Herbert Aptheker lecture, "The Life and Work of W.E.B. DuBois," at the University of Iowa, June 28, 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 the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois is Herbert Aptheker, director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City. Introducing Mr. Aptheker is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and chairman of the institute.
Charles T. Davi...: It is my pleasure to introduce this afternoon, Dr. Herbert Aptheker. I've learned much about him during the last few hours when we began our exploration in the discussion group. I think that all of us were impressed by his knowledge of Du Bois, and of Du Bois's time and touched as well by the depth of his commitment. Mr. Aptheker is the literary custodian of the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois. Now, this statement means rather more than it says. At a time when America was happy to ignore Du Bois, when the academic community failed to recognize the dimensions of a man, who Mr. Aptheker has described as a colossus, he was collecting and preserving the Du Bois papers. To my knowledge, this is an activity that has gone on for well over 20 years. Certainly when I was a very, very young man in New York in the '50s and displaying, despite the disaffection of my colleagues, an early interest in Du Bois. I was aware that he was performing this service. Mr. Aptheker is an accomplished historian to whom we owe much more in terms of our knowledge of American civilization. He received his doctorate at Columbia, his PhD in history.
Charles T. Davi...: His early book, American Negro Slave Revolts published in 1943, was the forerunner of the great revision of the American historian's approach to slavery and of the plantation system. Mr. Aptheker's work has indicated that for nearly a generation, we have known that something was the matter with Ulrich Phillips, that perhaps not even drastic surgery might correct. But it's only recently that the rich documentation has appeared, demonstrating without question that we have been taken in by a distorted view of reality. Other valuable works are a Documentary History of of the Negro People in the United States in two volumes, and Afro American History; The Modern Era published in 1971. He has been an influential historian of Black people, one in a selected circle of White historians who has brought knowledge and an informed, not maudlin, sympathy to his work. And for his achievement, he has twice received the History Award in 1939 and again in 1969. And I liked indeed the generation gap. It speaks much about America, as well as about the study of American history.
Charles T. Davi...: He's received that award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life in History. More to the point of our present concern. I should say that Mr. Aptheker is the editor of Du Bois's autobiography, posthumously published in 1968. And he offers now the prospect of the publication of Du Bois's complete papers. Earlier Mr. Aptheker mentioned the irony of the late hour of an institute on Du Bois. And we must agree that it is late but it has happened. And I view it not so much as a richly deserved reward for a great man but as a beginning for new scholarly endeavors. He is now director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City, and a member of the Department of History of Bryn Mawr College. I suppose the real measure of Mr. Aptheker's importance to us is the fact that it would be unthinkable, if not impossible to have an institute on Du Bois without him. He demonstrated that this morning with his knowledge of the states of the two versions of the Souls of Black Folk. It is my pleasure then to introduce the indispensable Mr. Herbert Aptheker.
Herbert Aptheke...: Thank you very much, Mr. Davis. It's a somewhat new experience for me to be called indispensable in an American university. Having been fired in 1938, universities got along without me for 31 years. However, times apparently change. The deepest regret I have is that he did not live to see these changes, although he was confident that they would come. We have already been favored last night by the portrait of the doctor by a great scholar, Mr. Redding, and I hope that many of you heard that effort. I will try now within an hour to present an overview of this man who is of the dimensions of a Galileo or a Beethoven or a Lenin and tomorrow, we will look at one aspect of that life, Du Bois's concepts of social transformation. And then you will have, of course other sessions here on other aspects of his life. But this is an effort within the hour to offer a view of him. He's born in western Massachusetts, deep in the Berkshires in New England's heart, three years after Lincoln was murdered. This brown child, son of poor working people and great grandson of a veteran of the Revolutionary War, on his 25th birthday, typical for him, very far than from home studying in Berlin in the diary that he kept for his own eyes and in which he made his deepest promises, he dedicated himself, he said to the search for truth.
Herbert Aptheke...: He had a little ceremony and a candle with raisins and wine and nuts. He wrote home to the folks. He wrote to the pastor of his church and then he wrote in his diary. He wrote in this secret and sacred place, quoting, "Be a man worthy of my race and of my father's." Du Bois never grew old except towards the final months of his life. When he was past 60 and had been invited back to head the sociology department at Atlanta, he always ran up the stone steps that brought one to the campus grounds. He was asked about this. He said, "I run up because reaching the top, I am rewarded with a view of lovely flowers and I cannot wait to bathe my eyes in this vision." When he was 80 and away on a lecture tour, he wrote his wife that to his keen regret, and engagement made it impossible for him to visit the circus that had come town. When he was 90, I myself saw him sitting on a piano bench with my daughter, seven years old, both of them singing lustily and fairly well. My daughter inherits my wife's talents ... About Old MacDonald and his farm. I remember when we were at the airport to which I drove him 11 years ago, 1961, seeing the doctor and his wife, Shirley Graham off to Ghana where he was to take charge of the projected Encyclopedia Africana.
Herbert Aptheke...: I remember a reporter ask the doctor how many volumes he projected and how long the task would take him. He was then 92 years old. "10 volumes I think," said the doctor. And then he added with the barest suggestion of a smile, "I think it will take me about 10 years per volume." In Georgia 75 years ago, Du Bois gave voice to the Black people's resistance against the conquest of the South by monopoly capitalism. He led the struggle against big businesses, so called philanthropic efforts to miseducate the Afro American people, and to corrupt their organizations and their leaders. He recognized what appeared to him to be the irresistible logic of socialism 70 years ago. He organized the Niagara Movement in 1905. And speaking out then for Black people he wrote their call, "We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social." I don't know if you know the dynamite in the word social in 1905. And until we get these rights, we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America." It was that Niagara Movement and the doctor personally that were vital to the launching four years later of the NAACP.
Herbert Aptheke...: When this century opened, Du Bois is the man who saw of course, as he wrote. In 1900, he was the secretary of the first pan African conference held that year in London. He wrote the call and it is there, not in Souls of Black Folk that this line first appears, I call attention to this because of the remarkable symmetry of his life. He would say this in 1900, not 1903. What he said in 1900 was the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. And it was he who with the clarity of genius 10 years later in 1910, added what he felt to be an essential element in the unfolding of the 20th century in the United States, quoting him, "The cause of labor is the cause of Black men. And the Black man's cause is labor's own." It was he also who more than 50 years ago, saw the anti-imperialist liberating potential in a world unity of African and African derived peoples, and therefore founded the Pan-African movement. The essence of his life as writer, thinker, educator and organizer and agitator may be in one sense summed up as the call for peace. Peace within nations and among nations. It is for dignified, secure, fraternal living together by a creative humanity.
Herbert Aptheke...: "I believe that war is murder," he wrote in his great credo of 1904, one of the most influential essays in the history of American letters. "I believe that the wicked conquests of weaker and darker nations by nations white and stronger, but foreshadows the death of that strength." Something which we see in front of our eyes now with every broadcast of the bombing of Indochina. Increasingly, Du Bois saw that the good things of life based as they must be upon peace, so that those good things may be created, shared and enjoyed, they can be obtained only by organized struggle. Increasingly, as he grew, he saw that the leadership and the main role in that struggle falls and must fall, if it is to be a principled, continual and effective one, to those who work and their allies. As he put it, "Naturally out of the mass of the working peoples who know life and its bitter struggles will continually rise the real, unselfish and clear sighted leadership." Du Bois insisted very early that imperialism is evil, racism vile, poverty conquerable, world war not inevitable.
Herbert Aptheke...: Leading the Peace Information Center that did monumental work in the late '40s and early '50s in the midst of the filthy McCarthy period, Dr. Du Bois and four associates were indicted and tried over 20 years ago as quoting their indictment, "Unregistered foreign agents," under the provisions of the McCormick Act. That act unlike the later and still existing McCarran Act, the McCormick Act did require a substantive proof of the actual guilt of the defendant personally, unlike the McCarran Act. The government of the United States offered in writing, offered Dr. Du Bois a deal telling him that if he would plead no defense, it would see to it that he got off without a jail sentence. Steeped in white chauvinism and reflecting the ethics of imperialism, the government officials did not know with whom they were dealing. Du Bois told his chief counsel, the late Vito Marcantonio, quoting his letter to Mr. Marcantonio, "Before I would enter into such a plea with such a government, I would rot forever in jail."
Herbert Aptheke...: Of course, the defendants who are not guilty to think of the doctor as a foreign agent. It's like thinking of Thomas Jefferson and Frederick Douglass as foreign agents, which by the way, both were accused in their day. And since as I have stated under the McCormick Act, one does not have a legislative bill of attainder such as the McCarran Act is, a defendant had a chance given due process of law. Du Bois and his fellow defendants were acquitted. By the way historically, this was the first significant breakthrough in the pattern of the McCarthy era. During the period of the indictment and the trial, Dr. Du Bois stuck to his guns of course, as had been true all his life. He said exactly what he believed and what he wants to say at that time. And he said it with the clarity of a master. With jail in sight, he wrote in his book, In Battle for Peace, which nobody but a firm with which I was associated with published in those days, we called it Mainstream Publishers. Harper turned it back with a printed form postcard, which the doctor showed me. So we published the book in 1952.
Herbert Aptheke...: In Battle for Peace. "With jail in sight, I hammered at the proposition that the Soviet Union did not want war while our masters did. That we in demanding peace were opposing big business which wanted war, and that we did this as free Americans and not as tools of any foreign or domestic power." It was in the midst of that struggle that Langston Hughes, one of the hundreds of distinguished Black people who as youngsters, had turned to the doctor for inspiration and help. It is to the eternal credit of the late Langston Hughes that he wrote a magnificent column in the Chicago Defender, October 6th 1951 when Du Bois was under indictment. "Du Bois is more than a man. He is all that he has stood for. The things that he has stood for are what millions of people of goodwill the world around desire also. A world of decency, of no nation over another, of no color line. No more colonies, no more poverty, a real education for all. Of freedom, love, friendship, peace among men and women. For as long as I can remember," Mr. Hughes went on, "Dr. Du Bois has been writing and speaking and fighting and working for these things. He began way before I was born to put reason above passion, justice above prejudice, well-being above poverty, wisdom above ignorance, cooperation above strife, equality above Jim Crow and peace above the bomb."
Herbert Aptheke...: What made Du Bois? Monumental persistence was there, and a fantastic and almost incredible capacity for work. As one studies his life, he is reminded of the letter that Thomas Jefferson whose range, similarly was almost incredible. The letter that Jefferson wrote his daughter, "No person will have occasion to complain to the want of time who never loses any." And again Jefferson, "It's wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing." Du Bois lived as though he had made Jefferson's advice his motto. Repeatedly, he said to others especially when under attack, and repeatedly he told himself, "There is only one reason for living and that is to live creatively and productively. And there is only one answer to attack and to criticism, and that is more and more effective work in which you believe."
Herbert Aptheke...: There also was present, what John Hope, his very dear friend and who then was president of Morehouse in Atlanta, what Hope wrote him in 1915 after Atlanta had been compelled it felt, to let the doctor go since so called philanthropist insisted that either Du Bois moderate his militancy or they would cancel their benefactions. Hope wrote in this personal letter, "You are able because you are honest. Intellectual honesty and moral courage are your adornments." And it's very true. About Du Bois's honesty, there hovered other qualities that were parts of the whole. For instance, there never was vindictiveness in him. He waged some monumental struggles. He never retained any grudge.
Herbert Aptheke...: He was very quick to admit error, sometimes very harsh with himself, as he did in particular for supporting U.S. Entry into World War One, for example. If he failed at times in dealing with others, and he was not an easygoing person, it was I think because he set fearfully high standards for himself and tended to apply the same standards for others. He also had a vision that there was so much to do, and not too much time to do it in. Of course, when seeking the secret of him, one is in the presence of genius and here biology itself so far has failed us. Certainly, an aspect of his genius, perhaps of genius was the persistence, the capacity for work, the integrity and his fundamental love of people, particularly his people. But then there was that mysterious something which we call talent and brilliance, not knowing what it is. He got to the heart. Very consciously, he anticipated. He sought to understand what was coming also very consciously, and what was true in a process sense, in a developing sense. He thought big. He came to no hasty judgments, he took himself seriously. Some who did not fully understand his own stern standards thought he took himself too seriously.
Herbert Aptheke...: I spoke to many people who knew him, among others to Mr. Norman Thomas. Mr. Thomas and I did not always agree, I assume you know. As I was leaving after an hour, Mr. Thomas called me back and he said, "Herbert, the point is this. Du Bois was a true prophet." Du Bois was a true prophet. He was not afraid to act, when to venture recklessly even to venture recklessly as some thought. Du Bois's writing is characteristically clear and lyrical. It exudes honesty and passion but it concentrates above all on precision. Zona Gale once described him as, "A great teacher of democracy in America." A democracy which we have not yet practiced or even visioned. About 40 years ago, his friend Eugene O'Neill, their influences mutual wrote, "Ranking as he does among the foremost writers of true importance in this country, one selfishly wishes sometimes as a writer oneself that he could devote all his time to the accomplishment of that final moving prose which distinguishes his books but at the same time," O'Neil went on, "One realizes self reproachfully that with Dr. Du Bois, it is a cause, an ideal that overcomes the personal egoism of the artist." And this brings us to another part of his heart, the cause.
Herbert Aptheke...: It was his devotion to it, his identity with it that is of course the ultimate source of his greatness. For over 50 years, this one person epitomized the cause. It was and it is the most dramatic cause in his country and his era. He experienced the crucifixion himself and he never sought to use his great gifts to remove the thorns from his own head. Many times was wealth offered him, many times with positions of great distinction dangled before his eyes. Sometimes his preeminence being so indubitable they actually came to him. But neither the offers nor the momentary reality ever came near corrupting him. The iron had entered his soul. He had lived in the ghetto of Philadelphia, in Atlanta, on Green Avenue in Brooklyn, on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. And he had the soul of a poet, and he knew torment when he saw it. He had seen the lynch victims fingers displayed in a Georgia butcher shop. He had seen the wreckage of his own home after the pogrom of 1960.
Herbert Aptheke...: He had sent his own firstborn, a lock of hair, which he carried in his wallet to his death. He had sent his firstborn son who died in infancy 1200 miles from home to be buried where Jim Crow did not live. Among his scores were thousands of letters, almost all of them carefully preserved. A thousands from the worker and the peon, the aspiring adolescent whose heart was bleeding, the sharecropper whose indignities overflowed in painfully penciled notes. The woman who scrubbed and dreamed, the most scorned and the most despised, the prisoner, the beggar, the prostitute poured their hearts out to him. "You are our voice," they wrote, "Speak for us." These letters were read, these letters were answered, the copies are preserved. The answers were full, serious, helpful, dignified. Du Bois's letters to the unknowns, to what the monstrous ruling class calls the mud sill of society shows great pains as his letters to presidents and to Gandhi and to savants.
Herbert Aptheke...: Black intelligentsia professionals and artists loved him as he loved and understood them and he fought for them. There is no outstanding Afro American creative figure of the 20th century, from Countee Cullen to Franklin Frazier, from John Hope Franklin to Jessie Fauset, from Richmond Barthé to Paul Robeson, who did not at some point draw inspiration and gather aid directly from their father. From all of these at the same time, Du Bois gained his strength, the inspiration was mutual. They held him up and he led the way. He wrote to these for his manuscripts show that he did so with great care. His sentence was scrutinized, many are the pencil alterations on manuscripts and on galley sheet. Really he was never finished. When I read some of his things marked and marked again some of his finished books marked by him, I think of Picasso who was asked once, "When are you finished with a painting?" And Picasso said, "When they come and take it away."
Herbert Aptheke...: There is one word that sums up to Du Bois, multifarious as were his interests and enormous as was his output, I've suggested prophet, it is a word which its synonym is poet. His range and passion, his vision and endurance, his kindness and iron, his knowledge, his compassion, his faith in reason. His fanatical devotion to truth, his urge to communicate, his basic optimism. These make his writings poems he made his life a poem. His passion was justice. Through science, reasons, struggle, organization, agitation would come justice and in that will be peace. It was this passion that brought Du Bois to socialism over 60 years ago. In the letter he wrote in 1904, he said, "I think of myself as a socialist." Never did he lose that light. His learning was as extensive as any person's. His friendships extended from Robson to Weinstein to Nehru, to Gandhi. No part of this globe did he not study with his own eyes, no significant political, social, intellectual current moved in the United States in the past 70 years without his participation.
Herbert Aptheke...: All this unparalleled experience held him firm to the need for socialism, and led him in his last period to the momentous decision of becoming a member of the Communist Party. There are I suggest certain lessons here surely for those who think that Marxism or socialism is something meant only for white people. The founder of the modern Black Liberation Movement and of the Pan African movement, thought the opposite was true. Du Bois in life exemplify the organic relationship between the struggles for equality, democracy, peace and socialism. And he believed that the last encompasses and embraces the first three. What he sought was an end of man's conflict with man. In that sense, he sought peace. He felt and thought that peace and justice are one and their name is socialism. It is a hallmark of the decay ... Do you want me to pause? All these devices. It is a hallmark of the decay of the United States social order and the depravity of its ruling class that Dr. Du Bois was labeled under the McCarran act, a fearful criminal, an assassin, a traitor, and [inaudible] democracy. One man's criminal is another man's saint.
Herbert Aptheke...: Langston Hughes in the essay already mentioned having in mind the government's effort to send Du Bois to jail wrote, "Somebody in Greece long ago gave Socrates the hemlock to drink. Somebody at Golgotha erected a cross and somebody drove nails into the hands of Jesus. Somebody spat upon his garments. Nobody remembers their damned names." In E.P. Thompson's monumental life of another revolutionary, William Morris. Mr. Thompson writes of Morris as beckoning us forward to the measureless bounty of life. And Thompson concludes his good book with this beautiful line, speaking of Morris, "He's one of those men whom history will never overtake." Very few such, one was Du Bois. He was a phenomenon like Jefferson, like Douglas, like Marx, like Lenin." He was a phenomenon. He was rather slight, impeccably dressed, very erect carriage, head very high, clear voice, his eyes about to smile, especially to a few people. Very quiet, very polite. Especially tender with children, very understanding. Children loved him. Slow to anger but a fierce fighter. Compassionate as I've said, he was no holder of grudges. Often very self critical. He enjoyed life.
Herbert Aptheke...: He loved the theater, music, painting, flowers, good wine, good food. Mr. Redding referred to his smoking at times. He smoked Benson & Hedges, gold taped three times a day after each meal. And he made a little ceremony of it as part of the joy of life. He knew one wine from another. He was very sweet. He was the kind of person you didn't want to leave. He was the kind of person at a trial [inaudible] walking in Sunday, we lived near him. She would say, "Let's visit the doctor." He was lovable." He was above prejudices, he gloried in his passions. They were three in particular, truth, justice and his people. Work, he would say, "[inaudible 00:34:05] there's so much to do." He wasn't all work, as I say, he was laughter too. Very delicious humor. The main thing was work. As I've tried to indicate in sheer dimension his labors are incredible like the output of Shakespeare. His poems, his plays, his books published and unpublished ... There are five unpublished books. His magazines, the Moon, the Horizon, the Crisis, the Brownies book, Phylon, his newspaper columns, his thousands of lectures in every city of the United States. His scores of thousands of letters. He writes to the prisoner in Georgia, "Do not despair."
Herbert Aptheke...: To the teacher in Alabama, "The children need you." The adolescent girl in Mississippi, "Prepare yourself, you must be useful." The aspiring poet in Ohio, "You show much promise but remember, writing poetry is hard work. One of your poems will appear in print in an early Issue." What work he put into the Crisis's poetry contests and drama contests, in college graduate numbers, and what work and what courage in the beautiful baby contest. And his scholarship, of course, his Harvard historical studies of 1896, the Philadelphia Negro 1899, Souls of 1903, his John Brown, which with all its technical errors that are of no consequences, the best biography of John Brown ever written. In terms of John Brown, what is John Brown? Do not be put off by all the other books you read John Brown 1909 by Du Bois. It's a great book. By the way, it was his favorite book. He had many children but that book was his favorite. He loved his John Brown. And the Negro 1915, a pioneering study, of course. His magnum opus, without any doubt is Black Reconstruction, which he wrote and rewrote three times and so on.
Herbert Aptheke...: And has three autobiographies. Darkwater, 1920, Dusk to Dawn, 1940. The thing I edited after his death, which I got in a cloak and dagger fashion after the coup and it came all wet, and I had to hang it up on clothes lines one page at a time with a closed pin. Which he wrote it when he was 90. He wrote it in about 1960. What it meant living and working in Georgia to fight for the full equality of Black people 60 years ago, 70 years ago. What it meant to organize at the turn of the century and in Georgia, scientific conferences on race and the so called Negro question with a budget that never exceeded $1500 a year, never, to which figures of national/international renowned came like Max Weber and Franz Boas. And not once but regularly for 18 years to organize a movement saying no to Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan and the Tuskegee machine, and to do it 65 years ago.
Herbert Aptheke...: To hold pilgrimages to Harpers Ferry and to issue calls for struggle in the name of John Brown 60 years ago. Each time he spoke in public his preparations were endless. His remarks meticulously written down almost always. Delivery timed exactly to the minutes at his disposal, sometimes causing chagrin to his hosts. They tried to get him to come say, "Well, we will not ask much. Please speak 10 minutes." Then he would come to some church who'd be advertising for weeks. And there'd be 1000 people or 2000 people and he'd be introduced and each he'd speak 10 minutes. Once he was asked to come to a dinner and he was very busy, "Oh, well, you just say hello. Just say hello." And he came [inaudible] and he stood up and he said, "Hello."
Herbert Aptheke...: Not atypical was this estimate of a speech he delivered in the summer of 1911. This is part of him. He is also a speaker. Universal Races Congress in London. I take it from a contemporary account in the Manchester Guardian, "The speaker was Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. He spoke with astonishing mastery, lucidity and perfection of phrase. The man was spontaneous yet every sentence was in place. The address was so simple, that an intelligent child one would think could have followed the argument yet at hand so closely the fundamental issue that no specialist who heard it would have refused his tribute of admiration. As a piece of exposition, as an example of oratory, exactly suited to its purpose, it was by far the finest thing that the congress produced." His astonishing industry of cause arose from a consuming passion, passion for justice. I repeat, he wanted dignity, which sounds awfully simple. He wanted dignity on Earth. His own perfect dignity was a reflection.
Herbert Aptheke...: I never found him in dress, other than the dress you would have if you were an ambassador or about to be introduced to the president of some republic. [Tini] and I would fall in on him on a Sunday morning and he'd be half reclining on a couch with some newspaper or some book and he would be dressed with his jacket and his vest just as though he were going to some I don't know what, to be introduced as an ambassador somewhere. I never saw him otherwise. If he was otherwise, he retired. He would excuse himself and so on. Remarkable quality, which of course was part of the struggle I need not spell that out. In public too when he went, [inaudible] manner. He wanted civilized discourse. He wanted human living. His own sensitivity was out of genius. And he lived a Black man in the United States, a Black sensitive man in the United States, a poet. Oh, the irony as Redding called one of his books to make a poet Black. And to make a poet Black and put them in Georgia in 1900s. You want irony, there you've got it. And in him, this fire, this resistance to effrontery, no insult ever went unnoticed by him. However, discipline for the battle, discipline to make a better soldier in the battle. I know no incident where he is described as having lost his wits or his sharp humor or his calm.
Herbert Aptheke...: I never saw him angry. I mean, he had you'd get a deep sense but ... Like I so often get angry, he didn't. I do not know what that is. But I know it was part of his training, emotional stability, calm to fight better. I mean, first is he debated Lothrop Stoddard before 5000 people in Chicago in 1929. Mostly white people. And you know what Lothrop Stoddard was? He kept his calm, including the question period, before that sea of white arrogant, ignorant faces asking him, "Where can I get somebody to wash my clothes?" The gentleman, the scholar, the fighter, the poet in Black. A student writes from Clark University in Massachusetts on behalf of his whole psychology class in 1906. The class is confronted with a question and no one not even the professor is sure of the answer and this is the question, "Would you please tell us whether or not it is true that Negroes are not able to cry?" There's no answer to this question. There's no carbon copy. Du Bois probably shed a tear and filed it. That was the university known for psychological studies. That's one who introduced Freud to the United States. It was 1906, Massachusetts, not Mississippi. A Christian minister from St. Louis 1910 sends to Du Bois a book. Urges he read it and review it. It's written by the minister.
Herbert Aptheke...: The book's title is the Mystery Solved: The Negro a Beast. An scientific ethnographic expedition is starting out from Denver, Colorado in 1927. And this is the scientific problem in the prospectus of this expedition sent to Du Bois. "Are the inhabitants of Central Africa humans or beasts?" Now, these are special things that come to him in terms of his particular position or reputation. Then there are ordinary events, you're not permitted in the orchestra, you may not eat here, you must go to the rear and so on. Hastening home to Atlanta from Alabama, where he was making a study of sharecropping for the the government, for the Census Bureau in 1906, to find his home and his university in shambles. His wife, who came from a farm here in Iowa, in terror and his little girl wanting to know, "Papa, what did all those men want?" And they'd had a separate compartment, a door where the child was told to hide. Just like in Poland, Jewish children were told where to hide when the pogroms come. So there was a compartment for her to go in and she was there while the mob was doing its work.
Herbert Aptheke...: What did they all want? And arming himself with a shotgun ... He always had a shotgun in the South, in the North, he had a pistol. He kept the pistol in repair, I have the permit of the pistol. When he traveled in the South, he had a pistol with him at all times. And when he lived in the South, he had a shotgun and a pistol. And the mob was still raging, he went out on the porch and stood there with a shotgun and as he writes in his autobiography, "If they come back, I would have spread their red blood over the green grass with the greatest pleasure and taken many before they took me." Now, they did not come back fortunately, one reason being there was resistance. And so he went back into his study and he put a shotgun up on the wall and it went off. And it blew a great many holes in the bound congressional record that he had in the library. The Sons of the American Revolution write him, "We regret to say that while your great great grandfather did fight in the Revolutionary Army, we cannot enroll you as a member since you are not able to supply the marriage certificate binding him and your great great grandmother. We are very sorry." This fire tempered Du Bois, it did not consume him. Whence came the strength so tempered?
Herbert Aptheke...: I think it came from the mass. Innumerable, incorruptible and irresistible. Du Bois was not a m=ass man. Du Bois did not like meetings. He did not seek leadership. He did not want power. I do not state these things as compliments. I do not conceive of them as complimentary. I state them simply as facts. Some described Du Bois as arrogant. Du Bois was not arrogant, he was shy. He did not like crowds. He was a poet and a scholar in temperament. In 1907, he wrote a letter of resignation from the Niagara Movement to his dear friend George Crawford. And what was the letter? They were having the annual meeting of the Niagara Movement and he said, "George, I am so sick of this, of the bickering and Forbes won't speak to Trotter and Mrs. Trotter won't speak to God know who, and I've got to get an executive committee together. And here I am in Boston with some of the greatest libraries in the world, Boston Public Library, the Antiquarian Library's nearby. That's where I want to be. That's what I want to do." But he didn't send the letter. He kept the letter. Because he knew who he was, and that it would be of consequence, historically but he didn't send it. And he did remain the general secretary. His tremendous courage and endurance. He didn't like it.
Herbert Aptheke...: I sometimes wish he had but he didn't. But Du Bois was believed, he was followed, he was encouraged by the masses among his people. Not only the intelligentsia took pride in him, or the professionals who admired him, they did but it was also the croppers and tenants and workers who knew that he was strong and honest. And they knew he was on their side. They wrote him thousands of times and told him so. I have the letters. So did the youth in particular, Black youth and white too but of course, mostly Black. Strong as Du Bois was, had he not had that, I doubt even he could have made it. Could have withstood the pressure, held off the doubts, overcome the despair, and live through the indignities but with him he could and he did. Du Bois also had the vision not only of the Afro American but of the American white also someday understanding and joining together, especially the working masses among the whites. Du Bois was always a union man. The Crisis carried the union button even when the Typographical Union was lily white.
Herbert Aptheke...: Du Bois was very early attracted as I told you to socialism certainly by 1904. Du Bois was a friend of the Bolshevik Revolution ... Critical friend but a friend of the Bolshevik Revolution, from its birth, publicly announced this repeatedly at least as early as 1919. Du Bois had serious differences with the Communist Party and it with him, especially in the '30s. But he never permitted himself to become a red-baiter, although he was frequently invited to do so I assure you. Du Bois studied Marx with great care about 50 years ago. He gave one of the earliest graduate seminars on Marx in any university, maybe the first in the summer of 1933. Before he left Atlanta, he gave a graduate seminar at that university, which was entitled Karl Marx and the American Negro. He saw 35 years ago that the battle for civil liberties was only one element and a start only in the whole struggle for Black liberation. He insisted that economic questions, jobs, prices, food, housing, training constituted the nub of the subject. It was basically because of this that he left the NAACP in the 1930s and was fired in the 1940s basically because of his insistence on an anti-imperialist struggle.
Herbert Aptheke...: His poet's soul and genius, his mind saw 60 years ago, the coming rebellion especially oppressed of the earth, which of course is the hallmark of present history, and the coming together of the dark people, the death of colonialism, the vision of pan-Africa. Never did he see this in an exclusionary sense. On the contrary, always Du Bois insisted it was part of the general social and class phenomenon of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of various forms of social-isms. In racism, colonialism, imperialism, and the structure monopoly, Du Bois thought he saw the heart of the war danger. Since he thought he saw that, he said so. One of the central features of his work and his writing was the struggle against war and he died as his last message says, I'll read it to you, "In the conviction that the peace would be one." In combining all these visions and working so effectively for the realization Du Bois is the pioneer among Americans.
Herbert Aptheke...: Now, nothing can erase the fact that Du Bois in his 92nd year and with the McCarran Act on the books and prosecution under it having begun, announced publicly his decision to join the Communist Party of the United States. By the way, when I wrote that sentence, "nothing can erase the fact," I was naive in terms of the United States because I have just read the syllabus or whatever you call it, or what they call Black studies by the Teachers Union of New York, Mr. Albert Shanker. And it's one of these contributions things with this man and that man, it has a page on Du Bois. And in that page, it says ... About halfway down, "In 1961, Dr. Du Bois joined ..." That's the printed book. That obviously, it was done by a communist agent. Because anyone knows that any child who gets that book will at once hurry to the teacher and say, "What did he join?" Isn't that right? Yes. So obviously, one of my comrades did that. So I must have a footnote before I publish this that nothing can erase the fact except Mr. Shanker.
Herbert Aptheke...: Historically speaking nothing can erase the fact that he joined the Communist Party in 1961. He, in joining said, he saw it in his opinion as embodying the best in radical and liberating tradition of this country and the best in the egalitarian and militant traditions of mankind. In this sense and as a direct continuation and logical combination of his own superb life, joining that party symbolized for him, his convictions as to what was true and what was necessary. And once he had such convictions he acted throughout his life, his convictions changed. Convictions based upon a life I remind you marked by such study and such creativity and such universal experiences as to make Dr. Du Bois the American of the 20th century, as Frederick Douglass had been, in my opinion, the American of the 19th. The eradication of the stench of racism will begin the erasing of the shame of Du Bois's hounding. Then with racism, extirpated cities and states revive with each other in this country in naming the loveliest parks and most magnificent schools, the W.E.B. Du Bois.
Herbert Aptheke...: How difficult with heartbreaking setbacks, the arrogance of the dominant classes, the sheer cruelty of monopoly, the unconcerned while the whole people was crucified. At times, the pain was so great it squeezed out from his heart. As after the 1906 Atlanta slaughter, in his great poem, his Litany, one of the great poems in English. He has this in it, "Wither, North is greed and South is blood. Within the coward and without the liar wither to death." But these were moments of doubt, rare and overcome. His life is a hymn not to doubt but to confidence. Now it should not be forgotten in conclusion that when one speaks of Du Bois, he is speaking of an agitator and a fighter.
Herbert Aptheke...: As to agitation, he wrote in the first volume in the Crisis back in 1910, certain friends that urged that perhaps the agitational method was harmful rather than helpful. "Not so," said Du Bois. "Such honest critics mistake the function of agitation. A toothache is agitation. Is a toothache a good thing? No. Is it therefore useless? No. It is supremely useful for it tells the body of decay and death. Without it, the body would suffer unknowingly. It would think all is well in lo, danger lurks." He always held to the belief in human progress. He insisted that its inevitability was not independent of but dependent upon man's activities. Basic to human progress, he held was the radical, the disturber, the agitator, the organizer. These are the ones he wrote in The Crisis in 1914, who, "Seeing the disinherited and the damned, can never sit still and silent. On the contrary, these are the men and women who go down in the blood and dust of battle. They say ugly things to an ugly world. They spew the lukewarm fence straddlers out of their mouths like the god of old. They cry aloud and spare not their shouts from the house tops. And they make this world so damned uncomfortable with its nasty burden of evil that it tries to get good and does get perhaps a little bit better."
Herbert Aptheke...: The quarter million of us who marched in Washington the day after he died and over 63 heard his name called by Roy Wilkins with a certain irony and knew that he had carried the banner at their head for over half a century. Could not help thinking of Margaret Walker's great poem for my people, was that Black woman out of Birmingham and written in 1937, "Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and of a strength of final clenching be the pulse in our spirits, in our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear, let the race of men now rise and take control." It is likely that generation is here. And its time is now. This is true everywhere in the world and it is true here. That it is true and to the degree that it is true.
Herbert Aptheke...: And that this is the generation, owes more to William Edward Burghardt Du Bois than to any other single human being that has ever lived. "He died," writes his widow, "After only a few hours of illness without pain after the sun had set, darkness had gathered." In his typical way he wrote his what he called his last message years before in preparation for this final rest. It was dated June 26 1957. It was given to the keeping of his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. It did read as follows in total. "It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say the last goodbye to one's loved ones, friends and to all familiar things in this life. I am going to take a long, deep and endless sleep. This is not a punishment but a privilege to which I've looked forward for years. I have loved my work. I have loved people in my play. But always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life. What I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others. Endless days, to be finished perhaps better than I could have done.
Herbert Aptheke...: Anyway, peace will be my applause, one thing alone I charge you. As you live believe in life. Always human beings will live and progress to greater broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly because time is long. And now, goodbye." I have a friend who died in Georgia in 1915, breaking his heart in the fight against depression. Du Bois then wrote, "Oh, the long years, the voices of little Black children shall make his silence sweet." Surely it is so with him. But though now the doctor is silent, we hear him. All who seek the good life hear him and will forever. The beacon dims but the dawn rises. We thank you dear Dr. Du Bois. Thank you.