W. E. B. Du Bois Joined the Communist Party at 93

W. E. B. Du Bois signed an application to join the Communist Party of the United States on October 1, 1961, addressed to Gus Hall at the party’s New York office. He was 93. Four months earlier, on June 5, 1961, the Supreme Court had upheld the order requiring that party to register itself with the federal government as a Communist-action organization, and on the same day held in Scales v. United States that active, knowing membership in it could be punished as a felony. Du Bois had already been indicted by that government once, ten years before, and acquitted. He sent the application anyway, left for Accra within weeks, and died there on August 27, 1963, the day before the March on Washington.

The party card is what people search for. It belongs to the last two years of a ninety-five-year life that had already produced the first doctorate Harvard granted a Black American, the book that named the color line, and the NAACP.

The letter he wrote at 93

The application is a few pages of intellectual autobiography. Du Bois runs through hearing Marx’s name in college without ever being assigned him, then the University of Berlin, where he heard Marx’s theories attacked by men who still did not make him read the source. He ends with ten aims he wanted the American party to work for: public ownership of natural resources and of all capital, public control of transportation and communications, abolition of poverty and limitation of personal income, no exploitation of labor, social medicine with hospitalization and care for the old, free education for all, training for jobs and jobs for all, discipline for growth and reform, freedom under law, and no dogmatic religion. The line that gets quoted is the shortest one in the letter:

Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction.

Hall replied, and the party printed both letters in its paper, The Worker, on November 26, 1961, by which time Du Bois was living in Ghana.

Great Barrington to Harvard

He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, three years after Appomattox. He entered Fisk University in Nashville in 1885, which put him in the South for the first time and sent him out to teach in rural Tennessee schools over the summers. He transferred to Harvard, took a bachelor’s degree cum laude in 1890 as one of six commencement speakers, studied in Berlin, and in 1895 became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. His dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade to the United States became his first book.

In 1896 the University of Pennsylvania commissioned him to study Black life in Philadelphia. The result, The Philadelphia Negro, came out in 1899 and is one of the first sociological field studies of a Black community in the country. He went to Atlanta University in 1897 to teach history and economics and ran annual research conferences on Black life in America there for well over a decade.

The color line

The Souls of Black Folk arrived in 1903: fourteen essays, part history, part field report, part memoir. The second chapter states the claim the rest of the century argued about.

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.

The first chapter had already given the language for what living behind that line does to a person:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

The book also broke publicly with Booker T. Washington, whose program accepted vocational training and white goodwill in place of political rights. Du Bois wanted the vote, the courts, and higher education, and he wanted them stated as demands rather than requests. In 1905 he helped found the Niagara Movement to say so with an organization behind it.

The NAACP, and the man who took his chair

The organizing campaign that became the NAACP launched on February 12, 1909, the centennial of Lincoln’s birth. Du Bois became its Director of Publicity and Research in 1910, the only African American then sitting on the executive board, and he founded the association’s magazine, The Crisis. The first issue appeared in November 1910 with roughly a thousand readers. By 1918 it had more than 100,000, and then the slide began. The Depression finished the job: scarcely more than ten thousand paid subscriptions by 1933.

By then Du Bois was arguing that Black Americans should build their own economic institutions instead of waiting on integration, and the board disagreed loudly. He resigned as editor in 1934. The man who replaced him was Roy Wilkins, which matters again twenty-nine years later.

An Appeal to the World, 1947

Du Bois came back onto the NAACP staff in the 1940s as director of special research, and on October 23, 1947 the association filed a petition at the United Nations titled An Appeal to the World, drafted by Du Bois with other scholars and lawyers. It laid American disenfranchisement, lynching, and segregation in front of an international body, and its most-quoted sentence explains why the timing stung:

It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi… internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad.

The next year he campaigned for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party while the NAACP’s leadership backed Truman, and in 1948 the board declined to renew his contract. He was 80 and out of the organization he had helped start.

Indicted at 82

In 1950 he ran for the United States Senate from New York on the American Labor Party line and drew roughly 200,000 votes. He was also an officer of the Peace Information Center, which existed from April 3 to October 12, 1950 and circulated the Stockholm Appeal, a petition asking governments to ban nuclear weapons. In February 1951, two weeks before his 83rd birthday, the Justice Department indicted him and his colleagues under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for operating as unregistered agents of a foreign principal. Prosecuting Americans over their politics had a long American pedigree by then: the Espionage Act cases of 1917 to 1919 had put people in federal prison for giving speeches.

The trial ran in November 1951, with Vito Marcantonio defending. The prosecution rested on the morning of November 20. By the account Logos Journal reproduces, Marcantonio told Judge Matthew F. McGuire that the defense would call a single witness, Dr. Du Bois, and then mentioned that Albert Einstein had offered to appear as a character witness. McGuire gave Marcantonio a long look and adjourned the court for lunch. When court resumed he granted the motion for acquittal, holding that the government had failed to support the allegations of the indictment. Du Bois counted the cost afterward:

It had not occurred to us how costly justice in the United States is. It is not enough to be innocent in order to escape punishment.

Winning took the next eight years of his travel. The State Department held his passport because he would not sign an affidavit swearing he was not a Communist. He got it back in 1958 and used it to visit the Soviet Union and China with his wife, Shirley Graham. The department had voided Paul Robeson’s passport in 1950 on the same theory, and lost that one to the Supreme Court’s 1958 decision in Kent v. Dulles.

Accra

Kwame Nkrumah invited him to Ghana to direct the Encyclopedia Africana, a reference work on Africa and the African diaspora. He arrived in October 1961, at 93. He became a citizen of Ghana in 1963, and he died in Accra on August 27 that year, at 95. Nkrumah’s government buried him with a state funeral.

August 28, 1963

The next afternoon the March on Washington filled the Mall. Bayard Rustin brought the news from Ghana to Roy Wilkins, who by then ran the NAACP, and Wilkins refused to touch it. In Charles Euchner’s account of the day, he said, “I’m not going to announce that Communist’s death.” Rustin carried it to A. Philip Randolph, whose answer was, “Tell Roy that if he doesn’t announce it, I will.” Wilkins folded: “Well, you tell Phil I’ll do it.”

Then he walked to the microphone and did it properly.

Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.

And then he gave the crowd a homework assignment:

If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903.

The march stood a minute in silence and went back to the program; Martin Luther King Jr. spoke later that afternoon. Wilkins had spent his morning refusing to say the name out loud, and he ended by sending everyone on the Mall to a sixty-year-old book. Du Bois had been dead about a day, and what the march did with him was hand out reading.