THE BLACK THINKER:
An examination of W. E. Du Bios’ life
By Paul Andrew Bourne
William Edward Burghardt DuBois, to his admirers, was by spirited devotion and scholarly dedication, an attacker of injustice and a defender of freedom
Gerald C. Hynes
W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) DuBois was born to Alfred and Mary Burghardt DuBois on February 23, 1868 in a small New England village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, United States, where the African American community was small in numbers but were very well respected (McKissack 17). DuBois’ father, Alfred, left the family home for good when DuBois was young (i.e. left home soon after he was born) and so he was raised by his mother, Mary (McKissack 16). He was the only child for his mother, Mary, who emphasized education and hard work as the vehicle of social mobility and success. DuBois was the first African American to have graduated of his class and the foremost African American to have graduated in Great Barrington (DuBois 99).
Because Fisk University was not located in Great Barrington but to the South, DuBois had to relocate to Tennessee where he first experienced overt segregation and racism. Although W. E. B. DuBois was experiencing segregation, he was still able to surround himself with educated African-Americans and liberal whites who were instrumental in awakening the social consciousness within this young man. He later posits, “I was tossed boldly into the ‘Negro Problem’ . . . I suddenly came to a region where the world was split into white and black halves, and where the darker half was held back by race prejudice and legal bonds, as well as by deep ignorance and dire poverty” (DuBois 108). This may have begun the social reformist consciousness within DuBois and may have propelled the willing to use himself as an example to both the white and black races.
On graduating from Fisk University in 1888 with a BA in Philosophy, between 1888 and 1890, he entered Harvard University as a junior and received a B.A cum laude. DuBois did post graduate work at Harvard University between 1890 and 1892 where he pursued and successfully completed a M.A in sociology. He was angered by his ex-president Rutherford B Hayes’s assertion that he (Rutherford Hayes) could not find a worthy student to take advantage of a fund to educate Negro students. This assertion angered DuBois, the later reformist and social activist, greatly and so he applied directly to Hayes and was given the grant.
While DuBois was at Harvard University, he distant himself from the system, he felt the purpose of him being there was to “Improve the condition of the race as a whole” (McKissack, 30). DuBois was so adamant about the segregation that while at Harvard, he chose not to socialize with many of the other Harvard students, choosing instead to spend his time with the African-American in Boston, encasing himself in a completely coloured world (DuBois, 136). It was during that period that DuBois solidified his belief that education was the cure of his people. He believed that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the seas” ( Weinberg, 81). As such, DuBois theorize that education was the only way the African-American will save themselves from poverty and racism. In 1896, he was awarded a PhD from Harvard; his dissertation read “Suppression of the African Slave Trade” (DuBois). He was the first African American to have received a Ph.D. from the University (Harvard).
Between 1892 and 1895, while completing his doctorial dissertation, DuBois brilliantly projected the possibility of subjecting to scientific scrutiny the problem of race in the modern world. This inevitably placed DuBois in an irreparable conflict with the social Darwinism, and the hereditarianism research programme which attempted to verify it. Between 1897 and 1914, Dubois conducted numerous studies of black society in America, he published 16 research papers. He began his investigations believing that social science could provide answers to race problems. Gradually he concluded that in a climate of virulent racism, social change could only be accomplished by agitation and protest. These were the dominant ‘ideoshanal’ and research paradigms on race matters with Anglo American social psychology of the time. Both actively capitulated and apologized for racism, both vigorously supported class exploitation; each claimed that social structure and social behaviour for the consequences of inherited genetic characteristics.
DuBois began his academic and public careers at a time when the forces of reaction had achieved political, ‘ideoshanal’ and cultural supremacy in the United States. It was within this background that he began his long journey in pursuit of the truth. He taught that this truth could be studied through scientific investigation. Scientific rigor and an unbending partisanship to the cause of African-American equality defined the part he chose. In retrospect, Du Bois’ scientific effort has prevailed over both Herbert Spencer’s and Francis Galton’s research programme of scientific racism. W. E. B. DuBois brought back the German scientific ideal from the University of Berlin and was one of the first to initiate scientific sociological study in the United States.
Dr DuBois thrust eagerly and indepthly into research. He believed that the race problem (segregation and white racism) was one of ignorance. So, he was determined to unearth scientific knowledge as much as he could, thereby provide the "cure" for color prejudice. Williams’ unrelenting research led into historical investigation, statistical and anthropological measurement, and sociological interpretation. The outcome of this exhaustive endeavor was published as The Philadelphia Negro (Hynes). "It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence." This was the first time such a scientific approach to studying social phenomena was undertaken.
On the completion of the study (the scientific observation of The Philadelphia Negro), he accepted a position at Atlanta University to further his teachings in sociology. For approximately thirteen (13) years there DuBois wrote and intensely studied the Negro morality, urbanization, Negroes in business, college-bred Negroes, the Negro church, and Negro crime. William DuBois also repudiated the widely held view of Africa as a vast cultural cipher by presenting a historical version of complex, cultural development throughout Africa. His works left no issue unturned in an effort to promote and help social reform. Many argue that because of DuBois’ outpouring of information "there was no study made of the race problem in America which did not depend in some degree upon the investigations made at Atlanta University."
W E B DuBois, the scientist, the social reformer, the advocate of black equality and the pioneer begin the introduction of scientific racism must be among the fathers of sociology. Furthermore, in Tony Monteiro’s view:
In retrospect, DuBois's scientific effort has prevailed over both Herbert Spencer's
and Francis Galton's; that is, the research program of scientific racism. This in spite
of the fact that scientific racism continues to rear its ugly head, as revealed in the
publication of The Bell Curve. DuBois's emphasis upon class and social structure
as the primary causal factors of social behavior, social action and social conflict,
subsequently propelled a tradition in American social science that stretches from
Franz Boas, to the Chicago School of Sociology and up till the present. Professor
E. Digby Baltzell argues that Franz Boas in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911)
was echoing the findings of DuBois when he wrote that "the traits of the American
Negro are adequately explained on the basis of his history and his social
status...without falling back upon the theory of hereditary inferiority." DuBois's
historical research, beginning with the Suppression of the African Slave Trade
(1895), through Black Reconstruction (1935), Black Folk Then and Now
(1939) and The World and Africa (1947) laid a materialist foundation in American
and African historiography. His masterwork in philosophy The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) remains a central achievement in moving American philosophy beyond
the strictures of pragmatism and positivism.
DuBois’s literary production is rather massive. According to Herbert Apthker, “it is on a Dickenson scale”. Yet more than this, his contribution in many respects laid a scientific materialist foundation for sociology and historiography. His most important works have that rare quality that brings paradigmatic; setting the broad philosophical and conceptual outlines of disciplinary research. In this respect, his work in both sociology and history established an alternative research programme. The DuBoisian’s paradigm is a consistent alternative to sociobiology, the assimilationist and the declining significance of rare paradigms. DuBois’s scholarship in history, sociology, social history, political economy and literature has the quality of taking on fundamental questions in a scientific and courageous manner. This gives a time less quality to his most important work and many of his historical predictions. Of this kind is DuBois’s brilliant prediction at the beginning of this century that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of colour line.” The lasting significance of this prediction is that of making it. He did not absolutize the issue of race by suggesting that it is not the only problem of this century, nor did he separate race from the modified problems that emerged in the twentieth century. But what his scholarship and research sought to do was to verify the interactive relationship between race, class and the multi-level configuration of the social structure of modern society. Du Bois saw race in a global context. He connected the problem of race to the colonial system and the world economic system. Du Bois was one of twenty nine (29) men who formed the Niagara Movement that was later merged with a white liberalism to form the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in 1909 (Broderick).
Du Bois prophetically saw the world with a new colonialism and the same old human slavery which once ruined us, to a third world war, which will ruin the world. As a result, he also called for the outlawing of nuclear weapons. The richness of DuBois’s work can be problem in his works such as the The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896), The Philadelphia Negro (1892), and The Black Reconstruction as few of them. In The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, he evinces an approach to history writings that does not include advocacy or partnership. This masterpiece was out of print and publication for some fifty (50) years. What an irony? In 1954, the Social Science Press re-established the publication of The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. Within that Edition, Du Bois included a ‘postlude’ which is a short explanation of some omissions he made in the book. He considered a particular naiveté with respect to human psychology which reflected the pre-Freudian epoch of the book’s production and the other weaknesses to that he gave most of the weight was the ‘Marxian analyses’. Du Bois acknowledge the existing emphasis in the book but indicated the absence of the concept of class domination of the state, class struggle and class interest as basic to the historical process.
DuBois’s blackness and the fact that he was an African-American, did not cripple his ability to explore beyond the natural but was the hallmark on which he sought to show the equality of the African, as it relates to scholarship. The Philadelphia Negro clearly shows the scholastic aptitude of this black man (Du Bois) as was set out to be proven by Du Bois. The Philadelphia Negro is the first major work of Americas and by extension the world in regard empirical sociology and remains unsuppressed in it methodology, research design, conceptualization, scope and rigor (Katlz). Although the Philadelphia Negro is basically ignored by most scholars in the field, it is the pre-eminent model in sociology. The Philadelphia Negro can be considered to be part of a larger scientific project which included Du Bois’s Atlanta studies. Between 1897 and 1910 Du Bois headed a team of researchers who rigorously studied the race question in the United States and the situation of the African-Americans. He took charge of the Atlanta University’s annual sociological conferences. This conference was attended by imminent scholars such as Max Weber and Franz Boas who would present scholarship papers. As such, Du Bois’s scholarship became a central part of the movements of reform and against poverty and racism. In this Du Bois stated that the final design of the work is to lie before the publics. Continuing, he believed that the body of information may be a safe guide for all efforts towards the solution of the Negro problems of great America. By 1896, Du Bois already understood what many conservatives and liberal sociologists have not yet digested “ghettoization” and poverty are not the creations of the poor but are as a result of the processes controlled by economic and political forces far removed from the ghetto and the poor themselves. He posits poverty, “ghettoization” and crime are symptoms of institutional and structural racism.
In spite of DuBois’s marvelous scholastic achievements, a generation later, in favourable reviews in Harris and Spencers’s The Black Worker, critiqued his Philadelphia Negro for a certain ‘provincialism’ which intended to view the oppression of black people from the view of religion, humanity and sentiment; rather than from the position of socio-economic realities and alignments. DuBois a scholar from the school of William James, George Santayana and Hegel, was fully aware of the epistemological crisis facing philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. The Souls is a unique DuBoisian’s effort to philosophically address the problem of race and the failure of American pragmatism to provide a philosophical framework for a social science of race. Another work by this intuitive scholar was Black Reconstruction. The book received a positive reception and an enthusiastic response from the Afro-American periodicals and journals. His long association with Pan African efforts, the imminent historian Rayford Logan, said that Black Reconstruction revealed that Du Bois was both a merciless critic and a constructive historian. According to Logan the real value of this epoch making book is that it is the first Marxian interpretation of this crucial period. DuBois also sought to make clear that Reconstruction was an episode in the entire worldwide struggle of the rich against the poor. The book did not only review and approach the specificity of the land question in the south but the entire matter of property right; indeed, he called one of the most pregnant chapters in the book “Counter-Revolution of Property”.
DuBois rejected the naïve optimism of American exceptionalism and idealism of hegelimism. In The History of the American Negro he argued, 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 merger, he wished neither a lost of the older self. He maintained that real history should be confronted head on, and thus sought to construct a philosophy of real history and of human action. Charles Wesley, an historian, portrayed Du Bois as a “Lyric historian, the literary knight with a plumbed pen”.
Why the visible marginalization of Du Bois in sociology? It would appear that both contemporary and traditional sociologists have not seen it fitting to epitomize Du Bois to the premier status of being one of the founding fathers of the discipline. Despite his unprecedented contributions to the discipline and the materialist foundation that Du Bois has offered to the branch of the social science, his legacy is somewhere between the opaque lines in all sociological texts and the untold of the captured. This essay has outlined the scholarastic materialist foundation of Dr Du Bois as it relates to the scientific approach of the study of issue as race and the invaluable legacy that he has felt for the study of other social phenomena that were once conceive as unscientific. Then why is W E B Du Bois not mentioned in the same sentence with persons like Max Weber, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. Answer – the same phenomenon that he (Dr Du Bois) studied.
Auguste Comte is lauded for his contributions to sociology and epitomized to the helm of the discipline because of firstly coining the term sociology and secondly laying the materialist foundation that the subject would be studied with the same scientific rigours as the natural sciences. Did Auguste Comte use empirical evidence to validate his position that social phenomena could be externalized and as a result be studied with the same scientific rigours as the natural sciences? Answer – No. Then, why is he among the fathers of the discipline? Answer – he was the first individual to have established the notion of a discipline known as sociology. In addition to distinguished characteristics that are fundamental to the establishment of the study of the discipline as was previously mentioned.
Marxian theorizing represented a significant growth of the postulations of some the greatest representatives of beliefs, economic idea, and socialism. Those positions are the essence, a fusion of German philosophy, English economic thought, and the best of French socialism (Rob Sewell, 1994). As such, it was that Marx matured under an atmosphere of Hegelianism and its unavoidable influence – through radical Hegelianism and the Young Hegelians (Jim Blaut, Hegelian and Marxist Dialects, 2002). That influence became apparent in Marx’s dialectical approach to understanding the fundamental sociological question: “How is society Possible?”
The theoretical intercourse that occurs within Marxian thought is made apparent through the many manifestations of the dialectics within society. For distinguished sociologist, Karl Marx, the role of the dialectic is in analyzing the antagonistic and contradicting forces within society. So, conflict then becomes one of, if not the most important concept used in Marxian thought to explain or show the existence of the dialectical nature of society. It should be noted that, a dialectical relationship also exists in Marxian theorizing, between the structures or infrastructure and the superstructure, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (that is, the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and the exploited), ‘class consciousness’ and ‘false consciousness’, and even between conflict and equilibrium.