We were partially liberated and then re-enslaved. We have to fight again on old battlefields but our confidence is greater, our vision is clearer and our ultimate victory surer because of the contributions a militant, passionate black giant left behind him.
Dr. Martin L. King Jr., "Honoring Dr. Du Bois"
On February 23, 1968, Martin L. King Jr. delivered one of his last major speeches at Carnegie Hall in New York in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois. The historian and good-trouble activist, Du Bois, died on August 27, 1963 in Accra, Ghana. The March on Washington took place the next day, August 28, 1963.
King begins by calling Du Bois "one of the most remarkable men of our time." For "more than an intellectual giant exploring the frontiers of knowledge," Du Bois was "a teacher." Du Bois, King informs his audience, "would have wanted his life to teach us something about our tasks of emancipation."
On Du Bois' watch, "a two-dollar poll tax, a literacy test," a record of an arrest or incarceration for a petty crime, or a failed attempt at reciting "from memory" the state constitution, writes biographer David Levering Lewis ( W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of A Race, 1868-1919 ), "effectively disenfranchised all but a handful of African Americans and several thousand poor white people as well."
We need the ballot, Du Bois
declared in The Souls
of Black Folks.
We need the ballot out of
sheer self-defense." As Lewis
writes, Du Bois' perspective was that of "his beleaguered people
who were deprived of the ballot and lynched in the South, shut out of
labor unions and socially ostracized in the North, taxed to pay for
public education systems that exclude them."
Americans refused to hear about their nation's dependence on the enslavement of black people. Ignorance was bliss. Or at least allowed for the denial of full citizenship and for the lynching with impunity of black people. The education taught in schools, presented "happy" black people, if on the plantation; and if freed blacks, inferior and criminal.
Knowledge of the indifference to human life on display in the bowels of slave ships crossing the Atlantic, of the brutality inflicted on men and women, of the trauma of children pulled apart from their mothers and sold to other owners, and of the day in and day out exploitation of free labor would only indict a collective belief in the superiority of white Americans. It would be better to uphold the myth of whiteness by relegating blackness as something in need of marginalizing and controlling. Any violence necessary in order to spare the nation from engaging in self-reflection.
In an essay entitled "The Souls of White Folks," in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Du Bois talks about the discovery of "personal whiteness" as a "modern" phenomenon of the 19th and 20th century. What is this "whiteness," Du Bois asks, if not the creation of a narrative granting to white people "ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!"
Individuals and nations that believe in it! It can be witnessed, he writes, in "the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob." It becomes all pervasive, making it easy, "by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man's soul." Every great deed, a white's deed, every dream, a white man's dream. "And if all this be a lie, is it not a lie in a great cause?"
So yes, blackness is antithetical to whiteness. One lie births another lie, and in time, the lies become facts. Merchant, scientists, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary, writes Du Bois, believe blackness is antithetical to whiteness. "Darker people are dark in mind as well as in body," they believe. "Dark, uncertain and imperfect," the darker people are "frailer, cheaper...they are cowards in the face of mauser and maxims." The darker people "have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogical idiots,--'half-devils and half-child.'" This is what America thinks of its black population. And so, America can uphold a detrimental ideology that is "whiteness," suppression all other truths to the contrary.
"Is not this the record of present America?", Du Bois asks.
I imagine Du Bois looking out on a divided America--one, having risen from the aches of Southern plantations, is striving to move forward, away from defeated cities and towns, in pursuit of an inclusive America. Nonetheless, Du Bois sees another America--another, having conquered an indigenous people and enslaved and exploited another, now, in the wake of the Civil War, sees herself "as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time." No nation, Du Bois adds, is fit for this role least of all one that marches "proudly in the van of human hatred--making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike--rather a great religion, a world war-cry. Up white, down black."
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