J. Saunders Redding lecture, "W.E.B. DuBois: Portrait Against Background," at the University of Iowa, June 27, 1972

Automated: 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 W.E.B Du Bois portrait against the background, is Saunders Redding professor of English at Cornell University. Introducing professor Redding is Charles T. Davis professor of English at the University of Iowa and chairman of the Institute. Charles T. Davi...: This is the first public lecture of the institute on Du Bois and I'm pleased to introduce Mr. Saunders Redding as the opening lecturer of the fourth institute of the program in Afro-American studies. He like, W.E.B Du Bois, is a man of letters and the title of his chair at Cornell University reveals that particular fact. Usually the titles of chairs do not, but I'm particularly pleased with Saunder's chair. It is of course, the Earnest I. White and Ernest I. White was a man of letters himself. Earnest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University. Charles T. Davi...: Mr. Redding has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University and honorary degrees from half a dozen colleges and universities, including, and this is most meaningful, his own Alma mater. One's own Alma mater is usually the last one to recognize, the last institution to recognize one's eminence. He brings to the consideration of the amazingly versatile genius of Du Bois, who was, as you recall, a poet, an economist, a sociologist, a rhetorician, a journalist, a historian, a novelists, and I've missed a few roles, I'm sure Mr. Apthekar will remind me of them. All of these things. But he brings to this amazingly versatile talent of Du Bois and amazingly diversified talent of his own. Charles T. Davi...: Mr. Redding's first book, To Make a Poet Black, was literary criticism and literary criticism of a very valuable kind on the Black poetry, which had been written up to the time of its publication. His second book, No Day of Triumph won the Mayflower Award for distinguished writing, and it was a perceptive commentary on the American South. They Came in Crisis, was history written as a part of Lippincott's Peoples of America series and American in India. It's an illuminating analysis of another culture, one indeed, which I read with great care before going to India myself in 1969. And other books of his have been the Lonesome Road and The Negro. And recently he has published Cavalcade an anthology, which is edited with another Davis. Arthur Davis, who is a university professor at Harvard University. And this is the most distinguished anthology of Afro-American literature since the Negro Caravan. Charles T. Davi...: I can say that since I am the author of a competitive volume which I trust all of you will rush out to buy. I spoke of Mr. Redding as a man of letters, and I mean this indeed quite seriously. I mean this I expect to the 19th century sense, when the term was not only a certain grace in writing about when students at Yale or Harvard or Princeton, but involved indeed a certain kind of substance in addition. I can recall that earlier in the 19th century, earliest say than Bliss Perry or Copeland, and I can name a few other such professors at the turn of the century, it meant a writer who was able to tell us the hard truths about ourselves. In the great tradition of Carlisle and Ruskin and Arnold and may I add Du Bois. Charles T. Davi...: Now, Mr. Redding has been able to do this, not only in his books, but also as a member of the board of the American Scholar, the literary organ of the Phi Beta Kappa. Now, one of the things I wish to say about Mr. Redding, he taught before becoming a part of the National Endowment of the Humanities. He taught for 24 years at Hampton Institute. And after that time, he did join Barnaby Keeney and Henry Allen Moore when they were engaged in setting up the new venture and cultural definition. I wish to say that he like Du Bois, represents, I think in many ways, the very best of the educational tradition associated with the Black colleges of the South. Charles T. Davi...: I wish to remind you of the fact that Du Bois taught on two different periods at Atlanta University. And he represents, I think, distinction coming from that particular tradition. I want to say finally, that it's a great personal pleasure for me to introduce Mr. Redding. My family has been close to him, I've been close to him for many years and it's a delight it seems to me and for us all, for him to return to give us the opening lecture on Du Bois here for this Institute. Mr. Redding. Saunders Reddin...: Thank you, Mr. Davis. When I was honored by the invitation to deliver this lecture, opening the Institute on W. E. B. Du Bois, I immediately decided to slight without altogether ignoring the scholarly formalisms implicit in the descriptive noun lecture and to address you rather in the vein of one who reminisces, of one who reflects rather than analyzes or probes. In the course of the next two weeks, using the tools of scholarship, you will pry and probe into the life and times of Du Bois and into the intractable particulars and documented facts of those social origins, that by a kind of innate logic brought him to the position of leader as symbol, in a world he never made, but which he sought unflinchingly to remake. Saunders Reddin...: I propose to attempt something quite different, not original, certainly, but differing from the scholarly and the academic. My approach is descriptive and forgive me, subjective. Some part of what I am going to say, is in the nature of personal recollection. I recall the first time I saw W. E. B Du Bois. It was on an occasion when he spoke in Philadelphia, back in the 1920s. My father had anticipated this event for days. For he had not then heard Du Bois either, but he had read him with great avidity and sometimes aloud. When we gathered around the dining room table, after dinner, we children to do our schoolwork and our mother to mend the clothes, which we incorrigibly ripped and tore. Gathering there under the chandelier of many colored glass, instead of scattering all over the house saved electricity, which was definitely a consideration. Saunders Reddin...: At any rate, assuming the grand oratorical tone and manner in which he coached us for speaking contests at school, my father read editorials from The Crisis and Du Bois' commentaries on all sorts of matters about which we had not the faintest intellectual comprehension. We children were more interested in our own reading of Effie Lee Newsome's children's corner, which The Crisis carried monthly. And in looking at the pictures of Black high school and college graduates, which were two or three times a year. But at the time of the occasion referred to, I was in my teens and Dr. Du Bois had begun to mean something. Though I do not claim that I thoroughly understood the meaning of such earlier works of his as I was then beginning to read on my own, the Souls of Black Folk, the Quest of the Silver Fleece. Saunders Reddin...: Although I reacted to it emotionally, I lacked the knowledge to understand what Du Bois meant when he wrote, "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm-in-arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong earth and the treasury of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will and they come all graciously, with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us oh, knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?" Saunders Reddin...: When the opportunity came to see and hear the man who had written those words nearly a quarter of a century earlier, I was quite as eager as my father. Partly, I suspect now, because going to Philadelphia from Wilmington, Delaware, by steamer, as my father planned it, meant a two hour boat ride up the river, a kind of excursion picnic, including Texas wieners with hot mustard and bags of popcorn. And a soft drink called Whistle. The train made it in 30 minutes and it cost nearly $2 per person a round trip. The round trip by boat was 50 cents per person, and five of us, including my parents were going and such economies were important. Shortly after we entered the auditorium of the colored, YMCA on Philadelphia's Christian Street, the audience was hushed by someone who brought a pitcher and a glass to the lector. Saunders Reddin...: Then the moment came when the chairman, a Mr. Lambert, if memory serves, emerged followed by another much smaller man, Dr. Du Bois. I was disappointed. I had seen pictures of him, but I had somehow expected a man of giant stature and not the delicately structured man he turned out to be. And when he spoke, I expected a voice of thunder and an apostolic storm of words, for that was the way my father read him and not the quiet, calm, deliberate speech that Dr. Du Bois gave us. I expected fire and brimstone, ringing iron and not tempered steel. But Dr. Du Bois of course was tempered steel. Forged in the crucible of parlous times and cast in a mold that was, I like to think and do honestly believe, forthwith destroyed. Both mind and character were distinctively his own. Saunders Reddin...: So far as the record shows, and it is a voluminous record, he never experienced a crisis of identity. Oh, I know some will argue otherwise, as does an esteemed historian, who is also a personal friend, they will cite that famous passage from the first essay in the Souls of Black Folk that reads, "One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro. Two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals and in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife. This longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of his older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul and a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American." Saunders Reddin...: And I will say to those who argue thus, that this very passage was an affirmation of Dr. Du Bois' identity. And much, much later when he went to Ghana and became a citizen of that country at the age of 93, it can scarcely be said, as William Buckley implied, that Dr. Du Bois was suffering an identity crisis. It was simply a question of where he wanted to be. Choosing a nationality or a country in which to live is not a matter of identity, it is a matter of identification, and the difference which may seem merely semantic is substantial. Dr. Du Bois always knew who he was. In a symbolic poem, entitled the Song of Smoke published in 1899, he had declared, "I am Black. I will be as Black as blackness can, the blacker the mantle, the mightier the man." Saunders Reddin...: So choosing to live in an African country in 1963, had nothing to do with identity. It was a consequence of his disillusionment with his identification as an American and his bitter disappointment with the total kinematic failure of the notional formulations that supposedly in here, in the American structure of values. Perhaps earlier on, he was too sanguine about the American notional formulations. He was born and largely brought up in an age of great technological and material expectations, in spite of the panic of 1873. And in a family that though poor, was never poverty shocked. There were few complexities in the personalities that formed the family circle, and until he entered Harvard, there were none in Dr. Du Bois. Small farmers, laborers, servants, his family was proud and self-contained. They danced around the same totems as most of the rest of Americans. They held the same beliefs. They believed that history was a progression toward perfection. And until he went to Germany and studied under Gustav Schmoller, Du Bois believed this too. Saunders Reddin...: His family believed that equality could be attained and that in the long run, justice triumphed. As a boy and a very young man, the last of the Du Bois's assumed what his family assumed. I quote, "That all who are willing to work could easily earn a living. That those who had property had earned it and deserved it and could use it as they wished. That poverty was a shadow of crime and connoted lack to thrift and shiftlessness." Not until he became a graduate student in history and the social sciences did young Du Bois begin to chuck these assumptions. And I quote again, "Begin to see clearly the connection of economics and politics, the fundamental influence of man's efforts to earn a living on all his other efforts." But the perception and the sharpness of mind that produced these insights, were already developing while he was still a boy in his small new England hometown. Saunders Reddin...: In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the very mildness of the color problem made it possible for him to cultivate the sensitivity that an upbringing in a typical small Southern town with its overriding component of emotionalism would forbid. In the valley of the birches, the tides of race ran calm and the young Du Bois could breast them with arrogant disdain. He did not have the beaten in feeling of combating an emotional force, too wild and unreasonable to comprehend. This is not at all to say that he viewed race as of no importance. He realized even then, he tells us, that color had become an abiding unchangeable fact. And whenever he went to New Bedford to visit his paternal grandfather or to Albany as a guest of his half brother, he got "Swift glimpses of the colored world and had veritable seizures of awareness of the Negro world's peculiar isolation, its tension, and its precarious place in the economy of the surrounding white world." Saunders Reddin...: But he saw it objectively and in impersonal terms, as a matter of social condition. And this condition itself as, and again I quote directly. "A matter of education, as a matter of knowledge, as a matter of scientific procedure in a world which had become scientific in concept. Only when he went South to Fisk and saw and experienced large numbers of Black people in their daily struggle against the self-conscious instincts that were a function of racial prejudice, did the emotionalism of the color problem hit him with telling impact. Only then did he begin to overcome his New England bred emotional constraints and the taciturnity, that was a part of his Dutch heritage. Only then did he begin to lose his reserve and to sacrifice something of his inner life. But he never lost all of his reserve, all of his privacy. The habit of it was impossible to break completely. Saunders Reddin...: Though a handful of intimates of later years often found him magnetic, warm, and gay, for most people, he kept a measured distance. He was considered aloof. Only among friends did his personality light up. His presence in a room full of people generally went unnoticed, except for those who appreciated the fine cast of his features and his beautiful head. At Harvard, where he took a second baccalaureate in 1890 and a master's degree the following year, and at the University of Berlin, he was attracted to the relatively new discipline of sociology. This was especially true in Berlin, where the discipline weaned from anthropology, psychology, philosophy and history, but combining some elements of all these since all knowledge is interrelated, had already obtained the academic respectability that William Graham Sumner would give it at Yale. Saunders Reddin...: At Berlin also, somewhat in defiance of the rigid protocol that characterized the relations between education and government and between student and professor, the strength of reform ideology had influenced some scholars to question and to encourage their students to question, if not effectively attack, the whole existing conservative order and the imperialistic hold that Germany and other European countries following England's lead, were establishing on what the exalting Rudyard Kipling called the "dark places of the globe." And again, to use a Kipling term, "the backward peoples of the earth." In Germany, Du Bois soon to be the first Black man to earn a PhD at Harvard, began to get it all together. Like Tennyson's Ulysses, he followed knowledge like a sinking star. Not knowledge simply for its own sake, which is an indulgence his practical idealism and his concerned awareness of the worldwide color problems scorned, but knowledge purposeful. Knowledge working. Saunders Reddin...: If he returned from Germany, something of a fancy Dan sporting the van Dyke beard, wearing spats and carrying a cane as some of his would be detractors, gloatingly, remarked, he also returned with knowledge that would make him strong in will to strive, to find and not to yield. Knowledge that would also animate an already indomitable spirit and stalk one of the most Catholic minds of the century. Yet it is not a difficult mind for us to know, it lies exposed in more than a dozen major books, hundreds of editorials, articles and lectures, and a scattering of poems. Dr. Du Bois' prose writings have the clarity and sharpness of anatomical drawings, showing the progressive stages in the development of an organism. In his case, the organism was truth. Saunders Reddin...: Du Bois used truth, the concrete truth of facts, as well as the abstract truths of a humanistic philosophy as a tool in the performance of the task, "Of probing, and assaying the scope of chance and irrationality in human action." But he applied it only to the area of race relations was partly due to the traditional specialization of scholarship and partly to the personal need to maintain a careful balance between intellectual curiosity and emotional involvement. He thought of himself as the scientist, but a scientist need not be a monstrosity of sheer cerebration. Certainly Dr. Du Bois was not. Saunders Reddin...: After the Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, his doctoral dissertation, which was described as the first scientific historical work produced by a Negro and was the first volume published in the Harvard historical study series, and after the publication of the Philadelphia Negro and in the midst of preparing his Atlanta University studies on the Negro, he published The Souls of Black Folk. Which for all its erudition and lucid reasoning, is perhaps as subjective and passionate a book as any written in the first decade of this century. Discounting some editorials and again, the poetry, several times and a long career devoted principally to investigation and research, in materials that generate passion, in material to which he was the first to apply the scientific method, he had to give himself a thorough emotional housecleaning. Saunders Reddin...: Darkwater is a book like The Souls of Black Folk. Gift of Black Folk is another. And the novels in a different way are others, even when they read like history and sociology. What strikes me as remarkable is not that he indulged in these introspective sprees, but that he indulged in them so seldom, and that they did not promote habits of thought and a manner of speech characterized by an incoherent and echoic jumbo of infective and condemnation, exhortation, and jubilation, apology and defense such as we're being treated to by some of the current crop of Black militants whose chaotic passions are matched only by their benighted ignorance of the historical situation and of the social circumstances that have made so-called Black studies, a necessary addition to the curriculum of American institutions of higher learning. Saunders Reddin...: As teacher-scholar, Dr. Du Bois would have known a sense of fulfillment from the best of what is happening along this line in higher education. Believing as he did that, the solution to the race problem was, "A matter of systematic investigation," as a teacher-scholar, his professional commitment was to, and again I quote, "The scientific investigation into social conditions, primarily for humanitarian ends." For a quarter of a century, almost alone among Black spokesmen, Dr. Du Bois declared and believed that the basis for racial change for the better and toward interracial brotherhood, was a knowledge of the facts and the broader truths the facts documented. His choice of subject for his doctoral dissertation and subsequently 13 years of work at Atlanta University, were posited upon this belief. And this belief was at the heart of much that appeared in the crisis and later in Phylon, under his editorship. Saunders Reddin...: He was the intellectual father of Franklin Frazier of John Hope Franklin, of Benjamin Quarles, of Rayford Logan, and a host of Black and some white scholars. One who reads his chief works is bound to be convinced that whatever emotional overcast they have is inherent in the material and is not necessarily a quality of the treatment. But Dr. Du Bois' scientific concerns, for that is the way he described them, were complicated in a way unknown to most professional scholars until the second world war. When a group of outstanding scientists came to realize that the consequences of the application of their research and knowledge was the horrendous atomic bomb, they could no longer contain themselves as theoretical mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and metalworkers. And they could not see the atomic bomb as merely a great scientific and technological achievement. It presented them with a moral and social problem of universal proportions, and they were social beings. Thus it was with Dr. Du Bois. Saunders Reddin...: He was a socially responsible factor in the universal problem of race. He was concerned with the practical application of his discovered knowledge to the solution of this problem. This accounts in part for his controversy with Booker T. Washington, his insistence on programs of higher education for blacks, for his espousal of the talented tenth, for his founding Niagara Movement and his later connection with the National Association, for the Advancement of Colored People and for his active in Pan-Africanism. These interests and activities were the function of a mind perfectly matched with spirit. The function of a vital awareness of the real combined with an equally vital commitment to the ideal. The reality forced him to embrace the ideal of the talented tenth, but the ideal was the advancement of all Black people. And he exhorted the Negro intelligentsia, which Truman Nelson tells us, Du Bois created, to lead the advance, to fight for equality. With I quote, "The weapons of truth with the sword of the intrepid uncompromising spirit." Saunders Reddin...: The reality of the Negro status as a second class citizen, which Booker Washington seemed to accept as the stable state of American society, led Dr. Du Bois into political action. That, though it was often far from diplomatic, was somehow always the right action. It was rebellious, not revolutionary. He believed in the principles of democracy and for a long time, he believed that the machinery of American democracy could be made to work. And he tried to make it work. But in the 1940s, when he was already into his seventies, he grew somewhat discouraged. And this was signified in his advocacy of racial separation, which he viewed as a tactic. Negroes, he declared in the 1940s, quote, "Are now segregated, largely without reason, let us put reason and power beneath the segregation." Saunders Reddin...: And in another place, he said, "Negroes could not only furnish pupils for their own schools and colleges, but could control their teaching force and policies, their textbooks and ideals. By concentrating their demands, by group buying, and by their own plans, they could get Negro literature issued without censorship upon expression, and they could evolve Negro art for its own sake and for its own beauty and not simply for the entertainment of white folks. Rail, if you will, against the race segregation here involved, but take advantage of it by planting secure centers of Negro cooperative effort and particularly of economic power." Saunders Reddin...: Excuse me. This, he called non-discriminatory segregation and it got him into trouble with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, from when she resigned in 1934. But forcing him to resign was no more to be justified than his federal indictment as an unregistered foreign agent 17 years later, when he was in his eighties. Is it criminal to work as Dr. Du Bois did for the realization of the principles of democracy? Is it criminal to advocate and work for Dr. Du Bois' ultimate commitment, the breakdown of all segregation based on color? His joining the Communist Party in 1961 was not really inconsistent with this commitment. It meant simply, that the halting rattling machinery of democracy had at last broken down and Dr. Du Bois as it were, merely changed vehicles so as hopefully, to reach the same destination faster. Nor was his going to Ghana also 1961 inconsistent either. Saunders Reddin...: He went to Ghana in the first place in order to work unimpeded by the need to scurry for funds on the long projected encyclopedia of the Negro, which would supply and now I quote, "The scientifically attested truth concerning Negroes." And this truth would ensure, and again I quote, "The survival of the Negro race, not for itself alone, but for the emancipation of mankind, the realization of democracy and the progress of civilization." Langston Hughes and I visited Dr. Du Bois briefly in Ghana in 1962. He was 94 then, though he was somewhat shrunken and stooped and too much talk tired him, he listened to others with unwavering attention and his eyes sparkled briefly whenever the sentiments expressed agreed with his own. Saunders Reddin...: The mind does not always perfectly reflect the man or the personality. In spite of the tremendous respect which his accomplishments earned him, Dr. Du Bois was not generally liked. Many of the stories about him set him forth as a crusty, modern witted intellectual and social snob. He was, many stories say, a little too proud and full of himself. In the days when he still smoked, many thought his preference for a certain brand of expensive cigarette an affectation. Just below average in height, he was meticulous about his clothes, giving many, an impression of dandyism, which contradicted the popular image of the scholar and of the dynamic leader. Saunders Reddin...: Yet it is the highest tribute it seems to me, that even those who grumbled about the Du Bois personality, acknowledged him as the Negro world leader from 1910 almost until his death in 1963. He did not seek the role of leader, his intellectual honesty in the search for truth, his prophetic vision, his all embracing humanitarian spirit and the fundamental integrity of his personality, destined him to it. Saunders Reddin...: Everything you will learn about him during the course of this Institute, will support the fact that he lived in the faith, but one day truth will make men free and will support also the claims I have made for him here tonight. Thank you. Charles T. Davi...: [inaudible] indicated that he would be happy to respond to questions. Yes go ahead. Speaker 4: What did he think about Du Bois' [inaudible]? Charles T. Davi...: Du Bois' authority- Speaker 4: His compensations with [inaudible] because not only did [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: In regards to Marcus Garvey and the Garvey program, Du Bois said, and this is a paraphrase, "Let us not put our faith in idle dreams." I think he recognized Garvey as an idealist who was not very practical. I think he knew, as Garvey later learned himself, that the business of going back to Africa was simply an impossible dream. And of course, I'm sure he was offended as a great many other blacks in the United States were by Garvey's insistence that the Black man in the United States who had any degree of Negro blood was somehow not a good man. Is that responsive to your? Charles T. Davi...: You have a question? Speaker 5: Yes, I wonder if you could explain a bit further your statement that Du Bois joined the Communist party was not inconsistent with his quest for the principles of democracy. Saunders Reddin...: Well, because I think first of all, that the principles of communism are pretty much the principles of democracy. Charles T. Davi...: You seem a little discontented with that answer, you will have my response to that. Speaker 6: I have no response but I was expecting more elaboration. Saunders Reddin...: You were expecting what? Speaker 6: More elaboration. Saunders Reddin...: Well, I don't really think it needs elaborating on. Certainly this much is true, from my understanding of communist principles, those who employ that machinery, that political machinery, are also striving for the freedom and the equality of man. So his commitment to the machinery of communism would not be inconsistent with his devotion to the principles of democracy. Speaker 7: What all just sycophantic moralists, what [inaudible] just praising Du Bois? [inaudible] if one studied Du Bois seriously and it would [inaudible] understanding [inaudible] what would that became that Du Bois was a Philistine until he gathered to the [inaudible]. Du Bois grew up up South, and he was [inaudible] growing up up South by the time he got into college, he had no [inaudible] of anything. Okay, Du Bois got to go to Germany, and the only thing that Du Bois learned in Germany was how to dress. He didn't learn anything about the German philosophical or tradition. And all these, just think everything [inaudible] Du Bois' life up until the age of 17 and one would see that Du Bois was a Philistine in everything. Speaker 7: I think there is too much emphasis on Du Bois, too many praises. I think we should [inaudible] the praised don't belong. And you said that [inaudible] Du Bois he was talking about guarding[ the idealism and trying [inaudible], I think you should put the praise on Booker T. Washington. And we should put the praise on Booker T. Washington and not just ask [inaudible], and by using Hebrews, they tell us that Booker T was- Saunders Reddin...: Excuse me, but I thought you were going to ask a question. Charles T. Davi...: I wish you would get to the question. Not that you aren't delivering any interesting speech, but perhaps we could schedule that at another time, but would you get to the question now? Speaker 7: Okay. You [inaudible] questions, [inaudible] here we go. Is that Du Bois was looking for the salvation of black [inaudible]? And his approach was, [inaudible] or our equality, is it? Was it Du Bois' whole objective to drive [inaudible]? Saunders Reddin...: So far as the public man was concerned, I would say yes. Speaker 7: [inaudible]. Black so-called black [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: So called what? Speaker 7: Black [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Is what what he saw? Is what, what he saw? Speaker 7: Is equality what Du Bois saw as his objective for the black folk? Saunders Reddin...: Certainly. Certainly. Don't you? Equality operating on all levels. Don't you see this is... certainly, it is one of the dreams of all mankind. Speaker 7: [inaudible] I don't see that. Saunders Reddin...: Okay. Charles T. Davi...: What is the other problem that you're seeing that Du Bois did not exhibit? Are you willing to put that as a question now? Speaker 7: [inaudible] Saunders Reddin...: Thanks. Charles T. Davi...: Are there other questions? Yes. Speaker 8: Let me [inaudible] or rather, my main question after all this. Is [inaudible]? But Du Bois, I've always called him that, [inaudible] French [inaudible], now why did they call him Du Bois? Saunders Reddin...: This was the pronunciation that he preferred. Charles T. Davi...: This is the ultimate in the way of pronunciation no matter how the name is spelt. The whole [inaudible] name has the right to [inaudible] Speaker 8: [crosstalk] So that is what I understood and I was wondering because why [inaudible] and is not the correct pronunciation. I wondered [crosstalk] Saunders Reddin...: Du Bois. Du Bois is what he called himself. Speaker 8: [inaudible] Tell me that Du Bois called himself Du Bois [crosstalk] question. Saunders Reddin...: Well, I have heard him insist in a private gathering that he preferred Du Bois. Charles T. Davi...: Mr. Moses, did you have a question? Charles T. Davi...: Well thank you very much this had been wonderful, finally Mr Redding [inaudible] at the beginning.