W. E. B. DuBois comes to South Carolina

W. E. B. Du Bois in 1947
From Wikipedia

On February 11, 1957, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech titled "The American Negro and the Darker World" at Benedict College in Columbia, SC. Du Bois had been invited to speak in early January by Allen University professor Edwin D. Hoffman. Du Bois spoke as the university's guest speaker for Negro History Week (a precursor to Black History Month). The talk was jointly sponsored by Allen and Benedict.

Du Bois's talk was announced in The State newspaper. The announcement was only two paragraphs long, but his arrival was certainly a major event. Columbia, South Carolina rarely hosted visitors of his stature.  At the time, Du Bois was almost ninety years old and a distinguished, internationally renown intellectual and civil rights activist.

Du Bois had long been active in international politics as he connected American anti-Black racism to colonialism and global capitalism. During the late 1940s and 1950s, he began to express sympathy for socialism because it offered a political alternative.

As American concerns over socialism rose and tensions with the Soviet Union grew, Du Bois became a political target. In 1951, the Justice Department alleged that an anti-war organization that Du Bois was involved in (the Peace Information Center) was acting as an agent for the Soviet Union. This required the organization to register with the federal government, but Du Bois and others refused, claiming that the allegations were false. Because of his refusal, Du Bois was indicted, but the legal case was dismissed the next year. By the time of his visit to Columbia, the controversy surrounding him died down. In its announcement of his talk, The State described him simply as an "American Negro sociologist and author." No indication was given that he might be a source of political controversy, although certainly Du Bois's views were regarded as outside the pale by many White South Carolinians.

Bacoats Hall
From Benedict College 1970 Benedictus yearbook

Du Bois spoke in the evening at Bacoats Hall on the Benedict campus. The event began with the singing of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and concluded with the singing of Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing. Both songs had major political significance. Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing was (and is) regarded as the Black national anthem, and singing it was an act of rebuke of South Carolina's segregationist culture. The song Battle Hymn of the Republic was even more politically provocative. The song was written by the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and served as an informal anthem for the Union army during the Civil War. The lyrics included a direct call for the emancipation of slaves: "let [us] die to make men free." 

Reflecting the emphasis on religion at the school, Du Bois's speech was preceded by a prayer delivered by Wallace E. Crumlin, an Allen faculty member who taught religious education. Du Bois was introduced by Benedict president J. A. Bacoats.

Allen faculty member Wallace E. Crumlin
Allen University 1957 Yellow Jacket

Benedict president J. A. Bacoats
Benedict College 1970 Benedictus

The text below is based on a draft held at the Special Collections and University Archives at University of Massachusetts Amherst. The text likely differs from the speech Du Bois delivered at Benedict. The draft is for a version of the speech he gave to the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, and it is dated April 30, 1957, a few months after his visit to Columbia. 

In his speech, Du Bois draws on two themes. First, he embeds the historical mistreatment of African-Americans into the broader history of the exploitation of labor, especially colonial labor, by capital. For example, he argues that capital responded to the emancipation of slaves in America by increasing its efforts to extract wealth from Asia and to extract labor from the working classes of the West through use of factory work. Second, he argues that African-Americans were becoming increasingly estranged from "the colored people of the world." While many people in African were organizing against imperialism and promoting the development of socialism, African-Americans are largely trying to assimilate into American culture and regarded socialism as harmful political philosophy that ran counter to American values. Despite the material advantages that they enjoy, Du Bois argued that African-Americans have a much more limited understand of their political situation than the people of African nations. He concluded by calling upon his audience to educate themselves about socialism.

In his autobiography Liberalism Is Not Enough, Benedict professor Horace B. Davis wrote about how Du Bois's speech was received. He wrote that the students at Benedict and Allen were mostly "conventionally patriotic" and saw no connection between American capitalism and their own political oppression. Du Bois's speech had an impact on them. The students paid close attention and, after the talk, many began to learn more about socialism for themselves.

While its highly unlikely that they attended the talk, White politicians in South Carolina would have been outraged to hear that Du Bois had encouraged students at Benedict and Allen to learn about socialism and act in solidarity with the people of India, China, and Africa. However, the speech appears to have gone unnoticed. When the governor began publicly attacking the schools a year later, he made no mention of Du Bois's visit. Du Bois's visit also not mentioned in Forrest Wiggins's FBI file, although Wiggins and the other professors were under close scrutiny around this time. 

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries the Africans imported to America regarded themselves as temporary settlers destined to return eventually to Africa. Their increasing revolts against the slave system, which culminated in the eighteenth century, left a feeling for close kinship to the motherland and even well into the nineteenth century they called their organizations "African," as witness the "African Unions" of New York and Newport, and the African church of Philadelphia. In the West Indies and South America, there was even closer indication of feelings of kinship with Africa and the East. 

The early excuse for American slavery on the part of planters was conversion to Christianity; but as slavery became the basis of great income in the sugar empire and the cotton kingdom, and as plans were laid for its expansion, the slaves in the United States sought freedom by escape to the north and joined with the abolitionists to fight for emancipation. The whites as well as many blacks now reverted to the first excuse for slavery, namely conversion of Africa to Christianity; and many plans arose for repatriation of negroes to Africa. The American Colonization Society was the best known, but soon earned the distrust of negroes when it became a method of getting rid of free negroes so as to fasten the chains closer on slaves.

When, later in the nineteenth century, the plight of the slave worsened, there arose again among American negroes plans for migration not only to Africa but to Haiti and South America. Civil War and Emancipation intervened and American negroes looked forward to becoming free and equal citizens here with no thought of returning to African or of kinship with the world's darker peoples. However, the rise of the negro was hindered by disfranchisement, lynching, and caste legislation. There was some recurrence of the "Black to Africa" idea and increased sympathy for darker folk who suffered the same sort of caste restrictions as American negroes.

But this brought curious dichotomy. In our effort to be recognized as Americans, we negroes naturally strove to think American and adopt American folkways. We began to despise all yellow, brown, and black peoples. We especially withdrew from all remembrance of kinship with Africa and denied with the white world that African ever had a history of indigenous culture. We did not want to be called "Africans" or negroes and especially not "negresses." We tried to invent new names for our group. We began to call yellow people "chinks" and "coolies" and dark whites "dagoes." This was natural under our peculiar situation, but it made us more easily neglect or lose sight of the peculiar change in the world which was linking us with the colored peoples of the world not simply because of the essentially unimportant fact of skin color, but because of the immensely important fact of economic condition.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Europe had begun to expand its trade and to important raw materials to be transformed into consumer goods. Machines and methods for manufacture of foods increased tremendously. When the revolt of slaves, especially in Haiti, and the moral revolt in England and America, led to the emancipation of slaves, the merchants who had invested in the slave labor began to change the form of their investment; they seized colonies in Asia and Africa and instead of exporting native labor, used the land and labor on the spot and exported the raw materials to Europe for consumption  or further manufacture. Immense amounts of wealth for capital were seized for Europeans in India and China, in South America and elsewhere; and thus colonial imperialism arose to dominate the world. Most of the exploited people were colored – yellow, brown, and black. A scientific theory arose and was widely accepted which taught that the white people were superior to the colored and had a right to rule the world and use all land and labor for the benefit and comfort of Europeans. While the emancipation of slaves in America involved great losses for Europeans investors, the simultaneous seizure of wealth in Asia and the new control of colonial labor enabled new rich employers in Europe and North America to accumulate vast sums of capital in private hands and to start the factory system. This method of conducting industry used new inventions and sources of power so as to drive laborers off the land, herd them into factories and reduce them to semi-slavery in Europe by a wage contract.

This brought the labor movement. In the more advanced European countries labor and its friends fought for more political power, public school education, higher wages and better conditions. These things they gradually secured by union organization and strikes. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe there was little education and wages remained very low. Political power rested in the hands of an aristocracy which became rich through encouraging and protecting western investment. This semi-colonial status of labor was even worse in South and Central America and in the West Indies, while in most of Asia and in Africa the condition of colonial labor approached slavery.

Thereupon arose the doctrine of socialism which demanded that the results of the manufacture of goods and the giving of services go to the labor involved and not mainly to the capitalists. This doctrine was in essence as old as human labor. Primitive labor got all the results of what it did or made. Many early societies like the first Christians and tribes in Africa lived in communal groups, sharing all results of work in common. Slavery intervened so that some workers were owned by others; then came aristocracy where a few took the results of the work of the many and the nation became the abode of a rich, idle and privileged class who were served by the mass of laborers. Protest against this and the doctrine that income should in some degree become the measure of effort became an increasing demand from the ancient world through the medieval world and was studied and scientifically stated by Karl Marx in the first half of the nineteenth century. He proposed that capital belong to the state and that workers run the state. Capitalists vehemently opposed this and partially met the demands of labor by raising wages. In the capitalist nations this raise was more than met by increased profits due to exploitation in colonial and semi-colonial lands. Also the spread of democratic control was counterbalanced by hiring White labor to war on colonial labor, and using public taxation for war rather than social progress.

From the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the First World War there was continuous struggle led by White troops armed with the most ingenious weapons to keep colonial peoples from revolt, and most of the other peoples of the world in subjection to Western Europe.

This was the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. British, French, and American capitalists owned the colonies, with the richest natural resources and the best controlled and lowest paid labor. By 1900, they were reaching out for other colonies elsewhere: other nations with fewer or no colonies, led by Germany, demanded a reallotment of colonial wealth. This brought the First World War. 

But it brought more than this: the assault of Germany and her allies was so fierce that Britain and France had to ask help from their colored colonies. They needed black manpower and without it France would have been overthrown by Germany in the first few months of war. Britain needed food and materials from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. The United States needed American negroes who formed an inner labor colony as laborers and stevedores. This meant an increase of wages and rights for colonial peoples. In the United States it brought the first recognition since 1876 of the equal citizenship of negroes. 

The workers of Eastern, Central and South America were not as badly off as the African serfs and Chinese and Indian coolies but they were sunk in poverty, disease, and ignorance. They were oppressed by their own rich classes, working hand in glove with White Western investors. When war came they starved and died. The situation became so desperate that Russians and Hungarians refused to fight. Their rulers sought compromise by trying to replace imperial rule with Western European democracy. But the Russian leaders, students of Karl Marx and led by Lenin, demanded a socialist state.

The Western world united to forestall this experiment. It said first that no socialist state could succeed, but lest it should and lower the profits of capitalists, the effort must be stopped by force of arms. Sixteen capitalists nations, including Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan, invaded Russia and fought for ten years by means civilized and uncivilized, to overthrow the plans of the Soviet Union. However, the world-wide collapse of capitalism in 1930, made this attack fail and the world witnessed the founding of the first socialist state.

Then came a new and even more unexpected diversion. The Depression, which was the collapse of capitalism, was so bad in Germany, Spain, and Italy that those states fell into the hands of two dictators, Hitler and Mussolini. Backed by capitalists, they seized power and demanded control not only of the colonial world then dominated by Britain, France, and North America, but the domination of the whole world. The west tried to compromise and offered practically everything they demanded, but Hitler's greed and German ambition grew by what they fed upon. They were so convinced of their superior power over the West that Hitler started a Second World War, like the first aimed at control by a part of the White race over the resources, land, and labor of the rest of the world. He began a wild career. He killed six million Jews, accusing them of being the main cause of the Depression and of being an inferior race. He conquered France and chased the British off the continent. They huddled on their own small island to make a last stand, but here Hitler paused. He had a new vision. If instead of wasting his power on a desperate England he turned East and seized the semi-colonial lands of the Soviet Union and Balkan states, then from this central heartland he could seize Asia and Africa and after that turn back to deliver the coup de grace to Britain and America. Hitler thereupon scrapped his treaty with the Soviets which they, spurned by the West, had been forced to accept, and to the relief of Britain and the United States, Hitler turned to conquer Russia. Englishmen and Americans said with Truman, "Let them kill as many of each other as possible." So, although Hitler's rear was exposed, the Western powers held off attack for a year and when they did attack went to the defense of their African colonies and not to aid the Soviet Union. The West was sure that the Soviets would fall in six weeks and thus perhaps rid the world of socialism and Nazis at one stroke.

The result was astonishing. The Soviet Union almost unaided conquered Hitler, saved the Baltic states and the Balkans at a cost of nine million killed and wounded and the distruction [sic destruction] of much they had toiled for since 1917. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin faced a world in which the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the United States must go forward toward a world in which socialism would grow, not perhaps as complete communistic states like the Soviet Union, but in states like the United States and England where social progress under the New Deal and the Labor government would advance together along paths leading to the same ultimate goal.

This co-operation American Business repudiated when it invented the Atom bomb. After Roosevelt died, our capitalists determined to drive communism from the world and push socialism back. This crusade failed. India became independent and adopted modified socialism; China conquered the stool-pigeons whom we paid to stop her revolution and became the greatest communist state in the world. The Soviet Union, instead of failing as we predicted, became one of the foremost nations of the Earth, with the best educational system and freedom from church domination second only to this nation in industry. Also the Soviet Union took a legal stand against the color line and stood ready to oppose colonialism. We tried to re-conquer China during the war in Korea and to help France retain Indo-China, but again failed. Meantime we formed the greatest military machine on earth and spent and are still spending more money preparing for war than any other nation on earth at any time has spent.

The excuse for our action is that communism is a criminal conspiracy of evil-minded men and that private capitalism is so superior to socialism that we should use every effort to stop its advance. Here we rest today and to sharpen our aim and coordinate our strength, we starve our schools, lessen social services in medicine and housing, curtail our freedom of speech, limit our pursuit of learning, and are no longer free to think or discuss.

Where now does that leave American negroes? We cannot teach the peoples of Africa or Asia because so many of them are either communistic or progressing towards socialism, while we do not know what socialism is and we can study it only with difficulty or danger. After the First World War we negroes were in advance of many colored peoples. We started in two ways to lead the Africans. In the West Indies Garvey tried to have negroes share in western exploitation of Africa. White industry stopped him before he could begin. In the United States negro churches carried on missionary efforts and a few negroes in 1918 tried to get in touch with Africa so as to share thoughts and plans. Four Pan-African congresses were held in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1925, which American, African, and West Indian negroes attended, and a few persons from Asia and South America. They made a series of general demands for political rights and education. The movement met much opposition. However, it encouraged similar congresses which still exist in all parts of Africa, and it was the inspiration back [sic?] of Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. After a lapse of twenty years, a fifth Pan-African congress was held in England in 1945. It was attended by negro labor leaders from all parts of Africa and from the West Indies and one from the United States. Especially prominent were the delegates from Kenya and Ghana, the first independent Black dominion of the British Commonwealth. The resolutions adopted here had a clear socialist trend, and further Pan-African congresses were envisioned to be held in Africa. 

Whither now do we go? We American negroes can no longer lead the colored people of the world because they far better than we understand what is happening in the world today. But we can try to catch with them. We can learn about China and India and the new ferment in East, West, and South Africa. We can realize by reading, if not in classroom, how socialism is expanding over the modern world and penetrating the colored world. So far as Africa is concerned we can realize that socialism is part of their past history and will without a shade of doubt play a large part in their future.

Here in our country, we can think, work and vote for the welfare state openly and frankly, for social medicine, publicly supported housing, state ownership of public power and public facilities: curbing the power of private capital and great monopolies and stand ready to meet and cooperate with world socialism as it grows among White and Black.

Citation: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. The American Negro and the darker world, April 30, 1957. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries