W E B Du Bois’ Fight for Equality

W E B Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (Vol 2)

By David Levering Lewis

Henry Holt and Company (2002)

Book Review

Although Lewis depicts the early civil rights activist as personally flawed, he also heavily emphasizes his amazing flexible intellect. Even in advanced age, DuBois had a remarkable ability to adjust his world view with changing political circumstances. changed.

As Lewis puts it:

In the course of his long, turbulent, career, then, W E B Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism – scholarship, propaganda, integration, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation and third world solidarity. First had come culture and education for the elites, then the ballot for the masses; then economic democracy; and finally all these solutions in the services of a global ideal of economic and social justice.

Volume two begins after World War I,  when Du Bois was the founder and editor of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) magazine The Crisis: A Report of the Darker races. Initially DuBois fully supported the NAACP agenda to address racism by installing as many “Talented Tenth”* African Americans as possible in academic and professional positions. The NAACP reasoning was that professional African Americans would use their economic power and political influence to improve the lot of the Black masses.

In 1934, a dispute over his promotion of Black economic independence (which violated the NAACP’s strict de-segregation policy) and his growing interest in Marxism led to his resignation from the NAACP to teach at Atlanta University. Following the termination of his Atlanta University contract in 1944 (he was 74), he returned to the NAACP and his prior leadership role in the Pan-African Congress (which he helped found in 1919). He was formally dismissed from the NAACP four years later (just before his 80th birthday), after some of his articles caused the FBI to label the NAACP as a communist front.

In 1951, he was indicted by a grand jury for failing to register the antiwar Peace Information Center (disbanded in 1950) as “the agent of a foreign government.” Although the court dismissed the case, the State Department refused to return his passport until the Supreme Court struck down their policy (in 1958) of suspending passports of political dissidents. In 1961, the first Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah offered him a position compiling an Encyclopedia Africana. He joined the Communist Party USA the day before his flight left.

At age 95, he became a Ghanaian citizen when the US, once again, refused to renew his passport. He died a year later.

The book discusses in depth a number of of Du Bois’s significant accomplishments in the second half of his life:

• His public feud with Marcus Garvey, largely over the latter’s financial mismanagement of a campaign to resettle African Americans in Liberia.**
• His introduction to mainstream American historians of the technologically advanced kingdoms across the African continent prior to the arrival of Europeans.
• His campaign, along with African American actor/singer and playwright Paul Robeson, to keep the US out of World War II.
• His publication of a definitive history of Reconstruction to correct its misportrayal in standard history books prior to World War II.
• His unsuccessful campaign to get a declaration of Black rights included in the UN Charter and Declaration of Human Rights.
• His open opposition (along with Robeson’s) to Truman’s hostility towards the Soviet Union (which Lewis blames largely on Truman’s incompetence and reliance on ultra-conservative advisors), the Marshall Plan,** NATO and the Korean War.
• His visit with Nikita Khrushchev in 1958, leading to the latter’s creation of an African Institute to support the growing Pan-African campaign of decolonization.

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*Talented Tenth – a term devised by white philanthropists designating the “leadership class” of African Americans in the early 20th century.

**As Lewis points out, Garvey was the first civil rights activist to mobilize large masses of poor and working class Blacks, hosting crowds as large as 25,000 in Madison Square Garden.

***Marshall Plan – although ostensibly a humanitarian aid program to war-torn Western Europe, DuBois saw the Marshall Plan as hostile to the Soviet Union (which was excluded, despite taking the brunt of human and economic war casualties) and apt to  polarize East/West relations.

 

The US Taboo Against Socialism

America’s Unofficial Religion: the War on an Idea

Abby Martin (Empire Files) 2015

Film Review

America’s Unofficial Religion is a documentary about the origin of the American taboo against socialism.

At present, the US is the only western democracy without a prominent socialist party. This hasn’t always been the case. A powerful socialist movement arose alongside the progressive, populist and union movements of the late 19^th century. All were a reaction to the brutal industrial oppression that characterized this period.

In 1912, the US had 13 socialist newspapers, 12 socialist monthlies and 57 socialist mayors 23 cities. Socialist Eugene Debs campaigned for president that year and won 6% of the popular vote (at a time when women and blacks were barred from voting).

Concerned about the detrimental effect of strong mass organizing on profits, the corporate elite leaned on president Woodrow Wilson to pass two laws – the Espionage Act, which criminalized dissent, and the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to oppose US involvement in World War I. Following passage of the Sedition Act, Eugene Debs was arrested for making an anti-war speech and sentenced to ten years in prison. The Wilson administration also imprisoned more than 90 International Workers of the World (IWW)* leaders, in addition to sanctioning the murder of IWW members by Pinkerton’s guards and organized lynch mobs.

US Organizing and Strikes in Response to Bolshevik Revolution

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would inspire a wave of organizing and strike activity in the US, leading one in five American workers to go out on strike in 1919.

Wilson responded by authorizing Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and his assistant J Edgar Hoover to launch the Palmer Raids, arresting more than 10,000 suspected socialist and communists and deporting thousands more.

In the 1930s, the cruel economic conditions of the Great Depression led to an enormous upsurge in mass organizing. Many historians argue that Roosevelt had no choice but to bring in sweeping New Deal legislation to prevent a socialist revolution.

Taft Hartley, HUAC and Cointelpro

Following World War II, during which US unions won major concessions, a Republican Congress passed the Taft Hartley Act, which made it illegal for union members to be socialists or communists (in 1945, roughly half the union leadership was socialist) and the Smith Act, which made Communist Party membership Illegal.

The enactment of these laws was accompanied by aggressive activity in the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). During the fifties many HUAC subpoenaed Hollywood actors, directors and producers – as well as teachers and college professors. Many were permanently blacklisted from working on the mere suspicion of socialist/communist sympathies.

In 1956 Hoover, a rabid anti-communist, would launch Cointelpro, a program conducting massive illegal surveillance, infiltration and sabotage of civil rights groups and other social change organization. Cointelpro also carried out clandestine assassinations and false imprisonment of numerous black liberation leaders, many of whom are still in prison.

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*The International Workers of the World (IWW) is international labor union started in 1905 that has strong ties both to socialism and to anarchism.