John Bracey lecture, "Black Nationalism in the Thought of W.E.B. DuBois," 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 25th through July 7th, 1972. Speaking on Black Nationalism in the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, is John Bracey, associate professor at Rochester University. Introducing Professor Bracey is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Chairman of the Institute. Charles T. Davi...: Is Mr. John Bracey, who was one of the impressive new Black historians who made their appearance in the late sixties. He has packed into a short life, an amazing amount of studying, speaking, consulting and writing. His education has occurred at Howard University, Roosevelt University and Northwestern and he's presently completing his dissertation at Northwestern, a work which carries the title, A Critical History of Black Sociologists, Du Bois, Charles Johnson and Franklin Frazier. Charles T. Davi...: Now, as many of you know, it is the usual practice in the academic world for a young man, newly arrived in the profession, to wait until he has a degree before he launches himself into publishing. And usually that launching takes the form of an article or two, derived from a thesis that has to be translated first into English from academia. Charles T. Davi...: Not so with the inpatient Mr. Bracey. He has edited with August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Nationalism in America and with the same collaborators, produced a number of volumes in the Explorations in the Black Experience series, sponsored by the Wadsworth Publishing Company. As well as the Afro-Americans; selected documents, published by Allyn & Bacon. He has one important article, Black Nationalism Since Garvey, in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, a book which most of you know. Another one on Harold Cruse, A Recent Visitor in the Midcontinent American Studies Journal and yet another on The Graduate School Experience: A Black Student Viewpoint, in the Graduate Journal. He's delivered papers at the American Historical Association, the Southern Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Charles T. Davi...: He has been doing, the past year, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester and he's on his way now to the University of Massachusetts. You can understand now why I was eager to have him as a lecturer at the Institute. When I called Vincent Harding to invite him to come to Iowa City and read to him the list of impressive participants at this occasion, he was a little bit disturbed because there were no young Black historians and before I had the opportunity to assure him that John Bracey would arrive, his first recommendation for such a young Black historian was John Bracey. It is a great pleasure then to introduce Mr. Bracey, who will talk on Black Nationalism and Du Bois. John Bracey: First of all, I assure you that all those great things, half of them are probably not true and the rest of it, I mean, what do you say after that kind of stuff? First, I guess I should thank Charlie for inviting me out, Rochester is a horrible place to live in the winter time and the past two weeks has been flooded. The Genesee River is backed up and all the water is brown and the people are sandbagging and this kind of stuff. So I thought, even Iowa would be an improvement over Rochester. I'm also glad to be in all this good company. I can show this to my daughter one day when she's able to read and say your daddy was here with all these great scholars and I can flip out when she goes to school for show and tell. John Bracey: What I'm going to do, is to not really talk about Du Bois that much. It seems to me... I didn't tell Charlie this... With the kind of saturation in Du Bois writings and in his life, history, it seems to me that a more profitable way of looking at Du Bois is to anchor him in some kind of context. I have no belief whatsoever in the great man theory of history and I don't think there's any value whatsoever in treating Du Bois like the second coming of Christ or some such other phenomenon and attempting to relate everything that happened in the world from 1868 to 1963 to Du Bois' existence on this planet. Although, he may indeed have had quite a bit to do with a number of significant occurrences. John Bracey: What I want to talk about, is Du Bois as a focal point for a discussion of Black Nationalism and the Black experience and attempt to mediate, working out of historical analysis, how do you get from an individual like Du Bois, to the society in which he lived, and how do you explain the connections between these two phenomenon, the personal and history, the ideological, the ideas, where did these ideas come from, who else had them? They didn't drop out of the sky and who was he in terms of the people he lived among, represented and was connected to in various social and political and economic ways? John Bracey: The two key terms, I guess, would be a mediation process. Du Bois, the personality mediating himself through history until they brought a context and the concepts of a horizontal and vertical anchoring him in history. That's to say, horizontally in terms of Du Bois and the people around him on the same plane with him in time and Du Bois vertically, as a person moving through history from 1868 to 1963 as an ongoing historical personality. And this is going to be kind of chicken, matter of fact, I'm experimenting on you because I've never really worked this out and I really don't know. It's not that funny. I really don't know how it's going to come out, but we'll see, and I'm going to enjoy it anyway, if you enjoy it, that's fine. And if you don't enjoy it, I imagine you'll tell me so, then I can incorporate your lack of enjoyment into my next experiment. John Bracey: First of all, I'm going to deal with my overall framework in dealing with Black American history is that Blacks are an internal colony. I found this makes much more sense and much more analytical clarity than to view Blacks as an ethnic group, a minority group, a oppressed people or what have you, but internal colonialism to me, enables one to view the key political, social, economic, and cultural mechanisms by which Blacks and whites are linked in American history and the context of exploitation and the mechanisms of exploitation, which Blacks suffer under and to begin this anchoring of Du Bois in history, I've got a number of charts, which I forced upon people when I get a captive audience like you all. John Bracey: So chart number one, for those of you who take notes, it's going to be a tentative diagram of Ventana Colonialism, which I will sketch out, which anchor Black America inside the context of white America and I'll stick Du Bois in the middle in a little bracket so we can try and place him and keep this in mind because I'm going to erase it and put up another chart a little bit later on. First of all, if you view white America... Can everybody see? ... View white America as a pyramid or triangle, or what have you. And this is the larger white society. In the United States you have at the top, a small kind of... I guess you would call them, what a ruling class, a bourgeoisie elite, military industrial complex, or what have you, who make all the major decisions. These tend to be corporate people in American society. The major power in America today is corporate power. Politicians have some power, but only in relationship to serving corporate interests. John Bracey: You have a smaller group or a larger group, less amount of power of service kind of personnel or media management, technocrats, bureaucrats, these kind of people, who have more power than ordinary blue-collar working class people and who, in Classic Marxian terms would be called a petite bourgeoisie, but they're not really that anymore, but I'm going to use the term because nobody seems to know a better one, but they're not really that. So put it in parentheses or something. I always spell bourgeoisie wrong, well, if it's wrong, look it up in a dictionary. John Bracey: And then you had the white proletariat. Wait a minute, there's too many stratum. One, two, three. All right. Well, beneath the second stratum, is the white proletariat, you would call it. These are people who work, do not own any means of production and who work for a living. This is the bulk of white Americans in this country and includes scholars and people like that also, who do not indeed own anything, but who have to show up to punch a time clock, almost to get a check. Now, inside of this framework, also at the very bottom level of white society, you have a very small stratum of unemployed. It's a little bit higher now than it has been in the past 20 years or so, but that's really not a major factor in white society. John Bracey: You have, what could be called in classical Marxian terms, a lumpenproletariat and the unemployed. I mean, people who don't want to work or just wander around and freak out in different ways, enjoy life and don't do much of anything, but they're not that many of them and the bulk of the white population is indeed a proletariat. Well, inside of this framework, you have a Black America situated and what you have is, located inside of this white diagram is a diagram that coincides with the Black reality. This is indeed the Black colony, right? Now, you notice of course, there are no Blacks in the ruling class, unless there's anybody that thinks they are, I'd like to get some names because most recent phenomenon in history, that there are indeed Blacks in the ruling class. John Bracey: And they are very few and no Blacks at all in terms of major corporate ownership, Blacks do not own a single factory producing any kind of basic industrial commodities, anything in this country. There are very few Blacks, and this is the upper levels of Black society, very few Blacks among what could be called the petite bourgeoisie, which is secondary industry and management, the middle management and technocratic kinds of skills, upper level government, civil service, and so forth. In Black terms, you'll have... Slide this over a little bit, so I can make this a little bit more clear... Black terms you have a very small Black upper-class which consists of the few Black capitalists who exist... John Bracey: Maybe I'm going to put these out here so you can see it. ... A few Black capitalists. You have Black professionals, the ones that are really at the top, you have a small number of Black criminals who really have quite a bit of money, but who aren't generally put into the class structure and who are upper-class only in terms of money. They're not upper-class at all in terms of status. These are the people who run the numbers, rackets, and who run prostitution and doping, this kind of stuff. John Bracey: And that's the small Black upper-class, the bulk of the Black middle class... I'll run this slide this way... It's made up of government workers of all sorts. That includes school teachers, social workers, postal workers, clerks, and the bulk of the... Just any kind of professional acquires that professional activities that Blacks are engaged in. And this is the bulk of the Black middle class. I mean, it's a standard thing in the Black community that if the husband works at the post office and the wife teaches, then you're in the Black middle class, which is a very tenuous basis in middle class society. But anyway, this is the Black middle class. It also includes the upper levels of Black trade union members. John Bracey: For example, a Black person who works for United States Steel that makes $5 an hour is a member of the Black middle class. Although in white society, he would be considered working class, a proletariat person. This person in the Black community has much more status and much more economic security than a white person a comparable status. When you can compare, say a white trade union official with Archie Bunker, say and see the difference in lifestyle, a Black person making 7, $8,000 a year has a house, Cadillac boat, four, five, six suits, $40 shoes, and he does not at all consider himself to be some kind of poor slob who drinks beer all the time, he drinks Scotch every day, right? So the status thing is entirely different. John Bracey: The bulk of the Black population is like the bulk of the white population, is a working class population of blue-collar workers, a classic kind of Black proletariat. They are distinct from the white workers in that they occupied lower status in the industries than the whites do and they have different, lower stratum of jobs, harder-working, well-paying jobs. Also in Black society, you have a residual force of real Black peasants. You have agricultural workers, migrant laborers, and so forth, and you have a lower stratum corresponding pretty much that in white society, we're underemployed and unemployed and unemployed and not looking for employment, class of Blacks who are now rising in large numbers in the cities and who are indeed a kind of lumpenproletariat in one sense, but who, in another sense, have never really been brought into capitalism in any kind of meaningful way. John Bracey: Now where is Du Bois in all of this? Du Bois, I would fit in probably with the Black middle class as a professional. He's an intellectual, he's a teacher. He at one attempt, tried to go into capitalist development in terms of a small housing project, which didn't work out too well, which might have gotten him into the upper-classes if it had paid off, but never did make it and Du Bois died pretty much broke and he never had any big savings. He never had any yacht or the other kinds of accoutrements of upper-class behavior. Although, he did indeed effective a distinctly middle class lifestyle in terms of personal stuff. John Bracey: So you've got him anchored in this sense, in terms of a static and this is a very static picture. This is not moving over time at all. This is a very static picture. You have Du Bois anchored safe, placed in relationship to white American society and Black American society as one type of person. He's not a unique individual, there are a lot of people in this class with Du Bois. He's not at all a phenomenon or a Colossus or somebody that strides over everything. He's anchored in social and the social kind of economic reality. John Bracey: A second way of looking at Du Bois... Are there any questions about this, if you want to stop and ask, before I go on? I'll clear up the charts because I'm going to erase it. Any questions about the chart? If you don't understand it, don't worry about it because a lot of times I don't understand it either. I think it looks nice. I think it looks nice and you know... John Bracey: A second kind of way of looking at Du Bois is to take him as an individual in history and move him out as a person in history and link him up with all of the kinds of social and economic and political forces that he had to live with and deal with as he lives. And we start here with Du Bois as an individual and this is Du Bois, the person, as one individual, living in history from the period 1868 to 1963. If you want to ask questions about Du Bois, to begin to figure out who he is and what he is you have to figure out where was he born? What kind of family was he born into? What kind of values did they have? What kind of worldview did they have? What kind of ideas did he grow up with? What kind of socialization took place to give him the kind of outlook that he had? And you immediately move beyond Du Bois into a larger circle of Black and white life, but mainly confining ourselves to Black life. John Bracey: Moving from the individual level to this contact with the larger Black community and you have to look at the two types of Black communities that Du Bois initially came into contact with to make any kind of sense out of him. First of all, Du Bois was born, as you all know, into a New England patrician kind of Yankee, a democratic community, which had no legacies of slavery, no kinds of inferiority complex. There're no kinds of major psychological problems in terms of basically how they function in their day-to-day lives. There were no [inaudible] in Du Bois' early life and there were no [inaudible] either, but there wasn't any need for either one of these, people function pretty much in this kind of way. So Du Bois in one sense, is different, if you look at this first environment, his New England environment and his Yankee kind of mentality, Du Bois is in a sense, different from the majority of Black people in the country, automatically. See, this is not a typical Black life, not a typical Black environment. John Bracey: And you have to look at the second kind of impact on Du Bois, the second Black world to Du Bois does move until, leaving aside the context and his training and so forth and white Institutions, Du Bois moves into the South and moves out of an orientation of Northern middle class, 19th century, Black Yankee, Black life. He moves down into the South and he moves straight flush into a system of what Bobby Hill would call, Plantation Blackness and the shock on Du Bois is something fantastic. It means one thing, it's quite clear if you look at any of Du Bois writings, any of Du Bois' work is the fantastic impact that Black people had on him when he went South for the first time. I mean, it just freaked him out completely. When he talks about the first meal he had at Fisk, he had never seen a large number of Black women before. John Bracey: And he sat down at the meal, he almost couldn't eat, just staring at all the beautiful Black women around him. He had been up there in New England with one or two, like he said, the women weren't that much and there were a couple of people around, but he didn't pay any attention to them. And he goes into Fisk and he just walks around, pretty much starving to death, just staring at all the... Well, it made a lasting impact on Du Bois. Now, what are the characteristics of this Black world? What are the characteristics of this world and how do they conflict with the values and outlook that Du Bois had that he brought with him to this world? John Bracey: First of all, the South and this system of Plantation Blackness was itself going through some fantastic changes as a result of the civil war and the breakdown and the Reconstruction period and what Du Bois was walking into was not a flourishing plantation society or a stable Black society, he was walking into a Black society that was indeed deteriorating quite rapidly. And Du Bois could see this all around him. And I'll digress on that in a minute to explain what I am talking about. John Bracey: Under slavery, you had a development of... And the whole kind of plantation system... You had a development of a Black social structure, a Black society, which had artisans and workers and a Black clergy developing. All of this is under slavery now. And coming out of the civil war, moving into the period of Reconstruction, you have a fairly strong Black community, they don't have much real power, but in terms of intel and development and internal cohesion, the Black society is really very strong. It's much stronger than any kind of immigrant groups that came over. A very cohesive society. There's tremendous evidence that the Black family was much stronger than anybody ever even imagined, that it was much stronger in terms of stability than white immigrant families, Germans, Jewish, Irish, anybody else. John Bracey: And that the breakdown in Black life was not at all at the level of personal relationships, it was in a larger sphere. Now what's happening, by the time Du Bois moves into the South in the 1880s, it's a massive... Well, two things are happening. First of all, in the political realm, you've got account of revolution being carried on by the whites in the South who literally gorilla Black side of Reconstruction. People talk about the Redeemers and Blacks got conned out of power and this kind of thing; what happened in the South was that Blacks were physically and militarily driven out of government. A military revolution was taking place and this was one kind of deterioration, the lynching of various people, the lynching of artisans, the lynching of Black political figures, Reconstruction, local leaders in a very large scale and the wiping out pretty much of a Black artisan class. A wiping out of Black mechanics, a wiping out a Black shoe makers, blacksmiths, iron workers, and all kinds of skilled Blacks and the attempt to force Blacks back onto the plantation as peasants. John Bracey: And Du Bois walks into this kind of environment and what he's trying to do is to come down and teach New England, Yankee values to people who've had those values in a certain sense in terms of skills and who are being defeated constantly, physically on one level, while he's trying to incorporate these high values on another level. And it causes a tremendous amount of tension in Du Bois' own works and his own writing and it causes him to seriously begin to dedicate himself to trying to study Black life, to understand what indeed is going on around him. John Bracey: So you have this taking place at this level and to... Let me find, I keep losing track of my charts... And the largest side, you've got this taking place. You've also got Du Bois, maintaining his context intellectually, at least in terms of his impact with the New England, Northern train kind of Black, who really don't have too much knowledge or concern about this plantation world. And Du Bois, throughout his life maintains this duality. He functions in two environments. He lives in the South, but he functions like in Northern New England kind of intellectual. And he's constantly discovering facts about plantation life and rural Black peasant life that he didn't know about automatically. John Bracey: If you look at all of Du Bois' cultural nationalism, it's a discovery nationalism. Du Bois went down and wrote a thing about spirituals, wrote a beautiful essay on spirituals, which is not bad, right? But how many Black people really But how many Black people really think enough about their music to write about it? I mean, it's automatic. How many of you would sit down and write an essay about The Miracles? I mean, it's automatic. It's part of your lifestyle. You sing about it. You sing the song. You sing James Brown songs, you don't write about them. John Bracey: You don't say, "James Brown sang a very hip song, I think I'll write an essay all to James Brown." It's part of your whole life, your whole well-being. And this is how he came into serious conflict with Booker T. Booker T. sang spirituals, went to churches automatically. He didn't take time to write about soul songs. He knew it. It was part of his life. John Bracey: Du Bois was coming in from the outside, looking at Black life, with this outsider point of view and trying to understand what was going on, trying to be scientific and cold about it. And throughout his life, he always had this conflict between a cultural, internal colony kind of Black community with its own dynamic and its own cohesion, and Du Bois not being a part of that community. Being an outsider with a different set of values, being this elite member of this elite. John Bracey: Du Bois also, in terms of his larger contact, was a member of what you could call the burgeoning colonial new [inaudible] class or colonial elite that was being trained in educational systems to the country during this period. John Bracey: If you know anything about colonialism, the first thing that the colonial overlords do when they take any country over is to set up a school system, to train some people to run the natives for the master. And this is the whole purpose of setting up schools. It's to train workers and to train people to run the colony in case the masters don't have enough people to do it by themselves. John Bracey: And the kind of school set up in the South... And white people admitted this openly. If you read the Phelps Stokes stuff, and you read the analysis between colonial educational systems in Hampton and Tuskegee and so forth, they're quite clear about this. They're trying to train people who will run the colony for them. John Bracey: And Du Bois happened to be one of the outstanding trained Black colonial leaders of the period. You have to look at him as a member of a colonial elite who was outstanding only in the fact that he completely mastered all of the values and all of the skills and dominant ideology of the ruling classes of that period. This is why Du Bois' people think he's a genius. He was a genius because he knew as much about white people as they did about themselves. John Bracey: And Du Bois talked about how he wished he was in France because in France they recognized the civilized natives. The French colonies were always single. They were always blazed in. They allowed educated French Africans to come sit in the French parliament. John Bracey: And Du Bois said, "Here I am stuck in America, educated, and the people won't let me do anything. Oh, to be a colonial under the French system, that really would be great. Boy, then I could really be a colonial and enjoy it." John Bracey: And Booker T. was much more aware of what he was and didn't really worry about it that much. He didn't agonize over the fact that his job was to run the colony for the masters. He had his own hidden agenda. Du Bois didn't. That's not what he thought. Let's be honest about it. John Bracey: I mean, he didn't agonize about them. He drank himself to death pretty much, but not because of that. And he had his own program, he knew that he wasn't going to free any kind of colony in any five year period and by making a lot of noise about it, so he began to slowly organize a... In a very kind of way, the people who would eventually turn over all of the colonial structure. And this is true. This happened all over Africa. John Bracey: The people that came out of those backwards little schools are the people who eventually led all the liberation movements in Africa. The people that came out of agri schools, Achimota College and all these little backwards places, Nkrumah came out of some little Catholic seminary place. Negari went to a Catholic seminary mission schools, designed to train good natives. Every last one of them came out of place designed to make them good natives. John Bracey: And they all came out, intending to play silver and Booker T. was well aware that he was training people who couldn't fit into all those little bowls he had set up. But he wasn't about to tell the white people that. That this thing is not going to work out the way you think it is. John Bracey: But Du Bois of course, having this kind of outside look on it and not really having to deal with the kind of pressures that Booker T. was under, could always talk about that and was always blowing the thing. He was always talking about, we really want to be free and stuff. And Booker T. was saying, "Nah, man, don't, not yet. Don't tell them yet. Be quiet." John Bracey: Emmanuel Chatue was completely out of the question. You know, all he did was holler about how oppressed he was. Now he's up in Boston hollering about his oppression and poor peasants down here, trying to figure out how they can make a $100 a year and live on it. And he's up there worried about he's oppressed because he can't ride in the front of a carriage or something. And it's two different kinds of world views to have to reconcile. John Bracey: And this accounts, in fact, this large kind of context, and this is what you could call ... This is an internal colony in which Du Bois indeed had to live. And the largest structure of course, is the white society around Du Bois. This is white American society moving over here, it's the capitalist society and the dominant institutions are increasingly corporate institutions is advising political infrastructure. John Bracey: The state is expanding into life now. There's all kinds of government subsidies of education, culture, and so forth and so on and Du Bois is indeed part of this. You know, he sees this and understands and interacts with it. So he's not a very provincial person at all. He's really mastered the best of both kinds of worlds. You know, he sees both things very, very clearly. John Bracey: And at least to what he has called, what people have called this kind of dual consciousness where he sees himself as an American, which is a very strange kind of term. He says he's an American and a Negro and how can he be an American and be a Negro American without hating himself or having to suffer for it? Which is a very kind of strange in one way, compromise. John Bracey: See if you look at a genuine kind of committed nationalist, like say Bishop Turner. Bishop Turner never considered himself an American. And after they threw him out of the legislature in Georgia in 1868, he about had it. He was not an American. He was living in America as a subject of America, but he was not in American. John Bracey: And he cussed the white people and everything they believed in for days. He didn't believe in white gods or anything else. And he was a... He had no kind of conflict in his mind about being a Negro and being an American. He wasn't an American. But Du Bois got both of these, he considers himself an American, first of all. And he says "But I'm a Negro," and he's very conscious about making these kinds of distinctions in his own way. John Bracey: And I will contend that this kind of dual consciousness is not a consciousness of Black people as a whole. This is a consciousness that pertains only to a particular elite among Blacks who have the option to decide what they want to be or which side they want to swing with. John Bracey: And the one key to understanding Du Bois is Du Bois' whole life was in swinging back and forth between these two options. Functioning as an American, as an individual citizen and functioning as a member of an oppressed kind of colony, which you couldn't get away from. John Bracey: And if you want to understand what the lack of this kind of consciousness now, you can look among say younger Blacks who, if you ask them, were they Americans, would laugh at you. Ain't no conflict in their minds. Like kids in Chicago, very seldom, they don't salute the flag anyway. I know in Rochester they don't. I mean, they laugh at you when the Star Spangled Banner comes on, they sit down. I mean, they don't even think about it. All the national symbols have no meaning whatsoever for them. John Bracey: They don't consider themselves American and a Black. They say they are Black Americans with the a, small a for American. And this kind of consciousness has always been a lower class consciousness. Most brothers on the corner never agonized about their citizenship. You ask them what they about, they're trying to make it from day to day, not to define themselves as some kind of national group or nationality, especially an American, an American nationality. John Bracey: But Du Bois had these kind of options because Du Bois knew about both worlds and he lived to a large extent in both worlds and he had choices he could make. One whole side of his whole life was to make the choice on the side of the American side, the European side. He went into the NAACP. John Bracey: Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells didn't. They said, "Look, you can't work with white people." Du Bois said, "Well, white people are part of the world too. I can work with white people." There's a compromise in their eyes. Wasn't just straight nationalist position. John Bracey: He had the same kind of conflict with Garvey. Garvey said Black people should do this by themselves. Du Bois says, "Well, why is all this noise? You got people wearing funny looking outfits and making loud noises, being very colored." And he didn't say it that way, but that's what he meant. And Garvey said, "Well, that's what, that's what we are." John Bracey: And he attacked Du Bois for being white. He said, "You just got halfway. Walking around with spats and a cane and all, sipping tea, talking about who's colored, who's not colored." I mean, Du Bois had this kind of option. He wanted to be Black, but not, not that Black. John Bracey: I mean, can you imagine... You read The Crisis and they talk about Blacks should act a certain way because they should be more civilized. And Du Bois is a great one for getting Blacks to be civilized. And Garvey was a great one for saying there's a benefit in not being civilized because civilization ain't exactly where it's at, you know. Civilization in white American terms. John Bracey: And so Garvey said dig it. If you dig a lot of loud colors, red, Black, and green and flags and uniform, wear them. And he had massive just glorious parades. Everybody had a title. He had an army. Nobody was a private, everybody was a Colonel or a general. John Bracey: He had more followers than anybody ever had in this country because he knew exactly where Black people were coming from. They wasn't worried about being Americans. He was enjoying being Black, trying to work that out. And Du Bois just looked at it with kind of astonishment. He says, "Well, the man is a... Maybe he's a charlatan, but what are his methods? Why they got to be so loud all the time? Why can't they write a nice letter to the editor of a newspaper or something. Maybe send a petition to the UN or something like that." I mean, he couldn't deal with that. John Bracey: And in the later periods of his life, even when he talked about being Black, during the depression period, when he talked about the economic cooperation. These are very elite kind of middle-class schemes. It wasn't really Black or in a scheme, it was separate from the kind of jobs movement where large numbers of Blacks were forcing their way in the industry in various cities against the efforts of the communist party and so forth. And outside of the efforts of the communist party. John Bracey: And he never paid any attention to that. Never paid any attention to that. His whole relationship with Black church life. Major institution in the Black community was a Black church. And Du Bois just writes about it like they're some kind of savages. You ever read that passage where he sits up at a revival meeting and the lady next to him jumps up and hollers and Du Bois says he's never seen such savagery and passion and so forth. I mean, what kind of... John Bracey: That's a European speaking, right? It's a European viewpoint on Black religion. And I can't imagine what he'd do if he came around and... Aretha Franklin probably would have driven him up the wall because of her uncivilized behavior. And so he's got this, he's got these two sides and one part of his whole career is siding with European middle class, white, New England kind of values, Victorian values, against that kind of Black reality, a staunch Black reality that Du Bois knew was there but couldn't really identify with or deal with. John Bracey: Now, it may or may not have been his fault. You know, I'm not saying it's something he should be blamed for, but it's very much a part of his personality and part of his whole ideology, this whole kind of lifestyle kind of thing. John Bracey: The second part, and the part I really am interested in, and I'll talk a little bit more about is Du Bois had to deal with the fact that Blacks were indeed a kind of national minority and a kind of colony. And he had to spend some time trying to sort out what that meant. So there is a Black nationalist side to Du Bois. There is Du Bois, the nationalist, and it's all woven in and out and it's not consistent or anything, but it's always there. John Bracey: First of all, you've got in the cultural kind of side. You've got a beautiful essay, The Conservation of a Racist. You've all read The Conservation of a Racist, which is the mirror image of European white racist thought of the period. Europeans said that whites were the greatest people in the world and that they were destined to lead all of mankind and the mankind was obligated to follow because of their great contributions. John Bracey: Well, Du Bois just turned the whole thing around and talked about the genius of the Black race. But here you are, sitting in America now. He claiming to be a scientist trained scholar, talking about the Negro race, the Black race. Now what does he mean by a Black race? Half the Black race had white blood. He's talking about the spiritual strivings of people with Black blood. You know, at the same time, he's claiming to be a scientist. John Bracey: But again, this is not Du Bois, the scientist speaking. This is Du Bois, the cultural nationalist. Du Bois appealing for the same kind of national feelings that Europeans were using at the same period, pushing his side. And if Europeans said white is best, and Du Bois would push the whole idea so that indeed Black people and especially Black people in the United States were indeed a race. John Bracey: You know, if the English are a race, then Black Americans are a race. And he's the one that... I mean, none of that makes any sense at all in any other kinds of terms. And Black Americans not only are part of a race, but they are in the vanguard of all the Black people, anywhere in the world. Du Bois also had this American chauvinism. John Bracey: Most Black Americans have this kind of belief that of all Black people in the world, they're the ones who are the smartest and the ones most qualified to tell all other Black people around the world what to do. Just like white Americans feel that their job is to tell all the white people around the world what to do. John Bracey: So while the white Americans were undertaking the white man's burden, Du Bois was trying to urge Black Americans to undertake the Black man's burden, the same time. It's a mirror image of European Imperial to start doing this during this period. And it's all based on this kind of very mystical, cultural nationalism. They're a bunch of long quotes I could read but I really don't think you want to hear it, man. If you've read all of Julius Lester, they all scattered throughout there. How's that for scholarly documentation? I mean, they're all in there, various pages. John Bracey: I'll read a little part out of The Conservation of a Racist so you'll know I got one quote right. He says, "We believe that the Negro"... This is the creed now. "We believe that the Negro people as a race have a contribution to make to civilization of humanity, which no other race can make as a race." I mean, what, what in the world does that mean? John Bracey: "And we believe it is the duty of Americans of Negro descent," Americans now, not Negroes who happened to be living in America, but Americans of Negro descent. "As a body, to maintain their race identity until this mission of the Negro people is accomplished. And the ideal of human brotherhood has become a practical possibility." John Bracey: So he's saying if you're Black, I guess you might as well stay Black until you can make a contribution and you fade on away, right? This seems to me to correspond pretty much with Marxist's, Withering Away of the State under communism. Blacks will set up a dictatorship of Black contributions and wither away when everybody's equal. I don't know what the world looked like then. I mean, it's all mysticism, but it's all cultural nationalism. In fact this kind of stuff is still around very much today. People still talk this kinds of stuff. John Bracey: Now also Du Bois, being a good nationalist at one point had to deal with the economics of the colony, economics of a colonial situation. And Du Bois was never consistent on this point. Du Bois never made up his mind what an economic solution to the Black problem in this country would be, and it's not his fault because nobody else has ever come up with a solution either. So it's something you can't really knock him for. John Bracey: At one point early in his career, quite early, 1890's, Du Bois talks about Blacks should be capitalists and develop a capitalist class. Quite clearly, he says that in the Atlanta University reports. "Negroes ought to enter in the business life. We need merchants, trained to go about setting up industry and technology. Negroes should go into business and should patronize their own businesses." John Bracey: He was proud of a conference where he wants to have 1900 businessmen, Black businessmen show up. He wants to form a businessman's league, a Negro businessman's league to encourage Black capitalist development. Five years later, he joined the socialist party, which is social democratic at this point. Which didn't have much of any kind of economic program and had nothing at all for Blacks. John Bracey: So at the same time that he's pushing capitalism, he's saying that Blacks should perhaps be set up some kind of socially democratic, or democratic socialist kind of program. Du Bois also at the same time, always kept to look out on for Black cooperatives. He had his whole kind of thing. I don't know where he got this from, but always in the back of his mind, every time somebody set up a little co-op somewhere, Du Bois would run an article on it in The Crisis and say how great it was as a solution to the racist problems. John Bracey: And over a period of like 10 years from about 1917... Well, even to the 20s, maybe 1917 to about 1934 or 1935, he had maybe a series of seven or eight discussions of kind of isolated Black cooperative movements, which he thought were really great. John Bracey: And he kept saying, everybody should do that. I mean, everybody could kind of run out to these little cooperatives and they'd all would feed each other and produce stuff and sell it back and forth. And somehow this would work inside the confines of American capitalism to solve the Black economic development problem. John Bracey: At other points, he talked about never really a clash struggle, but the kind of reorganization of American society where Black workers would indeed have some kind of control over some kind of economic means to production. And I guess the society as a whole would kind of shift over into communism, I guess you could say. John Bracey: And Du Bois always kept all these kind of things all flowing at the same time and he never really figured out or never had a definite economic program that was consistently nationalist in the sense that it was a program that could deal with Black capitalist development as a transitional form to a Black socialism or Black communalism. John Bracey: And simultaneously, and we mentioned this, somebody talked about it this morning, Du Bois had this great fascination about a pre-colonial African communalism as being some kind of ideal system. He never said go back to it. But he always looked upon it as a kind of ideal circumstance, which it solved the problems of Black people in that kind of context. John Bracey: You know, of course that in Du Bois' economic program Booker T. Washington immediately stole his idea for the National Negro Business League. Booker T. wasn't one on ideas, but he was a very great one for putting stuff into effect. And so he had people at the Atlanta University conference and Du Bois said, "We need a national business league." And Booker T. said, "Well, it's done." And the next year he set up the National Negro Business League, which is still in existence. Which still indeed set up and attempt to carry out Du Bois' program. John Bracey: So in a sense, you can kind of attack Du Bois for feeding Washington bad ideas maybe, or maybe attack Washington for stealing Du Bois' radical ideas. Or maybe- Speaker 3: Blame both of them. John Bracey: Maybe attack neither one them. Maybe Booker T. was really Du Bois and D Bois... You know? Anyway, be that as it may. That's so much of economics. And I'll stay on Booker T. a second. Booker T's economic program was much more consistent. Booker T. had no concern whatsoever about socialism. He knew that if it ever came, it wasn't going to come in his lifetime and he never saw any models of it anywhere. The Russian revolution wasn't until after he had died. John Bracey: He also knew the white people, the lower class white people were not about to give Black people anything ever. And if anybody was hated by Booker T., It was lower class white people. You have to read every word Booker T. says about the labor movement as something hideous. John Bracey: He would go to the Carnegie, he would go to Rockefeller, he'd go to the Hanson Ball and the Long Island Railroad, but he would not ask a working class white person for a nickel or even come anywhere near him. He knew exactly where they stood in the class structure in relationship to Black workers. And his position on Black workers was that if you can get a job and bust a strike, then get the job and bust the strike because white folks didn't want you in there in the first place. And the strike is not a strike to get you a job. John Bracey: And he was very consistent. Du Bois could never take that position. Du Bois kept saying, "Well, white workers have problems too." And Booker T. said, "Well, that's their problem. You know, it's not my problem." Booker T. was much more consistent nationalist than Du Bois was. Booker T. had one concern and that was Black people, lower class Black people. That was his whole kind of guiding thing, what could he get for his presence and his workers? And this is how he had a bigger following, he kept a bigger following than Du Bois. How to get his lower class thing together. John Bracey: In terms of politics, there's absolutely no... Du Bois has absolutely no political program that can be called a nationalist in any sense of the word. There is absolutely none. Du Bois' political behavior is that of the typical kind of radical intellectual who lives in American society in the 20th century, which is to say, if it can be called pragmatism, but more likely, it's a kind of opportunism. John Bracey: And what you do is you kind of pick the lesser two evils every four years kind of thing. And this is all Du Bois ever did. You know, at one point he was a socialist, but they didn't have a program. So he said, "Vote for Woodrow Wilson." And then Wilson said, "Well, we ain't going to give you nothing." We'll vote him out again. And then he had Coolidge and Harding and all them kind of people, and he couldn't do anything with them. John Bracey: And it got so bad at one point, he even ran for office himself. He ran for Senate on the progressive ticket. I mean, it got so bad, nobody to run at all, might as well do it yourself, right? And he's 80 years old. And he never had a political strategy for Blacks in politics other than, don't get stuck in one party. Which doesn't tell you much, right? John Bracey: And be flexible, which doesn't tell you much. And vote for the best man, which in American society, that's completely... There's no best man, they never run. The best people don't even show up at the conventions. And so as a political nationalist, Du Bois has no strategy at all. John Bracey: Booker T. once again is much better on politics in that, Booker T's thing is you back who was in power. At least that's reasonable. Whoever was in power can deal with it, you back them. That kind of... John Bracey: And Garvey's position was you stay out of politics in a short level kind of sense. The only time Garvey ever got in politics was to get himself out of jail. And it was with Coolidge. Coolidge came to Garvey and said, "If you endorse me for president, we'll get you out of jail." He said, "Okay. I endorse you." But he knew good and well all the people in the UNA was not about to vote for no Coolidge or nobody. Or was it Hoover? Well, they all kind of merged into a big blur. John Bracey: You know, other than that, he didn't care. He didn't care about who was elected to any kind of office in American society. His vision was to liberate Africa and to free Black people in a massive kind of way, and not to be nitpicking around with who's the president and who's the alderman and all this kind of stuff. John Bracey: But Du Bois always tried to deal on that level and he kept getting burned time and time again. He kept backing the lesser of two evils and it kept getting worse and worse and now we are really in bad shape. And he never came up with a political program. Pan-Africanism was kind of in one sense, Du Bois' attempt to deal with Blacks on a worldwide kind of level in a meaningful way, but even that is kind of a wishy-washy program. If you ever looked at those kinds of resolutions they pass, the average resolution pass at a Du Bois pan- John Bracey: The average resolution passed at a Du Bois Pan-African Congress was something that, generally speaking, the imperialists could get along with. Du Bois is saying, for example, at one point, "Why don't you allow the civilized Africans to vote?" Who is a civilized African? Africans that could read and write English, speak French, wore shoes. That's what he was for. That's just his Pan-Africanism. It's the Pan-Africanism of a very... Let's see if I got those resolutions here. Because they're really fascinating for the kind of just complete snobbery that Du Bois manifested in terms of his outlook. Well yeah, 1-2-72. One of them's really great. Where he says, "The recognition of civilized men as civilized, despite their race or color. Local self government for backward groups, deliberately rising as experienced and not as showing to be able to self govern themselves." John Bracey: That's what the Queen of England believed. That's what the King of Belgium believed, that he was civilizing the Congo and in a hundred years, it'd all be civilized and he could free them. Right? And as Du Bois said, "Well, that's fine." Freedom to pursue their own customs. They believed that in South Africa. They set up Bantustans so they could pursue their own native customs. This is hardly any kind of radical program for African liberation. The establishment under the League of Nations of an international institution for the study of Negro problems ... That's intellectuals' concern. Set up something so I can study it. Under the League of Nations ... All the leading imperialist countries in the world were under the League of Nations. He wants them to let him study Negro problems? John Bracey: No, this is no radical Pan-African program. The establishment of an international section of the Labor Bureau of the League of Nations charged with the protection of native labor. Protection ... The imperialists are going to protect native labor. This is Du Bois' program, Pan-Africanism. It's very middle-class, elite kind of stuff and once again, Booker T. had to jump on him. Booker T. had direct contact with the King of the Belgians, and had direct contact with the Germans, and so forth, to set up cotton growing and peanut growing plantations in Togoland and in the Congo and so forth. Booker T. was even smart enough to suggest that they put the Congo under his tutelage. He didn't say under the League of Nations tutelage or under some white people. He said, "No, no. I can run Tuskegee, which means I can run the niggers over here." Why don't you let me run all of them?" John Bracey: He didn't say oversee it. He said, "Put the Congo under me and I'll make it into the greatest plantation in the world." Even the King Leopold, dumb as he was, knew good and well that he knew better than to give the Congo to Booker T. Washington. But Du Bois was still coming with these very bland resolutions that the Queen of England is concerned and we want a statement from the King of France that he's concerned, and so-and-so is concerned, and we all concerned, and all this kind of stuff. John Bracey: Once again, you got to contrast with Garvey. Garvey's whole position on Africa was, first of all, you sneak some people over there and you organize a movement. You take over one country and you got a base. Then you move to another country, you got another base. In 10, 15 years you got enough bases, you can gorilla the white folks out of there. Rare concrete, realistic program in terms of changing political power from one side to another. It failed, of course. But Garvey established organizations in Africa that are still in existence today. The African Orthodox Church is a major, major institution and a major kind of separatist church movement in most African countries. John Bracey: There's been evidence of this guy, Robert Hill, doing this great work on Garvey. Drake too. Drake has got evidence that the Mau Mau movement was centered in the African Orthodox Church in Kenya, and that the African Orthodox Church in South Africa around Nyasaland and in Zimbabwe and so forth, were very instrumental in labor disputes and as an organizing kind of of headquarters for radical nationalist activity. There are ways that there's Pan-Africanism in this Pan-Africanism. Du Bois' Pan-Africanism was tempered by the fact that once again he was not in it. He wasn't really an African. John Bracey: He didn't really understand the backwards peoples he was dealing with. He really believed that he knew things they didn't know, and that people like himself should indeed rule. This kind of conflict, this tempered his Pan-Africanism. Du Bois also took the ... I mean, I think it was a serious mistake in that he went to Liberia as a representative of the United States government. Garvey went over there and tried to sneak ... He organized the mayor of Monrovia as a potentate in the UNIA. Then he tried to sneak some people over there and steal some land and set up his own little base. This is how he tried to do it. Du Bois went over there on the Lusitania, representing the U.S. government as an ambassador. John Bracey: What kind of Pan-Africanism is that? You step off a plane in Africa, a boat in Africa the first time, and you're representing the U.S. government, in Liberia no doubt. I mean that's the worst ... I mean, where else ... If he had went to Kenya, maybe it had been different. But Harvey Firestone is just taking the place over. Who comes to speak in behalf of the native population? It's Du Bois, ambassador from the U.S. I mean, what kind of Pan-Africanism is that? It's just not grounded in nationalism. It's not a really solid kind of nationalist kind of belief. He really didn't have confidence in masses of Black people to do anything. He was really kind of just saying they're backwards. The whole kind of use of the term backward shows you that at some points, this European influence was too strong. John Bracey: Du Bois did indeed in 1930s, shift around to a position that Black should indeed separate themselves and tried to organize group political, social and economic strength. Kind of late in coming, because throughout their history in this country, Blacks had always been separated in terms of their political, economic and social activity. So for him to announce that as a program, it must've been startling news to the head of the AME church, the head of the Baptist church, and the head of the Odd Fellows and the Masons and all the other Black organizations who had been organized separately for the past hundred years, and who probably were very glad to have Du Bois finally recognize that indeed Black people could do something by themselves. John Bracey: Naturally of course, they didn't pay any attention to him. All they did was get him fired from the NAACP, who were intent upon integrating Black people into starvation and death during the depression, by fighting such amazing issues as how to get two Blacks into college when nobody had a job to eat, and these other kind of nonsense they were doing then. John Bracey: After the Second World War, Du Bois just completely collapsed in terms of his basic kind of nationalist ideology. He allied pretty much with communist party in terms of their outlook, which is a very anti-nationalist outlook during this period. He never talked too much about Black group development, internal Black group development, and even the kind of things he did ... with going to Ghana, which was talked about again this morning. It's not really that nationalist in that kind of sense. That got pointed out. John Bracey: There were a large number of Black American communists who did go to Ghana when Nkrumah took over. But Nkrumah's advisory staff was mainly a kind of integrated kind of staffing, and Nkrumah himself was never a great believer in the strength of the African masses. I mean, he himself had a kind of Du Bois orientation toward life, that he indeed [inaudible], was going to lead the benighted peoples of Ghana into this great new kind of Pan-Africanism. He and Du Bois agreed that Pan-Africanism should be led by themselves, kind of thing. John Bracey: The concrete evidence for that is that when Nkrumah got thrown out, the people who were wanting to fight for him didn't even have any guns to fight for him, because he didn't trust them enough to arm them. I mean, nobody fired a shot on his behalf, which is an appalling ... There wasn't even a brick thrown. For a guy who was going to lead the masses, he had a pretty shaky program. You had Du Bois with this same kind of new England, Yankee outlook dominating his nationalism, but not totally suppressing it because the reality of the world was indeed this strong kind of Blackness that was always pushing itself up into Du Bois' consciousness. John Bracey: Now, perhaps tonight I've talked about Du Bois in a very negative way. Perhaps I should say some great things about him, but not too many. First of all, Du Bois' genius was that he indeed witnessed far theoretically and ideologically as one could go and maintaining these two positions simultaneously, and that he was above these two positions. Du Bois had a kind of fantastic insight in looking at the numerous kinds of possibilities, that people, indeed Black people should go through, in terms of sorting out their kind of reality. Now, what ever kind of faulting of his own was, is that he'd never choose any one kind of alternative. He never chose any one of these kinds of realities to project. John Bracey: I think this counts for the fact that first of all, Du Bois had never had a large mass following of any sort. He never had a mass following of integrationists. He never had a mass following of separatists. He never had a mass following of communists. He never had a mass following of scholars or anybody. I mean, he was so many things to so many people that nobody could ever say what he was long enough to follow him. He had no mass following at all among anybody. Perhaps he shouldn't have. Perhaps he didn't need any mass following. John Bracey: Secondly, he has an extremely mixed legacy that is coming down to us today. Du Bois means so many things to so many different people that nobody really knows who or what or why he was really that important. He's very hard to deal with. For example, I'll give you a kind of concrete example to show some people who people can kind of deal with. If I asked you ... say if you mentioned two great leaders, say take King and Malcolm. King believed in a coherent set of principles, which he adhered to throughout his kind of active political life, and King had a relatively large following of Blacks who agreed with those principles. There was never any question about it. If you went out behind King, King was not going to shoot anybody, wasn't going to throw no rocks at the police. King believed in Christian love and so forth, so a lot of people that believed in that followed him. They knew where he was coming from. John Bracey: Malcolm believed that Black people should defend themselves, they should be separatists and so forth, was a nationalist and so forth. If you believed in that, you could follow him. Now there are large followers of King and large followers of Malcolm. Garvey had the same kind of followers. He had large followers of people who followed his program, believed what he believed in, and were kind of committed to him. Booker T. Washington's the same way. When Booker T. was alive, he had a massive amount of support from the Black community because he had a program which he laid out. Not always in the open, but he had a program, a visible program, which was consistent and met the needs of the people who he was trying to organize to get to follow him. John Bracey: Du Bois' influences, it's just unclear. People talk about, Du Bois was a great scholar, but who reads what Du Bois ever wrote? How many people really assign Black Reconstruction to their students? You all are teachers, right? How many of you assign Black Reconstruction when you teach courses on Reconstruction? You got one person. You use all them little short books, right? Kenneth Stampp, Robert Cruden, anything to show off those kids. First of all, students are not ... They ain't going to read 700 pages. On anybody, Du Bois, anybody else. But you've got that. People talk about what a great book that is, but nobody reads it. People say Philadelphia Negro, greatest sociological work ever done by a Black scholar. Whoever read it? Who reads it? Who reads that? People say, Du Bois ... great poet, beautiful essays. Whatever he saw as the Black folk, because it's short. But even students nowadays don't really like it. It's always the Black folk. They call it kind of old fashioned. John Bracey: What indeed is the legacy of Du Bois? What indeed is Du Bois' influence in Black history? Where are the scholars who consider themselves followers of Du Bois? What do they do? And how can you tell? What would you as a scholar do that would identify yourself as a follower of W.E. Du Bois? What would you write? How would you write it? What would you say? What method would you use that would identify you as a follower of Du Bois? See? It's not clear, not clear at all. See, not clear at all. I like to confuse people anyway, but now I've got you all thoroughly confused. I'll just end on that. The whole kind of point is that Du Bois was a nationalist, but he wasn't a nationalist. He was great in some kind of way, but nobody really has defined that. Why was he ... He wrote a lot of books, but so does Mickey Spillane. So, his production, great. People read his. I mean, why are you having a thing on Du Bois anyway? I mean, nobody really knows. You all showed up though, for some reason. I'll just leave it with that and take questions now. Thank you. Charles T. Davi...: The most provocative and stimulating presentation, and very systematic. It seems to me that we ought to start with Mr. Bracey on the system which he uses. I mean, I'm an amateur social anthropologist too. Let me put up another diagram. One of the difficulties with your diagram, John, is that is, I think, interesting in terms of power and economic strength, but it does very little to explain social behavior, individual behavior. In other words, you make no differentiation, for example, in the class which seems to be terribly important in this country, namely the middle class. You have lumped them into a type of general group. There is another system, and I didn't create this, which would put your upper class here, middle class here, and your lower class here. According to this system, that would be, and you know who- John Bracey: This is Warner, right? Charles T. Davi...: This is going to be Warner. John Bracey: Warner, okay. Charles T. Davi...: According to Warner, there is an upper upper group that does not have any power really, or has very little power. What they have is family, money and other things of this sort that count really in an older society. But a good deal of the authority comes from the lower upper group, in which there is the power and the accoutrements of greatness. Then you'll have divisions which occur in your middle groups, which take care of the professionals, which take care of higher paid workers and things of that kind. Now, the thing that Warner has, and which it seems to me that really your system doesn't show, is the thing which is called caste, and that there is among Blacks, and Warner and you agree that there is a kind of cohesive society among Blacks. But it's a society which parallels this other, extending perhaps from just the edge of the lower upper or upper middle, down. Charles T. Davi...: You have certain kinds of behavior which become exaggerated because of the existence of this caste barrier. Now what I'm asking you ... That explains some things about Du Bois, which I suspect your system does not. How do you take into account ... Almost any, for example, immigrant group coming into America can be explained by the system which you present. But the tremendous emotional tension, which involves the relationship of Blacks to whites in this country can be perhaps only explained by the existence of something which approximates a caste barrier, and that in the effort of people at times, people function in a parallel way in terms of the general values of American society, and then there are obviously times in which people seek to have these interests coalesce. What about that? What about the whole problem with castes, and the whole problem of middle class differentiation? John Bracey: Okay. Lesson number two. First of all, I would differ. You can't ... Warner's thing, first of all, is based on self perception. Warner puts people into these categories according to how they view themselves. Like, if I think I'm upper class, one, it would put me in the upper class because I say I think I'm upper class. It was completely unscientific, and it does not at all speak to the question of power relationships. Warner's definitions deal with status. Status and all that had nothing to do with political economic and social power. Black people are not oppressed as a result of white people having status hangups. They are oppressed by real political, economic and social mechanisms. The differences between Blacks and immigrant groups, and you have to deal with this historically, is the slavery experience. John Bracey: The bulk of the time Black people have been in this country, they have been slaves. The basic Black/white relationship set up in this country for the first 250 years was a result of a master/slave tension ... reciprocity ... You want to get back to Hegel. Everybody was talking Hegel this morning. We're getting back to Hegel. The master/slave relationship, the fact that on a plantation ... The bulk of Black people in this country were on a plantation with a master, and they were the slaves. Your day-to-day reality was to try and maintain your humanity in a system where you had a person denying your humanity every day, and your whole development of your culture, your economic and social behavior, development of your social structure and whatnot, were all developed in this kind of relationship and the kind of tension between the master and the slave. John Bracey: This is the difference between immigrant groups. Immigrant groups never had to deal with that. Nobody told the immigrant groups, "You all are not human beings." Nobody denied them their humanity at all. The basic difference and the tension comes because there is indeed an other to Blacks who is denying Blacks the right to be people. This other still exists today. The whole idea that Blacks and their culture to deprive and say, "You're not quite human." The whole idea that justice Blacks are somehow genetically inferior to whites. They're saying Blacks are not human. This does not apply to immigrant groups in any kind of level. Caste is one thing, but caste doesn't have any kind of dynamism to it. Caste is a static category. John Bracey: I think you have to view the development. I mean, I've got the rest of the chart, which I didn't have time to put up, which shows the development historically of a Black class structure in this country, beginning on the slavery and defined by this master/slave relationship on an individual plantation. The average slave lived on a plantation that had five slaves, which means there's a hell of a lot of personal interaction between the master and the slave. There's five of y'all out here. Now, one white person, one master, and five of y'all. Now, y'all got to deal with him. You got to deal with him. He's got a whip, hollering, "boy," and there's five of y'all. He's saying you're not human, when you're asserting your humanity against him every day. John Bracey: There's all kind of ways this works itself out. On the larger plantations you've got less of a problem in terms of that in some senses, because you've got your group where you set up your own sanctions. The master can say what he wants up there. In the slave quarters and that, you know you're human because you got your God and you got your people and you got your wives, you got your family and you got your culture to hold you together and redefined in a search for humanity. You don't get that. Immigrants don't have to deal with that kind of stuff. They still don't. There's no problem with that. John Bracey: But this kind of system, this is what Du Bois had to come to try and see. Because coming out of the state of experience, a lot of this was broken down because with the breakup of the plantation system and the wiping out of the Black upper-class and the Black social structure, I mean the artisans and mechanics and the natural leadership, Blacks were kind of thrashing around because they really didn't have the people they looked up to around anymore to deal with these kinds of problems for them. Du Bois kept talking about the talented tenth, the talented tenth. The Blacks said, "Well, we had our leadership and they being lynched every day. I mean, the talented tenth is not going to get it." John Bracey: Booker T. says you have to build up the artisan class again. Booker T. in a sense was correct in this. Booker T. said in 1895, "Look, they wiped out all the carpenters. They wiped out all of the shoemakers. They wiped out all the blacksmiths. We've got to start all over again and build them up again." People followed him because they understood that, because they had seen them wiped out. This is what Du Bois didn't understand. Du Bois didn't see that. He came and looked at it and said, "Well, there's no leadership here. Who's going to tell these people what to do?" The people would say, "Well, we had it. We came out of slavery with it. They're gone. They were killed. white people killed them. They're being lynched." Du Bois didn't understand that kind of feeling from these people. Booker T. said, "Well obviously you can't jump on white people because they'll kill you." People knew that. They saw that. You have to have a different style of leadership. John Bracey: Du Bois' whole style of leadership during this period was not one that would attract masses of Blacks. All the local leadership was very quiet. Guttman has done some studies. Guttman in Rochester's got students who studied all the Black people killed in Texas during Reconstruction. 90% of them were artisans. See, 90%. They studied the Klan violence in North Carolina and South Carolina. 90% of the Black people killed were local political leaders in Reconstruction ... not national senators and famous Black people, local leaders, ministers, the blacksmith, local carpenter, and they're being replaced by white immigrant groups coming in all the time, eroding this Black social structure, tearing it down completely. John Bracey: Booker T. said we got to kind of gather it all up together and put it back together again. Be real cool about it, because we're in serious trouble. Hollering and screaming about your rights ain't going to get it. But Du Bois came from outside of that. He came from outside of that. The power that Booker T. saw was the real power. He didn't worry about the people who had [inaudible]. He said, who's got the real ... Who's got the money? John Bracey: Carnegie had no culture. Carnegie, he had an eighth grade education, is some kind of buffoon. But he had power. He had political and economic power. Rockefeller was no great representative of Western civilization. He had power. He had money. Hanson Baldwin was not a follower of the arts, but he had power. This is what Booker T. related to. Du Bois wanted to relate to the cultured people, the literati and the followers of the art, I mean, this kind of people. I mean, it's nice, but they don't have any power. To deal with them as allies, it's always fatal. I mean, the Civil Rights movement shows that. John Bracey: I mean, all the Joan Baez and all the people can't get you nowhere. They got all kinds of status, and Jane Fonda and all this kind of business, but that don't ... Ford Foundation, George Bunting and the head of the Rockefeller Foundation are the people with the power. What they back is what's still around and you got to deal with. Not what Joan Baez and Marlon Brando showed up for, because they don't have no power. There's a difference between status and power. Charles T. Davi...: One more question. You were quite right to emphasize this thing here. Now, what Aptheker, and Saunders Redding [inaudible] is about Booker T. and both of them indicating that we owe more to Du Bois than we do Booker T. Is the-difficulty with Booker T. is that he accepted this connection, accepted in short what they call the fact of subserviency. And that this, obviously, is the [inaudible] in all of the talk about building up self-sufficiency, Booker T. never did indicate, publicly at least ... Now, we're not talking about the secret Booker T. now, that's another discussion. But publicly, the image which was presented to the masses of people who followed him, and you're quite right in indicating that he had a large personal following. But what was accepted was the fact of subserviency. Now, again and again, of course, both ... [inaudible] support me, I need support with this, young man. [Aptheker] and Ray insisted upon that point. What do you make of that? John Bracey: I think it's true. If you look at My Larger Education, Booker T. goes in there, and half the book is praising white people who he's trying to get money out of, and it's a very fundraising kind of book. The other half of the book, Booker T ... He was a very political character. He wrote books to make money, not because he wanted to enlighten the benighted masses. John Bracey: He has two chapters in there on the most remarkable people he's met and they're Black people. He talks about Moton? Moton is the guy that he brought down ... the big Black cat. He talks about, [crosstalk] right? He talks about Moton, right? This is the cat. He talks about a massive giant African looking man with a military outfit on, who's the most impressive man he ever met. And I said, man, he's talking to like the Black people. He ain't saying that Carnegie was the most impressive man he met or Theodore Roosevelt, a Black man in a military uniform, looking like an African, was the most impressive man he ever met. Now, Booker T. is speaking to some people when he's saying that, see, Moton was not a subservient figure. I mean, Booker T.'s picture of him was of a warrior king. Charles T. Davi...: Except what he ignored in Moton, now you're talking about ground I know now because I was born at Hampton. He was this magnificent figure of a man. But if you look at his function at Hampton, his role at Hampton, he was a kind of Dean of men and the power rested at that time in Hampton with the white people who were running institution. So, that is I think something not quite right in this. John Bracey: Yeah. The point is, what did Black people run? The things that Black people ran Du Bois himself didn't relate to, like the church, see? I mean the strong, all Black institutions supported Booker T Washington, Du Bois made no appeal to them. And the point is, you're in a situation where colonialism is not ending. Colonialism is just, you live in a period when you got the bill in Congress and they chop up all the Africans, nobody does a thing about it. John Bracey: Then some fight it, a samurai too, and these people resist, you got this magic thing, all this kind of resistance, the Boer War, Shaka Zulu, not Shaka, what's the last one though, whatever his name is, the guy that fought and got it wiped out and he made a movie about it and he lied all about it in the movie, the cat wiped out the British and the Zulu all this kind of ... No, it wasn't Shaka, no, no. It's after Shaka. Dingiswayo, it might've been. Anyway, you got all this kind of stuff. And these are the best warriors that Black people having the whole world and they're being defeated. See, they're being defeated. You got no independent Black nationalities except Haiti, which is kind of everybody's disaster area kind of thing. Which back people, indeed, we're proud of. You got Ethiopia, but the Black world is in a constant state of retreat. They're constantly being beat down and there's no independent power source they can look to, see? John Bracey: And Booker T. said, you got to deal with that. You can't fantasize, talk about, "We should stand up and assert our rights. And we should sell Wolf tickets to the white people that make a lot of noise" because then you're not going to get anywhere. John Bracey: There's no institutional mechanism for carrying out what Du Bois's program was, see? And in the census account, utopianism. [inaudible] who do you follow today? How many of y'all joined the Black Panthers today? How many Black people in this country's joining the Panthers? They had the most outspoken, loud mouth program, right? They didn't take nothing off, no white people, right? So they started shooting. Now the Panthers is running for office in California, right? Cause they got blown out of that position. And Booker T. knew better than to put Black people in that kind of position that they couldn't hold. A leadership that has followers has to have a program that can be realizable and abstract appeals to dignity and justice are not ... There's not valid people to support them. Charles T. Davi...: You said what my last question is. And there we go, this is not a dialogue. Is you said that ... What? That Du Bois hasn't had any influence on history? John Bracey: I said it's mixed. Mixed. Charles T. Davi...: All right, here you are mending your position as I go along. But it seems to me, that that's really a highly questionable because in this whole new business, and you're more familiar with it than I am, and the revising our notion of what the institution of slavery was like in the rewriting presumably of Reconstruction, so that we get it accurately, again. It seems to me that Du Bois was a full runner of this. And also it seems to me that the model of history that he presented is something that other historians have either copied or reproduced. It seems to be on their own terms. I think, for example, James's History of the Black [inaudible], which you know, is a history which is very much like Black Reconstruction in terms of the assumptions, which it operates on. I would suspect that he has had more influence as a historian, particularly upon new young historians like you, than any other historian, I would say, of Reconstruction. Charles T. Davi...: The Dunning School on which I would know, this is what I learned when I came up and [inaudible] and taught me all about eventful things in the race [inaudible]. I think finally thoroughly discredited, and playing a tremendous part in Mrs. Du Bois. And so I don't think we ought to underestimate the influence of this man, but- John Bracey: I don't think the influence is that clear. It's easy to say that, but every single person that kind of cites Du Bois cites him in a negative way. Like they say, well, this is a pretty good book, but it's full of bias and blah, blah, blah. Oh, it's sprawling, or it's vague, and it's ill defined in the category, is it backwards in this kind of stuff? I don't think you can really point to a clear Du Bois school of the Black historians. Charles T. Davi...: Well, you insist on using the word school and it seems to me that much of what we talk about influence is not to be determined, I think, in terms of school. John Bracey: Well, among Blacks, for a commanding scholar, I would say that indeed, there should be some people who would consider themselves followers [inaudible] and it's just not there. Speaker 4: Why should that be necessary? John Bracey: It's a sign of influence. Speaker 4: Well, you don't have to necessarily be a follower of one [crosstalk] at one school. Charles T. Davi...: He never taught history, actually. He's not like done it. John Bracey: I mean, it's all good reasons, but they still don't make up for the fact that there isn't any group of people who consider themselves historians and followers of Du Bois. Mr. Moses: [inaudible] in connection with the interpretation of the Du Bois/Washington debate, at least Du Bois wrote the history on that. And what you seem to be doing here is trying to correct the kind of attitude that one might assume exists about the Du Bois/Washington debate. John Bracey: Yeah, well, I'll agree. In this case, Du Bois influenced his town, but this is not historical work. This is an essay out of The Souls of Black Folk, which is one of the few things people read by Du Bois. What has been happening among Black historians, which is kind of a problem, is that the bulk of the history up till now has been written by middle class people who indeed kind of identify with Du Bois's kind of vision of the intellectual. And therefore they would side with this Northern trained articulate Black against the poor country, Booker T. Washington. So they tend to side with Du Bois because he was militant, whatever that means. Or, they side with him because he refused to compromise on his rights, whatever that means. And they tend to dismiss Booker T. as just kind of the prototype Uncle Tom. But this is also the standard version of the thing that white historians write. And I'm very skeptical among white students of having them accept standard interpretations of the most powerful Black figure this country has ever known. Mr. Moses: I don't think it's ... it's certainly a standard interpretation. And I think the fact that they can be approached as such just shows some kind of Du Bois influence. At least, the story, as he told it, has been accepted. John Bracey: Yeah, well a lot of other people were telling it the same way. And, everybody that learned about Booker T. didn't learn about it from Du Bois. Mr. Moses: Well, what I learned about Booker T. in high school was that he was the leader of the Black masses and the important Black figure of that period. Du Bois in many high school texts, and then quite a few college texts is not mentioned, but Booker T. always is. John Bracey: well, Du Bois never gets into the textbooks except now. I mean, the McCarthy thing kind of wiped him out. But that's the point, is that's still a kind of standard way of looking at Black history. And I think it's a white way of looking at because looking at a man who figured out how to get all kinds of things out of white America and amass a certain amount of power, which Du Bois himself never did. And nobody else has ever done. Speaker 5: [inaudible] did it help anything or get really boomerang? John Bracey: well, Booker T.'s thing?, No, it was built in contradictions that he knew would help. So the point is Booker T. was a mess ... this is another whole lecture. You want to hear my lecture on Booker T. Washington? Booker T. was doing a number of things ... He had about six or seven different poses and nobody ever really knows which one was the real one. I don't think he knew which one was the real one. Speaker 5: Is it true that by the time he died everything that he thought would come out of this Atlanta cotton exposition speech where he laid down the truth that everything had been [inaudible] John Bracey: No, not at all. Booker T. set up all these schools in the South by saying they were going to train all kinds of cotton pickers and servants and all kinds of crap. Well, the people that came out of them schools were the Black middle class that raised all hell about their rates. These are the people that went to the NAACP. Where you think they came from? Where do you think all the school teachers came from? They came out of them little backwoods schools Booker T. set up to train sharecroppers and farmers and stuff. And he knew good and well, he was not going to go back there and farm no cotton and be servants to the white people. Booker T. had liberal arts. Booker T. kept trying to get Du Bois to teach for him. What was Du Bois going to teach? Handicrafts? Nonsense. Mr. Moses: What'd you say? [crosstalk] Booker T.'s followers became like Du Bois. Middle-class agitators very dissatisfied with their status. John Bracey: Pretty much, yeah. Not all of them, but I would say a large percentage of the middle class supporters of the NAACP in the 1920's [inaudible] so that kind of education. Mr. Moses: Well, Washington's best contribution, then, was that he trained [inaudible]. Speaker 6: [inaudible] We haven't seen in Du Bois [inaudible] and the second thing I want to ask you [inaudible]. It seems to me that you're working for [inaudible]. John Bracey: What was that? I was about five years old then. Speaker 6: I'm suggesting that your [inaudible] is that he's not working on keeping capitalism at full productive [inaudible] jobs for everybody, but that he's somewhat [inaudible] adversity. John Bracey: I mean, that's a completely anti historical statement. You can't have socialism before you have capitalism. Black people are going to try and get capitalism. The goal of anybody that's got any kind of concrete scientific analysis of capitalist development knows you don't jump stages. Black people are going to fight and die trying to make a 1789 revolution in this country in 1972. And I think it's silly and it's not going to work, but they're going to do it so I can sit here and say, I'm for socialism, I'm for socialism, I'm for socialism, while the masses go out there and set up shoe shining stands and go out there and sell Dashikis and set up liquor stores and try and be capitalist, because this is what they want to be. Speaker 6: They aren't selling wine and Dashikis, and the fact is that- John Bracey: Sure, it's going to fail. I know it's going to fail. But the point is that the people are going to do it. That's what's real. Not what I think, what the people are going to do. Speaker 6: That's what they're buying. They're buying the idea that capitalism is [inaudible] John Bracey: They have a historic right to want to buy that. You can't tell people that they shouldn't go through a historic process. I don't have a right to tell Black people they shouldn't try and be capitalists if they want to be. Speaker 5: Well, I guess I just want to thank you for giving us some kind of perspective. It's all right for us to say, "Hey, hey, hoorah for Du Bois" but I'm glad we could hear another side of the story. It's really what I [inaudible]. Charles T. Davi...: All right. [inaudible]. Speaker 7: I want to agree with [inaudible] on what he's saying. John Bracey: What about the parts you don't agree with? Speaker 7: Washington [inaudible] what he did was redeveloping and ... like [inaudible] My historical analysis was not just from textbooks, because [inaudible] Washington's leadership because where they recognize [inaudible] Du Bois was saying, because Blacks in America by that time, they could vote. John Bracey: Who is the leading Black politician during that period? Booker T. Washington was. Who was a political advisor to Theodore Roosevelt? Who got people jobs in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and the Democratic and Republican parties? Who had all the patronage and the Republican party in the South? Booker T. Washington. He wasn't out of politics at all. Booker T. was very much involved in politics. All he had to do was say he wasn't. The best way to get a political job by Booker T. was say, "I ain't interested in politics, but can I be the head of the port authority of New York city?" And he says, "Since you don't want the job, you can have it". John Bracey: Y'all want the man to be a fool. You want him to be a fool. But you understand politics in the back? You keep insisting on this kind of moralistic calm. It's very annoying to have a story has to be moral-less. Charles T. Davi...: Two more questions, and we will shut down for this afternoon. Mr. Moses. Mr. Moses: I think you're right. We evaluate, but [inaudible] we certainly don't hear them besides people who write Black history. But I'm trying to think of the real reasons why Blacks weren't working in the trade in 1880's and the '90s was not that there weren't any skilled Black traders around, but a factor that you pointed to anyone who's tried to practice this trade, or anyone tried to develop any kind of political power was being driven off. John Bracey: It killed them. Yeah. That's not Booker T.'s fault. You can't blame that on him. Mr. Moses: But I don't think that simply pretending that the problem was simply a lack of trained people. It sounds like you're saying the same runaround they gave us during the '60s. That there's not enough people, but there were enough trained people to- John Bracey: At one point. No, the point is a lot of them were dead. If you look at the figures, they literally killed something like three or 4,000 Black leaders. How many Black leaders you have to have? They wiped out the leadership. In fact, it totally just obliterated the leadership in about five states. This physically killed them. Charles T. Davi...: Two opposing facts here. [inaudible] I simply want to point out the fact that what Mr. Moses is saying is that they here the vocation, the occupations themselves disappear as presumably white- [crosstalk]. Mr. Moses: [crosstalk] John Bracey: No, the people, the people disappeared. Charles T. Davi...: [crosstalk] The second thing is quite true [inaudible]. Mr. Speller. John Bracey: He forgot his point now. Speaker 6: It's really a paradigm. Everybody says that we have a reason to say. And then these people, for some reason or other, here we have a militant Black, supposedly, Du Bois taking [inaudible] in the eyes of entertainers wanting to find somebody that [inaudible], you understand. Then we come up with Booker T. [inaudible] Get along, be quiet, be cool kind of thing. And they say, Hey, y'all don't want to pay no attention to him because he's a [inaudible], and it's just an interesting paradox if we have these intelligent Blacks and liberal whites, even on this kind of inconsistency. John Bracey: Yeah, I would agree. I would say, "Who do the masses of Black people follow? I trust the masses of Black people over there, intellectuals everyday. John Bracey: Scholars like other scholars. I mean, Du Bois wrote a lot of books. So a lot of scholars say, obviously he was the smartest one and they followed him because obviously he was much more intelligent than Booker T. All Booker T. did was have some power. And if, I mean,- Speaker 6: well then what I'm saying is there's definitely some trickery going on if Blacks do not emulate power. John Bracey: Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. And part of it is, and most Black trade people tend to be very derogatory toward their own people's judgment. And they tend to feel that well, if the masses follow him, he must've been pretty bad, but they went to masses to follow them when they get a program, right? And I think the masses of Black people in this country have a hell of a lot of sense. And if they don't follow somebody, it's cause they shaky. And if they do follow them, they must have something going for them. And I would follow that. I'd take it over any other kind of criteria. What are the bulk of the people in Black America doing? And they said, Booker T.'s all right. Well, he must be doing something right. Something, right. Speaker 6: Mr. [inaudible]. Speaker 8: You read one of the points that I think anybody here is kind of concerned with. Maybe you have a position [inaudible] was W.E.B. Du Bois [inaudible]. John Bracey: No, in that one statement. Being a kind of mystical belief in race. I mean, that was the same kind of white man's burden kind of statement. Speaker 6: Well, the have choices that we have [inaudible].