WEB Du Bois and the NAACP, Continuing the Fight For Civil Rights

Today, we will study and reflect on the career of the early civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, and we will reflect on questions like, what role did he play in making the NAACP, the leading black activist organization, eclipsing Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute? How did W.E.B. Du Bois increase awareness of civil rights issues among Americans? And why was he such a contrarian? What were the source of the tensions between him and the NAACP? At the end of our talk, we'll discuss the sources used for this video. Please feel free to follow along in our PowerPoint script posted to SlideShare. Please, we welcome interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and reflect together. When studying the life and career of W.E.B. Du Bois, we must ask ourselves, why was he such a contrarian? Perhaps his contrarian character was a reaction to the degree to which his relatives controlled the life of his unhappy, unmarried mother. His self-sufficient confidence helped him seek the scholarships needed to attend college, first at the Deep South Fisk University in Tennessee, then Harvard University, then one of the top universities in the globe, University of Berlin, finally sitting for his Ph.D. at Harvard. And this liberal arts education prepared him for the civil rights struggles he fought all his life. When he gained national prominence through his articles and books, his contrarian activism for civil rights caused public tensions with the Tuskegee Machine led by Booker T. Washington, a black leader who sought accommodation and encouraged blacks to work hard and save their pennies. W.E.B. Du Bois was the main founder of the activist civil rights organization, the NAACP. He chose to be the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, where he insisted on editorial freedom, roughly in line with the views of the NAACP, which often caused conflicts. Another co-founder of the NAACP was Ida B. Wells, a brave journalist who dedicated her life to publicize the all-too-common lynchings of blacks. The NAACP magazine, The Crisis, included monthly tallies of lynchings so it would be continually in the public eye. W.E.B. Du Bois fought off a request to also list black crimes in fairness, and he was not an administrator, so he wisely left the administration of the NAACP to others, with whom he butted heads. As a practical matter, although the NAACP did not support greater segregation of the races, battling existing segregation was not a priority in its early years. W.E.B. Du Bois states that the NAACP was not, never had been, and never could be an organization that took an absolute stand against race segregation of any sort under all circumstances, although the NAACP did say no discrimination based on race and color. But as W.E.B. Du Bois points out, in the World War I years, the NAACP could not plan on what actions would be taken if this discrimination was alleviated, which started to happen in the years leading up to 1954, the year of the Brown decision desegregating public schools. And now we'll discuss the status of civil rights under Woodrow Wilson around the time of World War I. The old Tuskegee machine was primarily focused on funding black colleges, and after the death of Booker T. Washington, this role was assumed by the colleges themselves going forward. In contrast, the NAACP focused on litigating civil rights issues to slowly roll back discriminatory laws. 1915 was a banner year. Court victories included a Supreme Court ruling that Oklahoma's grandfather clauses unfairly restricting the Negro vote was unconstitutional. But 1915 was also a landmark in the history of cinema. The first full-length movie was a marvel of technological innovation, and that was The Birth of a Nation. Unfortunately, it was a disaster for civil rights. This movie depicted the KKK night riders as modern-day knights rescuing southern damsels in distress from darkies with bulging eyes. And this movie is also infamous for its depictions of black Reconstruction state legislators eating fried chicken at their desks, oblivious to the proceedings. W.E.B. Du Bois stated that the Negro was represented either as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal tool of unscrupulous politicians, or a faithful but doddering idiot. In contrast, our biographer Lewis states that President Woodrow Wilson exclaimed that The Birth of a Nation was like writing history with lightning, and that it was also terribly true. This movie rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan that had been decimated by Grant's federal troops during Reconstruction. W.E.B. Du Bois noted that the number of mass murders so increased that nearly 100 Negroes were lynched during 1915 and a score of whites, a larger number than had occurred for more than a decade. And our biographer notes that the paradox was that Birth of a Nation and the NAACP helped make each other. W.E.B. Du Bois was quick to appreciate that the fight against the film probably succeeded in advertising it even beyond its admittedly notable merits. But the fight also mobilized thousands of black and white men in large cities who had been unaware of the existence of the NAACP. The NAACP succeeded in blocking its showing in theaters in many large cities, and these legal challenges lasted for several years. These early years of the administration of the Southerner President Woodrow Wilson saw many rollbacks of civil rights gains. The Republican President Roosevelt had appointed many black officeholders in the federal government, and Taft, the next Republican President, had appointed fewer black officeholders. But shortly after Wilson's inauguration, blacks were purged wholesale from these federal positions, and segregation of restrooms and cafeterias, public parks, and transportation was enforced. W.E.B. Du Bois admits his frustration. Blacks continually submit to segregated schools, Jim Crow railroad cars, and isolation because it would be suicide to go uneducated, stay at home, and live in the tenderloin. Now after war was declared against Germany, there was some apparent success in dealing with the Wilson administration, possibly because the country was facing a labor shortage due to the war. Wilson had condemned lynchings, and the armed forces had commissioned over 700 Negro officers. But when blacks were accepted into the military, they were often abused by white officers and were often forbidden to go on leave. Not all Negro soldiers were laborers. Tens of thousands of Negro soldiers fought in the trenches, some with distinction. Despite the mixed record of the Wilson administration on civil rights, W.E.B. Du Bois penned his Close Ranks editorial in The Crisis in July 1918, where he proclaims, Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. The hope was that if the Negroes proved their worth on the battlefield, they would win concessions on civil rights issues after the war. But events would prove this to be a In 1917, before the end of the war, race riots exploded in East St. Louis where there were tensions between striking white workers and blacks hired to replace them at a much lower wage. The homes of 6,000 blacks were destroyed. Many fled the city, never to return. And detailed accounts of the riots by brave reporters were published in The Crisis magazine. After W.E.B. Du Bois returned from observing the peace conference negotiating the Treaty of Versailles after the end of the war, he penned another famous editorial on returning soldiers, which helped redeem him in the eyes of many who had criticized his Close Ranks editorial. W.E.B. Du Bois proclaims, We are returning from war. The crisis and tens of the thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. But we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our land. We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Now, although the NAACP was fighting racism in the media and the courts, many whites were fighting in riots targeted against successful black communities in many cities in the Red Summer race riots of 1919. These riots were sparked by anger at returning black veterans demanding their civil rights and by jealousy of whatever financial success Negroes might achieve. As Lewis states, there were race riots on a national scale, right out of the south of hundreds of thousands of African Americans, the explosion of labor strikes from coast to coast, shedding down shipyards, coal mines, steelworks, and the panic inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Each made race relations far worse than they already were. As was typical, there was no due process for blacks, no compensation, no protection from white rioters burning down black businesses, churches, and homes. Previously, the Tuskegee Machine was the leading spokesman for civil rights, and W.E.B. Du Bois was the activist upstart. But now that the NAACP was the leading activist organization, others played the role of the activist upstarts who offered more radical, more popular solutions. For a time, the leading upstart was Marcus Garvey, and Lewis notes that the blacks attending his meetings were younger, angrier, poorer, and darker than the typical card-carrying members of the NAACP. He bellowed that Wilson's War was a white man's calamity having nothing to do with black people. Although W.E.B. Du Bois initially praised Marcus Garvey, he was gullible and not a good businessman, promoting grandiose schemes, including a grocery chain, a restaurant, laundries, real estate investments, a publishing house, and an autonomous community in Liberia. On top of all of these, the most grandiose scheme of all was starting up the Black Star Line in 1919, a black-owned steamship company. Of course, he was conned. He paid far more than he should for these steamships, and they were far more expensive to run and maintain than he could have imagined. In his autobiography, W.E.B. Du Bois remembers that when Marcus Garvey began to collect money for his steamship line, I characterized him as a sincere and hard-working idealist, but called his methods bombastic, wasteful, illogical, and almost illegal, and begged his friends not to allow him foolishly to overwhelm with bankruptcy and disaster one of the most interesting spiritual movements of the modern world. But Garvey went ahead, wasted his money, got in trouble with the authorities, and was deported since he was a native of Jamaica. Marcus Garvey also wasted the money of investors in his steamship company, and he had few defenders when the government indicted him under charge of mail fraud. His reputation was stained when he conferred with the leaders of the KKK, and then was convicted to five years in jail and a $1,000 fine. But he was still popular enough to cause trouble after he served his time. Did the President succeeding Woodrow Wilson support civil rights? The Democrats opposed civil rights, and the Southern President Woodrow Wilson had reinforced segregation in the federal government. Soon after the Progressive Era, the Republican Party was seen as the party of big business. Civil rights issues were no longer one of the party's blanks. W. E. B. Du Bois does not even directly mention the three Presidents after Wilson in his autobiography. But in Lewis's biography, we have a brief mention of Warren G. Harding, the President succeeding Wilson. Under his presidency, there were plans to staff the Tuskegee Veterans Hospitals with an all-white staff, and this caused some controversy. But President Harding instructed the Civil Service Commission to find qualified Negroes to staff the hospital. When black delegates attended the Republican Convention of 1924, they discovered that chicken wire was strung around the section assigned to them, separating them from the other delegates. The KKK had increased influence, and by a one-vote margin, the Democratic Convention refused to condemn the Invisible Empire for its anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and racist agenda. Although the third-party Progressive Party under Robert La Follette had no clear position on race, W. E. B. Du Bois supported their more progressive agenda. Calvin Coolidge was the next Republican President. When the Senate defeated a development loan for Liberia, a nation that had been settled by former American slaves, Coolidge appointed W. E. B. Du Bois as a special envoy to Liberia. The State Department thought he went overboard when he visited Liberia in a top hat and tails, proclaiming that many Americans took a keen interest in the fate of America's sister republic. This minor victory was overshadowed by the ugly racial policies of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, also during the Coolidge presidency, with the relief efforts overseen by the future President Herbert Hoover. Devastation was massive. Labors were needed, so thousands of blacks were forced to labor under peonage because they were accused of not paying for relief supplies. Undercover reporters from the crisis revealed that these peon laborers were forced to sleep in concentration camps and boxcar prisons, and these reports were confirmed by a long-delayed Congressional investigation. Our biographer Lewis notes that, building on Coolidge, Hoover accelerated the policy of whitening the GOP below the Mason-Dixon line in order to bring about a major political realignment. Pretending to fight corruption, doesn't this sound familiar? Hoover authorized the removal of Negroes serving on the Republican National Committee and as state chairman in the South. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois, in the crisis, proclaimed that when the Republican Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928, it was a victory for Wall Street and the KKK. The Depression struck blacks particularly hard. Many signs in the Deep South and elsewhere advertised that there were no jobs for niggers until every white man has a job, and whites desperate for work took jobs customarily filled by blacks, such as collecting garbage and cleaning streets. W.E.B. Du Bois notes that in many great cities, more than a third of the Negroes went on public charity, and more ought to have been helped, but suffered deliberate discrimination in the South. In addition to this, the greater tragedy was the loss of thousands of farms and homes, the disappearance of savings among the rising Negro middle class, the collapse of Negro business, including banks, insurance companies, and retail businesses. Sometimes poorly paid blacks were replaced by better paid whites. Now the New Deal of FDR started many programs to offer relief and public works jobs to unemployed Americans, and that includes artists who painted many murals in many federal buildings and post offices. Since the states administered many of these programs, blacks were often excluded in the first two years of the programs. Harold X, heading the WPA, or Works Progress Administration, proclaimed that there was no racial discrimination, but the implementation was discriminatory. But the NAACP had a friend in Eleanor Roosevelt, who saw it as her job to lobby her husband for more humane civil rights policies. Later in his administration, FDR did adopt policies ensuring more blacks would benefit from the New Deal programs. And Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR does provide a great deal of hope to blacks in America. The NAACP had been trying to convince Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill for many years. Another anti-lynching bill was defeated in 1938. Eleanor Roosevelt and the black leaders were pushing FDR and Congress to pass the anti-lynching bill when the entire world was witnessing the horrors of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. And we'll take a few slides from our video, From Jim Crow to the Final Jewish Solution, drawing from Doris Kearns' biography, No Ordinary Time. FDR was sympathetic. He explained to a colleague that the Southerners, by reason of the seniority ruling Congress, are chairmen of the key congressional committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk. So FDR had a choice. He could either fight the Nazis, or he could fight lynching, but he could not do both. And defeating the Nazis was an attainable goal. Eleanor persisted in public speeches and her newspaper column in support of the anti-lynching campaign, constantly badgering her husband. When she asked FDR, do you mind if I say what I think? FDR characteristically replied, you can say anything you like, dear. I can always say, well, that is my wife. I can't do anything about her. And this supposed conflict was a good political way to push for civil rights without unduly antagonizing the powerful Deep South Senators and Congressmen. And what's distressing about this history is this bill was not about lynching itself, but it put legal pressure on Southern judges and policemen to enforce the law and punish those who were guilty of lynching, instead of just ignoring the crime. One symbolic gesture that gave Negroes hope that someday their lives would improve was the Marian Anderson concert. Not only was Marian Anderson black, she was also a renowned contralto opera singer who singing to large crowds and wanted to give a concert in Washington, D.C. The D.A.R., Daughters of the American Revolution, had a suitable concert hall, but they refused to rent the hall to a black singer, as did all the other venues. Eleanor Roosevelt and Howard Ickes arranged for her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial, and her performance was carried by radio stations all across the country. Professor Holloway, a former Yale professor, describes how this inspired and encouraged so many blacks in America. And YouTube has his undergraduate lectures in the Yale YouTube channel. Although civil rights were not a major focus of the FDR administration, due to Southern Congressmen dominating Congress, there were major improvements made that helped blacks economically, with the real promise of future civil rights gains. These small improvements convinced many blacks to switch their allegiance to the Democratic Party. There were real civil rights gains under President Harry Truman when he issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces. In 1947, Harry Truman was the first president to address a national NAACP convention, speaking to an audience of 10,000 from the Lincoln Memorial, and Eleanor Roosevelt had preceded him to the podium. Now, why did W.E.B. Du Bois resign from the NAACP? W.E.B. Du Bois actively supported the international Pan-African movement, but the NAACP was too engrossed in the civil rights struggle in America to concern itself with challenging colonialism overseas. W.E.B. Du Bois concluded that he was out of touch with my organization and that the question of leaving it was only a matter of time, especially as the Crisis Magazine was no longer supported. Although the Crisis Magazine benefited from a well-timed grant, the Depression had greatly reduced the number of subscribers. The magazine, The Crisis, was not as critical to the success of the organization as it was in the earlier years. The legal and other activities of the NAACP had increased in importance. There were tensions between him and the executive secretary since 1929, who was Walter White, and he was more of a hands-on manager than his predecessor. Ever the contrarian, W.E.B. Du Bois even penned an article entitled Segregation and the Crisis, surprising readers in the NAACP board that although segregation had meant racial discrimination, this did not have to be so, explaining that there should never be an opposition to segregation pure and simple, unless that segregation does involve discrimination. Segregated schools, churches, and public facilities were inathema only because they had been inferior. The NAACP insisted that he retract this statement and he refused. And what was some of the reasons for the tensions between W.E.B. Du Bois and the new secretary for the NAACP, Walter White? White viewed Du Bois as an employee and expected that he should behave like an employee, taking directions from the boss, which was something W.E.B. Du Bois would never do. W.E.B. Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934 and was hired back by Atlanta University to head its department of sociology. In his public statement, the NAACP board stated his contribution as the contrarian editor of the Crisis. A mere yes-man could not have attracted the attention of the world and could not have stimulated the NAACP board to further study various important problems. Now in our last video on W.E.B. Du Bois, we will examine the question, was W.E.B. Du Bois a communist? How did the NAACP view the American Communist Party? And we will reflect on the last decades of the long and eventful life of W.E.B. Du Bois. Now we'll discuss the sources we used for this video. We prefer reading the autobiographies of black civil rights leaders because we want them to speak for themselves. But W.E.B. Du Bois' autobiography suffers from the fatal flaw that he assumes that we already know the history of the NAACP and America during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. For the videos on the latter part of his life, we used as our primary source the excellent biography by David Levering Lewis. W.E.B. Du Bois left out key facts critical for our understanding of the struggles of the NAACP that it faced after it was founded. In part, he was selective in the telling of the many conflicts between him and the board due to his contrarian nature. The YouTube description includes a link to our PowerPoint script that we uploaded to SlideShare and also our blog. Please support this channel by sharing this video with your friends, and by clicking on the like and subscribe buttons, and by clicking on the Amazon links to purchase any of the books we discussed, which will earn us a very small affiliate commission. And please consider becoming a patron of our channel. Plus, we will host special discussion groups for our patrons. Plus, you can click on the Meetup or small M icon to participate in our online discussions where we practice our future YouTube scripts. 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