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Last Updated: Aug 15th, 2008 - 12:09:44 |
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| W.E.B. Du Bois |
The NAACP is no stranger to controversy, as of late. In the last four years, I watched the organization symbolically bury the “N” word in an elaborate funeral. I observed the firestorm develop after Bill Cosby publicly ranted against “lower economic” African Americans at the group’s Brown v. Board of Education 50th anniversary gala. I even laughed at the encore performance given by Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the recent Detroit chapter gala, where he humorously explored the cultural divide between Whites and Blacks, particularly in music, language and learning. Having witnessed these contemporary dramas loop continuously on 24-hour news stations and on YouTube, I am reminded of one of the NAACP’s more publicized dramas 60 years ago in 1948: the unceremonious banishment of one of its founding fathers, W.E.B. Du Bois. He was fired after his memorandum critical of Executive Director Walter White and the NAACP board of directors appeared in The New York Times.
Long before the hip hop-infused cultural criticisms of Michael Eric Dyson, the riffs on feminisms of bell hooks, and the multimedia musings of Cornel West, America’s premiere Black public intellectual of the first six decades of the 20th century was W.E.B. Du Bois. During the first quarter of the century, he rose to fame as scholar, educator, author, editor, activist and Pan-Africanist. But by the 1950’s, at the height of the Cold War—the tense state of war-in-peace between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet-led East which began in 1945 and ended in 1991—the government named Du Bois a Communist and Soviet sympathizer. This action set him at odds with the very organization he helped found.
Those of us old enough to remember can recall the Communist witch hunt that ensued during the 1950’s. Communist China had fallen to the Maoists. America was at war with Communist Korea. Relations with the Communist Soviet Union were fragile. And at home, Senator Joseph McCarthy was on a mission to find any loyalist to the Communist cause. The government indicted hundreds of people for being un-American.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the officers of the Peace Center were indicted as unregistered agents of a foreign government. The indictment changed forever the image of him engaged in heroic struggle in the fight for freedom. This Black Titan watched as the doors that he had fought so hard to open for Blacks closed in his face, surprisingly slammed by many of his brethren.
A Man Apart
Biographer David Levering Lewis perhaps summed up Du Bois’ life when he wrote, “In the course of his long, turbulent career, W.E.B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity...”
Indeed, Du Bois was first in academics. He was the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard University. He was the author of 19 books, the editor of 18 additional titles, and wrote hundreds of newspaper articles, scholarly papers and essays. He conceived of the Encyclopedia Africana in 1909, published as Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1999. Du Bois even was inducted as an alumni member of Fisk University’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious honor society in the United States.
Du Bois was first in activism too. In 1909, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and for 24 years worked as the crusading editor-in-chief of its seminal publication, The Crisis. On its pages he set the agenda for the organization, introduced the world to Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, and wrote penetrating essays that helped his readers understand the historical background and character of American society. He shaped a generation that would come of age and break the back of Jim Crow in America. Under his editorship, the circulation of The Crisis soared from 1,000 in 1910 to more than 100,000 by 1920.
And yet, for all of his sterling academic achievement, Du Bois largely has been banished from the NAACP. His biography states that his estrangement with the organization began in the 1930s’s, when he wrote several essays encouraging voluntary segregation, “what we call supporting Black businesses,” and criticizing integrationist policies of NAACP. While Du Bois thought economic separatism may be effective, some NAACP leaders thought segregation of all kinds should be abolished. Du Bois resigned his post as editor for The Crisis and went back to teaching at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). His unceremonious fall from grace, in the eyes of many in Black America, soon followed when he was indicted as “unregistered foreign agent” in 1951 for his chairmanship of the Peace Information Center, an organization dedicated to the international peace movement and the banning of nuclear weapons. In a cause célébre, following a five-day trial in segregated Washington, D.C., the judge dismissed the charge that Du Bois, “a radical Democrat,” was a subversive agent.
A Beacon of Hope
Du Bois died at age 95, in Ghana, on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Aug. 27, 1963), where one of his proud sons, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream Speech.” Before passing, Du Bois, the wounded old lion, then 83, lamented prophetically in his autobiography that “the little [Black] children will no longer know my name.” His audacity of hope for recognition in the annals of American scholarship and civil rights activism should be recognized by the organization he helped birth—beyond his name in small print on the editorial page of The Crisis. One way the NAACP can bring its founder in from the Cold War is to rename its annual ACT-SO scholarship competition after him at its one-hundredth birthday in 2009.
The NAACP Web site describes ACT-SO as “a major youth initiative of the NAACP. Founded in 1978 by renowned author and journalist Vernon Jarrett, ACT-SO provides a forum through which African-American youth can demonstrate academic, artistic and scientific prowess and expertise, thereby gaining the same recognition often only reserved for entertainers and athletes, and stand as first among equals in the global community (my emphasis).” Simply put, it is an Olympics of the mind. And it should be named in honor of Du Bois whose name is synonymous with academic excellence.
The youth in the ACT-SO competition defeat stereotypes. The American Promise Alliance recently issued a report in spring 2008 where it examined graduation rates for the main school systems in the nation’s 50 largest cities. It found that 17 of the nation’s 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent. The average graduation rate for black students in all of these cities is 51.8 percent, while Baltimore, the home of the NAACP and the site of a high school named in honor of Du Bois, boasts an average graduation rate of only 34.6 percent. Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma and about 1.2 million students drop out annually.
By contrast, ACT-SO, during its 29 years, has had nearly 261,000 local participants nationwide, an average of 9,000 participants per year. In 2007, the most recent ACT-SO competition, there were 781 National Gold Medalists at the annual NACCP convention, representing 28 states who competed for $354,00 in monetary awards, laptop computers, and academic awards.
In times such as these, where intelligence is considered “uncool” by many Black students, Du Bois still stands proudly as a beacon of hope. He stands as sign and substance of who they are and what they can become by dint of hard work. The NAACP, therefore, should name its most prestigious academic award after its marginalized brother. An icon of success, Du Bois, like his fellow traveler in the peace movement Albert Einstein, sends the message to students that it is “cool” to be smart in a world where there are no limits on the imagination. If the great teacher had a motto, it would be “educate and elevate.”
The Du Bois ACT-SO Gold Medal for Academic Excellence is consistent with the NAACP’s goal of securing the rights to equal education for African Americans.
First in the fight for equality, Du Bois, too, was, “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh” of the dedicated workers, organizers, and leaders who forged this great organization fought long and hard to ensure that the voices of African Americans would be heard. For nearly 100 years, it has been the talent and tenacity of NAACP members that has saved lives and changed many negative aspects of American society.
Similarly, Du Bois devoted his life to a blend of academics and activism virtually unrivaled in American life. It is time for the NAACP to bring home from the Cold War this peerless interpreter of the souls of black folk.
DOLAN HUBBARD is professor and chairperson of the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University. He is editor of The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later (2003).
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