agreement with those who proclaim him the father of Pan-Africanism. Professor Rayfo...: Tonight I point out again, that he and other Pan-Africanists, notably George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, benefited from external forces in the redemption of Africa. In the address on the Two Bronze Titans, Douglass and Du Bois mentioned above, I stated it was not until World War II had weakened and impoverished the colonial powers, that Winston Churchill had to preside over the beginning of the liquidation of the British Empire. The goal had to concede self-government and independence to most of France's trust and overseas territories, and Belgium to grant independence to the Belgian Congo. Professor Rayfo...: When Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, practically all of Africa down to southern Africa was independent. Who knows what external forces may necessitate the revision of my foreboding then, 1971, about the present situation. In Portuguese Africa, Rhodesia, Republic of South Africa, and Namibia, formerly South West Africa, the problem of the 20th century will still be, according to the dire predictions of some observers, the problem of the 21st century. Despite this unfinished business, Du Bois deserves the encomium of great, because he helped liberate 34 Black African nations from colonial exploitation. Professor Rayfo...: The criteria I have set for measuring his greatness are the extent to which he accomplished the task he set for himself when he wrote in his diary on his 25th birth date, 1893. "I therefore take the work that the unknown lays in my hands, and work for the rise of the Negro people, taken for granted that their best development means the best development of the world." How valid was his assertion that the best development of the Negro meant the best development of the world? In 1893, the future of the Negro was bleak. Liberia and Ethiopia were the only two independent African nations maintaining their precarious existence by the sufferance of the great powers. Professor Rayfo...: The rape of Africa was already aborting the rebirth of Black Americans, the Black African civilization. Haiti, the first independent Latin American nation, and the first in the western hemisphere after the United States, which took 58 years before it recognized the independence of Haiti, had only escaped establishment of United States control. Most of the other West Indian Islands languished under the exploitation of Spain, Great Britain, France, and Holland. Negros, Mulattoes, and Zambos in Central America and South America, found themselves generally at or near the bottom of a rigidly stratified society. Professor Rayfo...: In the United States, Negros were sacrificed on the altar of the road to reunion between the north and the south. It is probably that Du Bois in 1893 knew these simple facts. It is likely, too, that what he wrote in Dusk of Dawn, 1940, accurately reflected his thinking in 1893. Under the influence of his teachers at the University of Berlin, and in the social setting of the period he, "Began to see the race problem in America. The problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political development of Europe as one." I suggest that the high priest of the third world in 1972, consider rather Du Bois' concept of one world. Professor Rayfo...: A year after he outlined his mission in 1893, he told [inaudible], the blue-eyed German girl who wanted to marry him, that it would be unfair to her to bring her to the United States and besides he had work to do. For almost 70 years after his return to the United States, he did his work. In 1895, he was the first Negro to earn the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University. The next year, Longmans, Green & Co., an established firm, publishes the Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, the first volume in the Harvard historical series. Professor Rayfo...: It revealed an extraordinary amount of research in original sources, supported by abundant footnotes, two lengthy appendixes, and a bibliography of almost 15 pages. It is still an indispensable source for the study of this era of man's inhumanity to man. Du Bois was one of the founders and a vice president of the American Negro Academy, organized March 5th, 1897. His occasional paper, The Conservation of Races published in that year, compounded a dilemma which still plagues many American Negros. "Am I," he queried, "an American, or am I a Negro? Can I be both, or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro, as soon as possible, and be an American?" His final answer of course, was to continue to be a Negro, and cease to be an American. Professor Rayfo...: Even in distant Africa however, he continued until the eve of his death, the mission he had set for himself on his 25th birthday, and four years later in The Conservation of Races. He did not pretend to know the truth, when in 1893 to seek it on the pure assumption that it is worth seeking. Four years later, in The Conservation of Races, he stated that the American Negro Academy should aim to exhaust the people by truth, not by lies. By honesty, and not by flattery. He wanted his Encyclopedia Africana, which he had projected as early as 1909, and was planning on the eve of his death as the crown of his life's work to be a scientific production, and not a matter of propaganda. Professor Rayfo...: Most of his scholarly works adhered to his oft-repeated prescription. For instance, Professor E. Digby Baltzell praised The Philadelphia Negro, 1899, for Du Bois, "Painstakingly researched an objective interpretation." Baltzell added that, "The volume set the pattern in both method and theoretical point of view, for several significant sociological studies." 45 years after the publication of The Philadelphia Negro, Gunnar Myrdal and his associates, deemed it in An American Dilemma, as a model study of a Negro community. The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, established his reputation as a great American essayist. Professor Rayfo...: Another master of the English language, Professor Saunders Redding, wrote in his introduction to the 26th edition, that he'd belonged among classics because it expressed the soul of one people in a time of great stress, and showed its kinship with a timeless soul of all mankind. In my judgment, his temperate essay of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others, is still a model for an adversary's criticism. It also launched the first effective attack upon the doweling of capitalists who had grasped Washington to their bosom for his accommodationist apostasy at Atlanta, September 18, 1895. So far as I know, the allegedly bitter Du Bois, and he was often bitter, never bemoaned the fact that Harvard University conferred the honorary degree of Master of Arts upon Washington in 1895, post-hoc ergo propter hoc. Professor Rayfo...: I don't know the year in which appeared Du Bois The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, but left it to Fisk University to elect him many years later, an alumni member of Phi Beta Kappa. The substance of the 14 essays in The Souls of Black Folk justify its designation as a classic. Its style has rarely been equaled. For instance, one young white man, after reading the essay of The Passing of the Firstborn, told a Ms. Mary White Ovington, "No man should dare to write like that." Others have probably wept with him as they read this poignantly beautiful passage about his only son. Professor Rayfo...: "He died at eventide, when the sun lay like a brooding sorrow above the western hills, bailing its face, when the wind spoke not, and the trees, the great green trees he loved stood motionless. I saw his breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his little soul leaped like a star that travels in the night, and left a world of darkness in a dream. The day changed not, the same tall trees peaking at the windows, the same green glass, glinted in the setting sun. Only in the chamber of death writhe the world's most pityiest thing, a childless mother." Professor Rayfo...: Professor Francis Broderick, in his biography of Du Bois, 1959, concluded that the Atlanta University publication had, "Impressive value. Du Bois' pioneering idea of in introducing organized facts into the miasma of opinion of prejudice which passed for discussion of the Negro, was novel and arresting." One must also marvel at Du Bois' stamina in editing 16 of these publications, three of them with the assistance of Augustus Granville Dill. Du Bois did not exaggerate when he wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn, 1940, "Between 1896 and 1920, there was no study in America which did not depend in some degree upon the investigations made at Atlanta University." Often they were widely quoted and commended. The reprint by the [Arnold Press] and The New York Times, enabled scholars to compare these indispensable volumes with some of the hastily written propagandistic screeds of recent years. Professor Rayfo...: Two of his less well-known books add to his stature. Ernest Kaiser, one of the more competent critics, in his revisionist interpretation of Du Bois' John Brown, deemed it a voice crying in the wilderness of the venomous history and biography of the early 20th century. The little book, The Negro, published in 1915, is praised in the perspective of 1970, by the distinguished Africanist, Professor [George Jefferson] of the University of Edinburgh, for its place in the history of ideas, on the socioeconomic nature of the new imperialism. Professor Rayfo...: Du Bois' most controversial book is of course, Black Reconstruction in America. Like others, I have criticized it for its unscientific Marxist views. On the other hand, I agree with Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. of course, who in 1925 emphasized as did Du Bois in 1935, the admiral provisions of the Reconstruction Conventions and legislatures. None of these measures Schlesinger wrote, "Was more laudable perhaps than the mandatory provision, for the inauguration of free public school systems." Still valid in 1972, is Professor Howard K. Beale's conclusion in 1940, that Black Reconstruction's emphasis on economic problems presented, "A mass of material formally ignored that every future historian must reckon with." Professor Rayfo...: In this context, I mention only one point made by Professor John Hope Franklin last night, namely that Du Bois had read every page of The Congressional Globe that was relevant to the book Black Reconstruction. I must admit comments about his other publications, many of which have been ably discussed at this Institute. Their scope was summarized in my introduction to my profile, in the [inaudible] American Profile Series 1971, in these words. "A complete biography of Du Bois would have to include a portrayal of him as a novelist, poet, and public speaker. Author of two-score books and several hundred articles and pamphlets. Professor Rayfo...: "Editor of one of the most effective polemical magazines in the United States. Scholar and teacher. Leader of the Talented Tenth. Authentic American radical. Pragmatist and romantic. A founder an officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Socialist and communist. Pluralist, integrationist and advocate of voluntary segregation. Nationalist and Pan-Africanist. Opponent of Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey. With the exception of Frederick Douglass, he was the greatest American Negro." Professor Rayfo...: Du Bois was not only a great scholar, he was also a prophet and a great leader of protest. For most of his life, he was what I have called an authentic American radical. At the second meeting of the Niagara Movement, August 15, 1906, in Harpers Ferry, he made what I still consider the most succinct and eloquent statement for what we call first class citizenship. I tell my students that they should be able to wake up at 2:00 in the morning, and recite with Du Bois, "We will not be satisfied to take one jut or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free-born American, and until we get these rights, political, civil, and social, we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America." Professor Rayfo...: Though he changed his goals, his protest deserve high rank among the great American polemics. In November 1909, his editorial in The Horizon, which he defiantly called a radical paper, demanded first universal suffrage including votes for women. Many of his other writings should be included in an anthology of 20th century crusaders for equal rights for women. His profound respect for Black women in particular, elicited some of his most wrathful and sardonic protests. He declared in Dark Water, 1920, that he would forgive the white south for many things, "But one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come, is wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the Black womanhood, which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust." Professor Rayfo...: Five years later in The Crisis, he labeled bills introduced by the Ku Klux Klan to prevent intermarriage, and proposals to encourage prostitution, and degrade women of Negro descent. In an appeal for Planned Parenthood he wrote in The Crisis, 1931, "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." And Mary Black said, "Who, me? Blessed? And another day becoming, and none of us with a job?" His love for his son Burghardt may have led to his concern for children in general, manifest in The Brownies' Book, which he and Ms. Jessie Fauset edited monthly from January 1920 to December 1921. Eleanor [Sinept] perceptibly stated that in this book for children, "There begins further insight into this man's greatness." Professor Rayfo...: During the same period, Du Bois' Dark Water quoted a passage from Holy Writ, "And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones is better for him that a millstone were hanging about his neck and he were cast into the sea." Du Bois' compassion for mankind accepted no limitations of sex, age, race, color, economic, social, and cultural status, religious affiliation, or national boundaries. The leader of the Talented Tenth, rarely spoke to the masses. He did however frequently speak for them. He deplored the alienation of many American Negroes from the disadvantaged brothers and sisters. Professor Rayfo...: In the Revelation of Saint Orgne the Damned, 1938, he denounced those responsible for the plight of criminals, others of society's forgotten men and women, students who cannot read or could not seek an education. "What is crime," he asked in 1932, "but disease, social or physical." As did E. Franklin Frazier, he castigated the Black bourgeoisie for the conspicuous consumption. He flailed American labor and conservative unions under reactionaries like Meany, an eminent gentleman who yell, "We give the Black man every chance, and yet look at him." Professor Rayfo...: He condemn those who caricatured the Negro, as well as those who would interpret the history of our country as to make the plot turn entirely upon the Black man. "A nation's religion is its life," he admonished, "and as such, Christianity is a miserable failure." As early as 1911, he was one of the first to point out that the majority of the world's population are colored. In 1952, he urged voters to ask each candidate, "Will you kindly please tell us, what the hell do you stand for anyway?" He described colonies as places where, "Niggers are cheap, and the earth is rich." His denunciations of lynchings are still classics. A true Pan-Africanist, he demanded African for Africans. Professor Rayfo...: These are only a few of the barbs with which he assailed American and European hypocrisy. Of no subject perhaps was he as denunciatory as he was of war. In Dark Water he wrote, "I believe in the prince of peace. I believe that war is murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations white and stronger, but foreshadows the death of the strength." May I add, how prophetic? What he wrote in 1919 about Negro troops returning from France, might well be with appropriate change, the slogan of veterans returning in 1972 from Vietnam. "We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for democracy. We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the USA, or know the reason why." Professor Rayfo...: And now to conclude. Du Bois was great because for 70 years he labored to fulfill his mission of working for the rise of the Negro people. Like other great men, he shifted his goals as circumstances required. Like other great men, he made mistakes and stumbled. But phoenix-like he rose and rose again, until August 27, 1963. Then as he had written 60 years earlier in The Souls of Black Folk, "No mighty mourning donned to lift the veil, and set the prison free. Not for me. I shall die in my bonds." He is dead in his bonds of service to mankind, but his greatness lives on in the Negro people who are rising in Africa, America, and the Islands of the sea. It lives on, too, in his efforts to involve the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, in the best development of the world. Professor Rayfo...: In 1926, almost a half-century before President Nixon journeyed to a summit meeting in Moscow, Du Bois made his first trip to the Soviet Union 10 years later, 36 years before President Nixon inaugurated his ping pong diplomacy with the People's Republic of China, Du Bois made his first trip to the most populace nation in the world. President Nixon's attempts in 1972 to normalize relation with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China had prompted suggestion that he be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Du Bois' insistence in 1950 that we have got to live in the world with Russia and China, led to prosecution, persecution, and the indignity of being briefly handcuffed in a court of justice. Professor Rayfo...: Acquitted, Du Bois continued despite lingering suspicion that he was a traitor, to seek for the two much maligned powers, the decent respect of mankind. In November 1958, he and Mrs. Shirley Graham Du Bois talked for two hours in Moscow with Prime Minister Khrushchev, about the peace moment in the United States, and about Pan-Africa. The opening of the Institute of African Studies in Moscow the fall of 1962, resulted in large measure from Du Bois' conversation with Khrushchev and Dr. [Ivan Potamkin], who became the first director of the institute. Professor Rayfo...: Du Bois continued his Pan-African diplomacy in China, three years before Dr. Henry Kissinger and President Nixon inaugurated their ping pong diplomacy with China. On February 23, 1959, Premier Zhou Enlai was host at a banquet for Dr. and Mrs. Du Bois to celebrate his 91st birthday. They had lunch and spent and afternoon with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. We shall know perhaps someday how much Du Bois helped to open the door for Dr. Kissinger and President Nixon. Du Bois liked to say, "Always something new out of Africa." Today one may say always something new out of the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. If these voices speak for the best interest of the people of Indo-China and Africa, they will be saying to a great American, 'Rest in peace, you have fulfilled your mission." Professor Rayfo...: On August 27, 1963, John O. Killens, James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier and others, were told, "The old man died." Killens added that no one had to tell them who the old man was, since they knew he was Du Bois. "To some of them," Killens wrote, "he was our patron saint, our teacher, and our major prophet." He was, and is mine also, I hope he is likewise, yours.