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L IIain
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A
Empowering African-American Manhood,
Empowering African-American Politics:
The Quest of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1890-1920
Amanda Laugesen
W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most influential and significant African-American
intellectuals, with a career that spanned the decades from the late nineteenth century
until his death in 1963. This article is an attempt to make an examination of Du
Bois' political thought in the first phase of his career - from 1890 until the end of
the First World War, when Du Bois turned to Marxism to reconfigure his thinking.
The constructions of 'race' and 'manhood' within his political thought are of critical
importance in understanding his pre-war thinking. Manhood in particular has
remained an understudied element in Du Bois' thought. Du Bois both pushed the
boundaries of these constructions, and remained imprisoned within them. But his
understandings of race and manhood remained inadequate for the African-American
political agenda, and as the Great War shattered faith in the old 'truths', Du Bois
turned to other intellectual paradigms to inform his work and politics.
‘Civilization has met its Waterloo’, wrote William Edward Burghardt
Du Bois as the Great War spread across Europe in 1916.1 As for so many
intellectuals, the war forced a reconsideration of long-cherished ideals and
certainties. Du Bois saw that nothing would ever be the same again: that
truths were being fragmented and opportunities had to be grasped.
For Du Bois, the United States’ entry into the war opened up battlefields
on which the African-American man could prove his worth, prove his
‘manhood’. Du Bois initially saw the Great War as a war ‘for liberty’, a
war that could change the position of African-Americans at home and make
America ‘a real land of the free’.2 As Du Bois rallied the African-American
community to support the United States’ intervention into the European
conflict, he argued that America was his country:
We have worked for it, we have suffered for it, we
have fought for it; we have made its music, we have
tinged its ideals, its poetry, its religion, its dreams.
We have reached in this land our highest modern
development, and nothing humanly speaking, can
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prevent us from eventually reaching here the full
stature of our manhood.3
Supporting the war did not represent a capitulation to white America.
As Du Bois wrote tellingly, ‘today our souls are ours, but our bodies belong
to our country’.4 Yet many have puzzled why Du Bois was so in favour of
the war. It is perhaps not so surprising when his position on race, manhood
and the United States is considered, because he truly believed the war
could achieve for African-Americans what might take years to achieve
otherwise. He had already been involved in intellectual and political life
for several decades, and the little progress won was hard fought and slow
in coming.
Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868 and enjoyed an upbringing
that offered him excellent opportunities for education. He studied at both
Harvard and the University of Berlin in the 1890s. He earned a PhD in 1895,
writing a dissertation on slavery, and went on to do pioneering studies in
sociology, especially in the study of African-American communities, and
held numerous teaching posts at American universities.5
Du Bois’ experience of a lynching while working in Atlanta in 1899 has
been seen as the catalyst for his move into politics.6 A few years later, Atlanta
saw a wave of racial violence which moved him into an ever more radical
political position. Most significantly, Du Bois set himself up in opposition
with Booker T. Washington, an influential African-American leader who
advocated accommodationism and technical education for AfricanAmericans, and who had been seen to that point as the main spokesman
for African-Americans.7 Du Bois helped establish the Niagara Movement,
an all-black organization that sought to organize the voice of black protest,
and looked to unite with other ‘oppressed peoples’ in the world.8
Du Bois was then invited to lead the newly established National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was
the founder and editor of the significant newspaper of that organization,
Crisis. Through his writings for numerous newspapers, public speeches,
and the organization of public demonstrations, Du Bois crucially shaped
the political discourse of not only the African-American community
but also American political and cultural discourse as a whole. He also
involved African-American protest with world protest movements,
travelling around the world and involving himself in such meetings as PanAfrican Congresses.
The United States entered the Great War in April 1917, and by July,
some 700 000 African-Americans had registered to serve.9 Du Bois fought
to have African-Americans commissioned as officers, a vision only partially
fulfilled. Still optimistic, Du Bois travelled to Paris in 1918 for Versailles
and the Pan-African Congress. But an investigation into the reality of
the soldiers’ experience was a depressing story of discrimination. Those
soldiers returning home faced a backlash. Over 78 lynchings, along with a
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wave of mayhem and arson, were recorded in the summer of 1918. White
newspapers in the South boasted about the bloody prospects for returning
soldiers who might expect better treatment.10
In 1919, Du Bois looked back on the story of the African-American in
the Great War. He recorded the fine duty of the soldiers in Europe, winning
medals for distinguished service. Yet, ‘anti-Negro prejudice was rampant in
the American army and the officers particularly were subjected to all sorts
of discrimination’.11 For Du Bois, there was no excuse for the treatment
suffered by black soldiers, but it showed up clearly the truth of America ‘the
real, inner spirit of American prejudice’.12 African-Americans had proven
themselves in the ultimate testing ground of manhood, yet would not be
given the recognition they had earned, as white America displayed its true
racist nature.
Du Bois articulated the agony of the African-American position as
African-Americans were denied the opportunity to show their patriotism
in a country which failed to fully recognize their citizenship or civil rights.
He pointedly suggested the gulf between the real and the ideal America,
writing: ‘For America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for
the dominant Southerner oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought
in bitter resignation.’13
The Great War shattered the intellectual premises upon which Du Bois
had based his politics. To that point, he had continually questioned and
reconfigured the truths of his thinking, but the war and its aftermath brought
him to a crisis point. Understanding Du Bois’ thinking and politics before
this critical moment is essential in illuminating the intellectual atmosphere
in America before the war, and, most crucially, can provide insight into
the evolution of African-American political thought and rhetoric from the
turn of the century to the First World War. In particular, constructions
of ‘race’ and ‘manhood’ were essential to this configuration of political
thought, and have not been closely examined by historians.14 It can help
explain why Du Bois looked to the war with such hope and why the reality
of the war and subsequent events challenged his political thought to such
an extent.
Such an examination requires a critical rethinking of manhood in the
public sphere, and, in particular, of African-American manhood. As Joan
Scott has articulated: ‘Gender is one of the recurrent references by which
political power has been conceived, legitimated and criticised.’15 The idea
of a white manhood’ helped to legitimate the American system that denied
African-Americans a place; the idea of an ‘African-American manhood’
provided an active basis for criticizing that system. Gail Bederman’s
Manliness and Civilization has examined the crucial nexus of discourses on
gender, ‘civilization’ and race. By examining several intellectual and cultural
figures in turn-of-the-century America, she sought to illuminate ‘some of
the different discursive positions it was possible to take in relation to race,
manhood and civilization’.16 I seek to do something similar in looking at Du
14
Amanda Laugesen
Bois. Like Bederman, I seek to see Du Bois as working within and actively
shaping political discourse. As Bederman puts it:
Only certain types of truths, and therefore only certain
possibilities for actions, are imaginable under the
terms of existing discourses. Yet because so many
potential ambiguities and contradictions exist
within any discourse many possibilities for dissent
and resistance always remain.17
Du Bois worked within particular discourses about race and manhood
but also sought to reshape them and use them to empower his politics. Race
was something he used actively and critically, but, if he worked to reshape
meanings of race at the time, he was more constrained by his understandings
of gender and manhood. Gender needed to remain a stable construct so
that the boundaries of the meanings of race could be pushed. In this way,
Du Bois drew upon and reinforced prevailing concepts of manhood; but
equally used them to subvert meanings of race. Advocating an AfricanAmerican manhood was a powerfully subversive and challenging idea in
a white America that saw African-American men as violent and sexually
threatening.18
‘One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body’,
wrote Du Bois in perhaps his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk.19
This duality was inscribed on the body of the African-American, entangled
in their lives and consciousness. ‘African-American’ embodied the tensions
of this duality, and Du Bois agonized about the necessity of embracing a
hyphenated identity. Within ‘African-American’ the boundaries of racial
and national identities blurred. Embracing it provided some solution: one
could ‘be both a Negro and an American’, but, inevitably, the tensions of
this identity threatened to tear the very fabric of it apart.20
As Du Bois despaired over the unrealized opportunities offered by the
Great War, he realized that the ‘Americanness’ of ‘African-Americaness’
was perhaps false, a potentially destructive and hopeless identity not to
be embraced. But before the war, Du Bois saw no way out of addressing
the dilemma. What to make of America? What to make of American
civilization?
History bound the African-American people together through their
common legacy. They were ‘of one descent, children of a common
sorrow’.21 The legacy of slavery weighed heavily on the shoulders of the
African-American community, but also offered them a heritage that could
be empowering. They had helped to shape America. ‘Would America have
been American without her Negro people?’, asked Du Bois.22
Du Bois saw the future, as he saw the past, of the African-American as
intimately linked to America. ‘There is nothing so indigenous, so completely
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’’made in America’’ as we’, he wrote in 1919.23 African-Americans had as
much claim to America as did the white American. It was as much ‘ours’
as ‘theirs’. But it was not as simple as this. Embracing hyphenation meant
occupying an anomalous, even problematic, position.
Du Bois critiqued the present state of America - as an ‘African’, but held
on to its promise - as an ‘American’. African-Americans should equally
embrace their African heritage, acknowledging ‘that Africa is in truth his
greatest fatherland’.24 Du Bois was conceiving of the African-American as
the embodiment of the best of both Africa and of America, a unique type
that could redeem the world. He wrote that the African-American
does not wish to Africanise America, for America has
too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not
wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white
Americanism, for he believes - foolishly, perhaps,
but fervently - that Negro blood has yet a message
for the world.25
Before the war destroyed Du Bois’ faith in progress and civilisation, he
argued that African-Americans could lead the way into a more evolved
civilisation. Using the concept of ‘civilisation’ as a political tool, Du Bois
held up an ideal of Civilisation to critique the imperfect present civilisation
of the United States.26 African-Americans had to help achieve this more
perfect Civilisation: ‘Here are the paths which civilization points out and
in those paths we must plod.’27 He used this to admonish and agitate the
African-American community. It was their duty to uphold Civilisation and
dedicate themselves to its ideals such as justice, freedom and culture.28 Du
Bois exhibited a faith in ‘Civilisation’ as an ideal but not in ‘civilisation’ as
he lived and experienced it. America’s present could be effectively critiqued
while maintaining a hope in the future.
Underpinning this argument was a dynamic concept of the meanings
of race. Du Bois recognized that race was a construction, just as ‘AfricanAmerican’ was a construct based on race. Race was a fundamental basis
for assigning difference, a product of biology, an essence. But Du Bois’
understanding of it was a complicated one that conflated biology, culture
and nationality.
At the beginning of his intellectual and political career, Du Bois
mapped out his views on race. In 1897, Du Bois saw the history of the
world as essentially the history of races.29 Physical differences played a
part in defining races, but he believed that the real meaning of race lay in
the ‘universal prevalence of the race idea, the race spirit, the race ideal’.30
Each race had a unique message to give to the world. The ‘complete Negro
message of the whole Negro race has not as yet been given to the world’,
Du Bois believed.31 This was then their special destiny: to discover, and
16
Amanda Laugesen
subsequently carry out, the promise of this message.
In an article entitled ‘The Souls of White Folk’, Du Bois referred to the
importance and function of ‘whiteness’, recognizing its social construction
beyond any pure biological meaning. He argued that whiteness was
something ‘discovered’ in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The
modern world in ‘a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that
it is white and by that token, wonderful!’32 Du Bois denied that AfricanAmericans wished to be white, refuting the logic that: ‘White men alone are
men. This Negro wants to be a man. Ergo he wants to be a white man.’33 As
his thinking developed, and he rethought the meaning of race, it was clear
that his belief in race’s constructedness provided important insights. While
racial difference may be real, this did not mean that African-Americans were
inferior - indeed, by the logic of seeing race as a construction, they could be
superior. White America had, by establishing and giving meaning to racial
difference, given Du Bois little choice but to embrace his racial otherness
or destroy his African-American identity in the process.
The African-American was thus the significant figure on the margins of
American civilisation: ‘A sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this American world.’34 These seventh sons were the
saviors of Civilisation, not just in America but possibly in the world. By
1920, Du Bois saw the ‘darker races’ as uplifting the world.
A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men. If
the uplift of humanity must be done by men, then
the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the
hands of the darker nations.35
Any struggle for the survival of the fittest would see a ‘triumph of the good,
the beautiful and the true’, that is, the colored races.36
But as Du Bois stretched, tested and empowered the meanings of race,
gender, also crucial to his political thinking, appeared to remain a stable
element. ‘Manhood’, like ‘race’, figured crucially in Du Bois’ thought and
informed his politics.37 Neither can be seen as stable, both were historically
specific and critically informed by the context of the discourse in which
they were produced. Du Bois infused race with new meanings that could
empower and inform African-American political consciousness. Gender,
specifically manhood, also informed this consciousness, but Du Bois was
far less aware of the constructions of gender that he worked with. While
Du Bois did not reject race as some sort of essential element, he reshaped its
meanings. Gender constructions were less consciously reshaped, less open
to question. Indeed, Du Bois relied on a perceived stable understanding
of manhood to infuse his race politics with power and meaning.38 In this
way, he could draw upon and even reinforce prevailing concepts of
manhood, but subvert the construction of whiteness, and specifically,
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white manhood. Seeing African-American males as ‘men’ in the fully
gendered understanding of the word could be powerfully challenging
and subversive.
Du Bois reflected turn-of-the-century understandings of manhood
that emphasized character and such qualities as vigor, strength, hard
work, moral strength and purpose. ‘Manhood’ stood in opposition to the
emasculating effects of modern urban and industrial life. As Bederman
has seen, white, middle-class manhood around the turn of the century
was placing increasing emphasis on the values of self-mastery and virility,
in reaction to perceived threat from immigrants, the working classes and
racial ‘others’. ‘The power of manhood, as the middle class understood it’,
explains Bederman, ‘encompassed the power to wield civic authority to
control strife and unrest, and to shape the future of the nation’.39 Du Bois’
desire to empower African-American manhood was thus a direct challenge
to a white manhood predicated on such attitudes, even as it borrowed its
language and values.
Du Bois sought to refute the preconception that African-American males
were less than men. White Americans, he realized, saw African-American
males as lacking manhood; they were ‘not “men” in the sense that Europeans
are men’.40 The segregated system of ‘Jim Crow’ was viewed as a direct
assault on African-American manhood. If this system ordered blacks to sit
in a different railway car to whites, then that problem for Du Bois was not
so much that he had to sit in a particular train car, ‘as the fact that behind the
public opinion that compels me to ride there, is a denial of my manhood’.41
He asked whites: ‘Shall you measure men according to their manhood or
according to their race and colour?’42 In responding to this denial, it was
vital to assert one’s manhood and thus one’s power. In ‘A Philosophy
for 1913’ published in Crisis as a call to action for his male readers,
Du Bois wrote:
In fine, I will be a man and know myself to be one,
even among those who secretly and openly deny my
manhood, and I shall persistently and unwaveringly
seek by every possible method to compel all men to
treat me as I treat them.43
Du Bois worried that too many African-American males were not acting
as men, and were failing to assert themselves. ‘Fellow Negroes, is it not time
to be men?’, admonished Du Bois.44 His conception of manhood was also of
a morally based manhood, in keeping with prevalent ideals. For AfricanAmerican males, ‘moral uplift was a priority’.45 But if manhood was still the
goal to be achieved for males, it was held up against the perfect womanhood
of the African-American female. They were the ideal, the backbone of the
race who could help males become men.46 While the burden of the legacy
of slavery had fallen on the women, they had nevertheless ‘come through
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Amanda Laugesen
due to superior qualities of character, intellect and ability’.47 Indeed, the
‘sacrifice of Negro women before the [Civil] war for freedom and uplift is
one of the finest achievements in their history’.48
Du Bois prided himself on his support for women: ‘I honor the women of
my race.’49 He supported their political rights and presented positive images
of women. In supporting the women’s vote he expressed his belief that
they would vote ‘morally’ and help prevent political corruption. ‘We need
above all ... the woman’s influence in politics.’50 For him, womanhood was
fully realized for the African-American female, in contrast to the tentative,
yet-to-be-asserted manhood of the African-American male. The realization
of their ‘womanhood’ was not dependent on the vote or recognition of
their rights - although this had to be achieved - rather, they already fully
possessed their dignity and womanliness despite their treatment. ‘No other
women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation
which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America’, Du Bois
declared, ‘with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain’.51 Yet
Du Bois idealised the African-American woman to the point where they
did not appear as real people. He did not write about women extensively
before 1920, and while recognising their great achievements, hard work
and suffering, it was through stereotypical understandings of their lives
and character.52
At the core of Du Bois’ political thinking was a conception of racial,
gendered identity that needed to be embraced and empowered. Du Bois
promoted race pride, writing: ‘Especially do I believe in the Negro Race,
in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul ... I believe in Pride of
race and lineage and self.’53 In a poem, he wrote: ‘I am the smoke king/I
am black/... /I will be black as blackness can/The blacker the mantle
the mightier the man.’54 Race was embraced as a heritage and tradition,
biologically innate and culturally constructed, to be valued and passed
on. Race pride and manhood were intertwined for, Du Bois argued, it was
‘race pride that fights for freedom; it is the man ashamed of his blood who
weakly submits and smiles’.55 Responsibility for securing the recognition of
manhood could only come through ‘more and more manly self-assertion’.56
The realization of an innate sense of pride was to be seen as racial and
essential to the larger fight for rights. African-Americans would fight not
only ‘for their own rights as men, but for the ideals of the greater world in
which they lived’.57
The struggle for civil rights and suffrage was linked to this conception
of racial and gender pride. ‘Only in a demand and a persistent demand’, Du
Bois declared, ‘for essential equality in the modern realm of human culture
can any people show a real pride of race and a decent self-respect’.58 ‘As
one of the Earth’s Disowned I swear to hold my Ballot as the sacred paean
of Liberty for all mankind and for my prisoned race.’59 In Du Bois’ mind,
the freedom of all ‘mankind’ must rest on the recognition of all the ‘others’
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of the world.
Political power and freedom could only be achieved through the
assertion of racial and gender pride. ‘We will not be satisfied’, argued Du
Bois, ‘to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights’.60 What
African-Americans needed were:
Work, culture, liberty ... all striving towards that
vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people,
the ideal of human brotherhood gained through
the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering
and developing the traits and talents of the Negro,
not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but
rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of
the American Republic, in order that some day on
American soil two world-races may give each to each
those characteristics both so sadly lack.61
Du Bois placed a great deal of responsibility on the African-American
community for achieving this future. Indeed, he saw such responsibility
as part of the necessary recognition of African-Americans - as full citizens
of the nation with duties and responsibilities to undertake.
Du Bois recognised the full value and significance of citizenship. ‘I am
by birth and law a free black American citizen’, and he desired all the rights
and duties that came with this.62 The vote was the most important aspect of
modern civic life. He argued that the greatest weapon for human progress
was the power of the ballot.63 The vote was the means to self-respect and
manhood - ‘voting is necessary to modern manhood’ - and thus to power.64
If white America allowed African-Americans to fully exercise their vote they
would also be giving essential recognition to African-American manhood.
Du Bois argued for African-American men to actively fight for this right
to vote, for ‘no people must willingly or passively surrender their essential
rights of manhood’:
The man that supinely sits down and gives up the
rights of manhood or even goes so far as actually to
protest that he doesn’t want them ... such men do not
deserve American citizenship.65
Du Bois rejected a leadership that advocated accommodationism in
any form. To deny accommodationism meant an affirmation of manhood.
In articulating this argument, Du Bois wrote: ‘Those black men, if they
are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and
loyalty to oppose such a course [accommodationism] by all civilized
methods.’66 In an articulation of the intersection of the discourses of race,
manhood and civilisation, Du Bois looked for a leadership among African20
Amanda Laugesen
Americans of
men of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred
men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of
culture, men who thoroughly comprehend and know
civilization and can take hold of Negro communities
and raise and train them by force of precept and
example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of
common blood and ideals.67
Education was an essential path to manhood. Du Bois declared: ‘Make them
men even if they have to be menials.’68 The final product of education and
training should be ‘neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man’.69
Such leadership and training would leave no possibility for criticism from
white America.
Underlying this vision of an ideal future lay an attitude of deep
ambiguity and uncertainty about America and the white community.
Even as Du Bois sought to make white America live up to the promise
enshrined in their Constitution, he recognized that the system was being
used to oppress his people. In defending an African-American boy who
had refused to salute the flag, Du Bois argued that the flag represented
‘a seriously defective country’.70 America had treated him with nothing
but ‘studied insult, dishonesty and cruelty’.71 ‘Instead of standing as a
great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human
brotherhood’, accused Du Bois, ‘America has taken her place as an example
of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples
are concerned.’72 Continuing his attack, Du Bois wrote: ‘For two centuries
America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred.’73 But Du Bois
remained in love with the idea of America, with her potential to be the
greatest of nations, with ‘what America might be - the real America.’74 In a
final expression of regret, Du Bois wrote: ‘We did love our country because
we deemed it capable of realizing our dream and inspiring the greater
world.’75
Here, then, lies the clue to understanding Du Bois reaction to the coming
of the Great War, and his bitterness when his hopes were shattered. Herein
lay the very dilemma of race and manhood in America. Whereas white
America defined manhood as ‘white’, Du Bois sought to find a new AfricanAmerican manhood wherein race pride and community unity could be
established. Neither ‘race’ nor ‘manhood’, in their pre-war understandings,
remained adequate for the realisation of the political agenda of AfricanAmericans. But they were concepts fundamental to Du Bois’ political
thinking and discourse before 1920.
In growing disillusionment with the nature of Western civilisation, Du
Bois began to embrace ‘otherness’, and was prompted to look towards Africa
and its culture for inspiration. Du Bois’ career after the defining moments
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of the Great War embraced socialism, Marxism and, finally, Africa. Du
Bois became increasingly involved with Pan-African movement, and also
with Communism, becoming a member of the Communist Party in 1961.
He decided to abandon America, and became a citizen of Ghana, where he
remained until his death in 1963. Du Bois’ influence on the development of
African-American political consciousness was enormous and long-lasting,
his legacy great. Understanding his conceptions of race and gender in his
early political thinking provides critical insight into the evolution of AfricanAmerican political thought.
Notes
W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Battle of Europe’, Crisis, September 1916, in H.L. Moon (ed.), The Emerging
Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: Essays and Editorials from the Crisis, Simon and Schuster, New York,
1972, p.248. Author is Du Bois in the following notes, unless otherwise stated.
2
‘Awake America’, Crisis, September 1917, in ibid., p.252.
3
‘A Philosophy in Time of War’, Crisis, August 1918, in ibid., p.254.
4
Ibid., p.255.
5
The most comprehensive biographical study of W.E.B. Du Bois and his early career is David
Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919, Henry Holt and Company, New
York, 1993.
6
J. Lester, ‘Introduction’, The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume One,
Vintage Books, New York, 1971, pp.38-39.
7
Ibid., pp.41ff. for Du Bois’ conflict with Booker T. Washington.
8
Ibid., p.53.
9
Lewis, p.535.
10
Ibid., p.579.
11
‘The Black Man in the Revolution of 1914-1918’, Crisis, May 1919, in J. Lester (ed.), Seventh Son
Volume Two, Vintage Books, New York, 1971, p.112.
12
Ibid., p.157.
13
‘Returning Soldiers’ in ibid., p.259.
14
See, for example, the recent study by Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American
Thought, 1888-1903, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995, which pays no attention to
gender.
15
J. Scott, Gender and The Politics of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, p.48.
16
G. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995, p.43.
17
Ibid., p.24.
18
See for example, Martha Hodes, ‘The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and
Black Men in the South after the Civil War’, in John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo, American
Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender and Race Since the Civil War, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1993, pp.59-74. She writes: ‘White fears of political and sexual agency on the part of black men
intensified through the next decades; lynching reached its height in 1892 and continued into the
early twentieth century’ (and beyond), p.72. Bederman similarly argues that the belief on the
part of whites (used to justify lynching) that black men were ‘uncivilized, unmanly rapists …
[who] lusted uncontrollably after white women’ was current from the 1880s and took hold in
the North as well as the South. (pp.46ff.)
19
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, McClurg and Company, Chicago, 1903, p.3.
20
Ibid., p.4.
21
‘Manuscript for Essay 1900’, in H. Aptheker (ed.), Against Racism: Unpublished Papers, Addresses,
1887-1961, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1985, p.68.
22
Souls of Black Folk, p.263.
23
‘Africa’, Crisis, February 1919, in Moon, p.219.
24
‘On Migration to Africa’(1897), incomplete memorandum to Paul Hagemans, in Aptheker,
p.47.
1
22
Amanda Laugesen
‘Strivings of the Negro People’ (1897), in G.D. Wintz (ed.), African American Political Thought
1890-1930: Washington, DuBois, Garvey and Randolph, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1996, p.87.
26
‘Reconstruction and Africa’, Crisis, February 1919, in M. Weinberg (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader,
Harper and Row, New York, 1970, p.372. Bederman provides an excellent discussion of the way
‘civilisation’ was used in different ways to legitimize different claims to power (p.23). I would
argue that Du Bois realized the power of the concept, and infused it, like race and manhood,
with political power. Du Bois sought to achieve an ideal Civilisation where African-Americans
would have a place, this was not the current situation of western civilization.
27
‘The Spirit of Europe’ in Aptheker, p.63.
28
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1896), Benjamin Blum, New York, 1967 p.389; ‘Address
to First Pan-African Conference’ (1900), in P.S. Foner (ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and
Addresses, 1890-1919, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970, p.126.
29
‘The Conservation of Races’, 1899, in Foner, p.75.
30
Ibid., p.76.
31
Ibid., p.78.
32
‘The Souls of White Folk’, in Lester, The Seventh Son, Volume One, p.487.
33
‘Ashamed’, January 1911, in ibid., p.171.
34
Souls of Black Folk, p.4.
35
Darkwater: Voices From Within The Veil (1920), AMS Press, New York, 1969, p.49.
36
Souls of Black Folk, p.164.
37
‘Manhood’ and ‘manliness’ are taken in this article as the gendered constructions predicated
on biological understandings of maleness.
38
That is to say, manhood was in fact a construct, but Du Bois did not perceive it as such - he
worked with current understandings of what it meant to be a man, although not a black man.
He sought to achieve an ideal of manhood, which white men professed to have, but in fact
did not.
39
Bederman, p.14.
40
‘Of the Culture of White Folks’, Journal of Race Development, April 1917, in Weinberg, p.314.
41
‘An Open Letter to the Southern people’ in Aptheker, p.4.
42
Lecture in Baltimore, December 1913, in ibid., p.76.
43
‘A Philosophy For 1913’, Crisis, January 1913, in Moon, p.49.
44
‘The Fruit of the Tree’, Crisis, September 1913, in Seventh Son, Volume Two, p.11.
45
‘Some Notes on Negro Crime Particularly in Georgia: Report of A Social Study Made Under
the Direction of Atlanta University’, Atlanta University Publications, no.9, 1904, p.65.
46
Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel (1911), Arno Press and the New York Times, New York,
1969, p.340.
47
‘Morals and Manners Among Negro Americans’, 26 May 1913, Atlanta University Publications,
no.18, p.69.
48
Ibid., p.70.
49
Darkwater, p.185.
50
‘Votes For Women’, Crisis, September 1912, in Moon, p.95.
51
‘The Damnation of Women’ (from Darkwater), in Lester, The Seventh Son,Volume One, p.526.
52
In his The Gift of Black Folk (1924),Washington Square Press, New York, 1970, Du Bois included a
chapter on women (they are not otherwise integrated), where the black woman figures as worker
and family mainstay. Through working in the houses of whites, she helped ‘transmit her dialect,
her mannerisms, her quaint philosophy and her boundless sympathy’ (p.144). She was also the
concubine, helping to mix the blood of the two races throughout America and thus facilitating
a future where the two races were inextricably bound together. This argument was particularly
problematic: the woman here is the means by which the human race will progress. The image
of woman as a symbolic facilitator of progress (through assimilation, the passing of one race to
another and so on) through the fact of their biology and sexuality is recurring.
53
Darkwater, p.3.
54
‘The Song of the Smoke’, 1899, Selected Poems, Ghana University Press, Accra, no date, p.12.
55
‘Ashamed’, Crisis, January 1911, in Weinberg, p.306.
56
‘The Social Effects of Emancipation’, Survey, 1 February1913, in ibid., p.74.
57
Ibid.
58
‘The Immediate Program of the American Negro’, Crisis, April 1915, in Wintz, p.109.
25
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LIMINA
Volume 6, 2000
‘The Oath of the Negro Voter’, November 1917 in Weinberg, p.109.
Niagara Address to the Nation at the Second Annual Meeting of the Niagara Movement, in
Foner, p.170.
61
Souls of Black Folk, p.11.
62
‘A Philosophy for 1913’, in Weinberg, p.48.
63
Darkwater, p.173.
64
Souls of Black Folk, p.55.
65
‘The Parting of the Ways’, World Today, 6 April 1904, in Wintz, p.95; Du Bois, Lecture in Baltimore,
January 1913, in Antheker, p.76.
66
Souls of Black Folk, p.55.
67
Ibid., p.172.
68
‘College Education’, Crisis, July 1918, in Moon, p.122.
69
Souls of Black Folk, p.86.
70
‘Salutation’, Crisis, May 1916, in Weinberg, p.108.
71
Ibid.
59
60
24