In 1900 Du Bois got the chance to explore some of these ideas on an international stage. Their perseverance, faith, and creativity would provide a useful example to the oppressed the world over. But Du Bois saw African-Americans as having a unique perspective and message to send as the foremost proponents of the idea of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence, carrying it forward in the face of open hostility.
How they fit into the American polity was, and remains for many, a contested issue. As he famously wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” For Europe, a long and bloody history with people of color had extended from enslavement beginning in the sixteenth century to colonization in the nineteenth and early twentieth, as nations including Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy took control of 90 percent of the African continent.Īfter all of this-because of all this-white supremacy was a worldwide phenomenon, and it had a particular force in the US, home to a large population of people of African descent. That talented Blacks managed to excel even in the face of the depredations of Jim Crow and lynching was further proof of the worthiness and genius of the race.ĭu Bois also saw early on that the struggle of Black people was global.
Person by person, fact by fact, information about Blacks of ingenuity would put the lie to the doctrine of white supremacy. A born scholar, preternaturally disciplined and driven by belief in the power of rationality and evidence, he was convinced, particularly during his early career, that examples of Black achievement would serve as effective answers to the scientific racism that had become ascendant in the nineteenth century. Throughout his career, Du Bois believed it was important to find and showcase the accomplishments of other Blacks like him-though, of course, there really was no one, of any race, quite like him. He was a walking refutation of the concept of Black inferiority. He wrote dozens of articles and books, and edited magazines. becoming one of the founders of a new field, sociology and in 1909 helping to start a new organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
#Circle of contempt color lines professional#
He went from one scholarly and professional triumph to another-graduating from Fisk University, the University of Berlin, and Harvard University, where he was the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. In the decades that followed his Great Barrington youth, Du Bois won many of the privileges and honors that the world had seemed to reserve for whites. Whatever innate competitiveness he possessed was sharpened and directed by the experience of being treated as different and, on some occasions, as inferior. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.Īs he grew older and took note of the “dazzling opportunities” placed before white people, Du Bois decided that he would “wrest” some of those prizes from them. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,-refused it peremptorily, with a glance. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards-ten cents a package-and exchange. In his most acclaimed work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois described both the moment he discovered that he was on the vulnerable side of the racial divide and his response to that realization: His childhood in New England-Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts-introduced him to the troubled racial dynamics of the United States and to a way of coping with them. The problems he encountered as a Black man were the problems of Black people the world over. Du Bois carried himself as if he were “the Negro race.” Throughout his very long life-ninety-five years-his personal successes and victories were the successes and victories of all African-Americans.
0 kommentar(er)
