A Homeric Life: W.E.B. Du Bois

Review by Jim Zook
From The Chronicle of Higher Education

Thirty years after the death of controversial black sociologist and political activist W.E.B. Du Bois, his first biography has appeared, written by a Rutgers University historian who sees his subject as having led "one of those Homeric lives" that seemingly touched upon a myriad of issues, came in contact with a wide range of people, and revolved around life on three continents.

At the turn of the century, a time when it might have been dangerous to be a vociferously angry black man, W.E.B. Du Bois determined that it was time for him to be loud and adamant. As an Atlanta University professor in his mid-30s, Du Bois had already proved himself a trail-blazing sociologist with several studies of black America. But mainstream academe had all but ignored the work of Harvard University's first black Ph.D.

The slight was intolerable for Du Bois, a man who recognized his own brilliance at an early age and spent most of his 95 years proclaiming it. He set aside academic sterility for the passion of the essayist with his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first expressed his notion of "racial twoness" as a core-identity issue for people of both African and American heritage. This idea was too bold to be ignored, especially by the millions of subordinated black Americans whom it inspired.

"Two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder," Du Bois called it. "The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self."

Recasting black America's self-image assured Du Bois his stake in history, which he would vastly expand over the next 60 years. But that remarkable life would end, for Du Bois, in the cruelest of ironies. Du Bois, a man who never doubted his own stature, would be largely ignored for years after his death in Ghana in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington. At the civil-rights movement's greatest moment of public affirmation, the grandfather of the movement died in exile, tarred by the U.S. government as an anti-democratic traitor.

It has taken 30 years since his death for a comprehensive biography to appear. W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (Henry Holt & Company), the first installment in a two-volume work by the Rutgers University historian David Levering Lewis, follows Du Bois from his birth and childhood in western Massachusetts through his stormy editorship of The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the infant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"THE COMPLEXITY OF THE MAN"
Du Bois seems a logical signature work for Lewis, who holds Rutgers University's Martin Luther King, Jr., chair. His previous books on the Harlem renaissance, imperialism in Africa and King served as preludes to this, admittedly his most challenging, project. Support from his publisher and a Woodrow Wilson fellowship made the task doable.

"Du Bois's life is one of those Homeric lives," Lewis says. Du Bois "touched about every issue, knew just about everyone, lived on three continents, took position, and was a master when it came to expressing his ideas in prose. It just seemed to me it would be not only fascinating as a life the complexity of the man, the personality but it would really be a window onto the 20th century."

Critically speaking, the wait has been rewarded. Lewis, the beneficiary of glowing reviews in recent weeks, is among the finalists for the National Book Award in non-fiction. The awards will be announced November 17 in New York.

LACK OF ACCESS
As a piece of scholarship, Du Bois is Lewis's attempt to offer "one of those great missing biographies." That void is due, in part, to the challenges of chronicling such a geographically and intellectually far-flung life, as well as the lack of access to Du Bois's papers until 1980.

And those obstacles do not account for the anti-Communist disfavor that shadowed Du Bois, which scared off some scholars and publishers for much of the Cold War. The decline of Communism and creation of a Du Bois archive at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have opened the way for a coming flurry of work on Du Bois, of which Lewis says his is simply the first.

"The record of publication on a figure as important as Du Bois is really scandalous," says Arnold Rampersad, a Princeton historian whose works include Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Schocken, 1990). "When you think of how few books have been written on such an important intellectual, you have to wonder what's going on among American scholars. A lot should have been done over the past 15 years that wasn't done."

Creation of the Massachusetts repository, home to 110,000 documents of Du Bois's personal correspondence, was an essential precursor to Lewis's book. Du Bois's literary executor and Communist Party colleague, the historian Herbert Aptheker, kept the papers from the time Du Bois left for Ghana in 1960 until 1972, when Aptheker persuaded Du Bois's widow to sell them to the university.

Another seven years were needed to organize and protect the papers and produce the 79 reels of microfilm that they consume. Harvard had previously refused to accept the papers of its alumnus in the 1950s, when Du Bois's acquittal on federal charges of being a foreign agent was still vivid in the public memory.

Aptheker, editor of a three-volume collection of the papers (University of Massachusetts Press) and a 37-volume collection of Du Bois's published writings (Kraus-Thomson), is widely considered the most knowledgeable Du Bois scholar. He declined comment on Du Bois until publication of the second volume, which Lewis has yet to write but hopes to publish early in 1996.

The appearance of Lewis's biography has a bittersweet tinge for Aptheker, who published his works only after years of trying to secure financing or find a publisher willing to touch Du Bois. Nevertheless, he says he is "delighted" that a comprehensive biography has materialized.

A FEROCIOUS FIGHTER
"He's not too dangerous now," Aptheker says. "But while he was living, he was a ferocious fighter against racism and war and imperialism. He was not only a ferocious fighter, but an effective one. The racist government never forgave him for that."

For Lewis, Du Bois is more than an academic pursuit. Lewis's father a former dean of the theology school at Wilberforce University and a founding member of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP was a friend and occasional correspondent of Du Bois. The book's acknowledgments open with a flashback to Lewis's brief childhood encounter with Du Bois.

"I do not recall the answer I gave when [Du Bois] asked what my plans were for life," Lewis writes, "but it certainly could not have anticipated what I would say to him today about the plan my life has followed for the past eight years."

While admitting that he, like Du Bois, is a formal personality, Lewis says the pull he felt to write the biography was intellectual, not personal.

MYSTIQUE AND ARROGANCE
"I like Du Bois, he's interesting," Lewis says. "I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with him because there's a kind of categorical imperative of his life that would be too demanding for me."

Du Bois's mystique emanates from what Lewis calls "a force field in personality," anchored by an unparalleled arrogance and allegiance to a broad notion of racial equality. But those bedrock traits also masked insecurities about painful details of his personal life.

For those who knew him, Du Bois was universally respected but not revered. He relished bucking mainstream intellectual thinking, doing so as early as his dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. He was among the earliest outspoken feminists, but also a patriarchal husband who spent little time with his wife and daughter, and was a prodigious lover. Later, as a leading member of the Communist Party of the United States, Du Bois was known to leave political rallies before delivering his scheduled address because he went to bed at 10 p.m. Always.

A TRAUMATIZING EVENT
The catalyst for what Lewis terms Du Bois's "elegant anger" was, according to Du Bois himself, a traumatizing grade- school event in his predominantly white hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois and his classmates were exchanging greeting cards until one refused to accept the card offered by Du Bois.

" `Suddenly,' Du Bois says, `the veil fell, and I realized I was apart and different,' " Lewis relates. "I think most of us today would have said, `Why, the little twerp!' It becomes a simile for the whole collective experience. But that was typical of Du Bois to take what might be incidental, trivial, or even significant, and make it a grand abstraction, pregnant with meaning that we would hang on, glom on."

Through much of his research and in his earliest writings, Du Bois's Victorian, elitist sensibilities dominate. Those tendencies even led Du Bois to agree for a while with his eventual philosophical arch-rival, Booker T. Washington.

Although Du Bois personally never gained what Lewis calls "the common touch," his essays and speeches began to promote more egalitarian ideas about education, economics and social equality. The Souls of Black Folk presented the most direct and public assault on the thinking of "the Great Accommodator," as Washington was known. More important, Souls starkly outlined the terms of the race debate for decades to come.

"Here is the summation of the real gut issues that impact and concern African Americans that had not been done before, certainly not with the luminosity that Du Bois managed," Lewis says. "The power of language to combat social evil is the sum and substance of what The Souls of Black Folk is all about."

On a personal level, Du Bois's idea of racial twoness initially troubled Lewis. The idea seemed to apply only to the "talented tenth" of elite blacks such as Du Bois himself, and it said to Lewis that "we are forever looking at ourselves through others' eyes." Only later, when Du Bois fleshes out the idea as a permanent tension between cultures, does Lewis embrace it as "the forerunner of multiculturalism."

REMOTE FIGURES
Throughout all the traveling and incessant work, the Du Bois story includes two figures who are surprisingly remote: Du Bois's first wife, Nina, and their daughter, Yolande. For most of its 50 years, the marriage was one of appearances, maintained for the scholar to hold up as evidence that blacks could maintain stable families.

Lewis believes that behavior was part of a pattern of eschewing family ties. Some episodes are too painful for Du Bois to confront openly, such as the guilt he carried over his mother's death, which freed him of family responsibilities as he reached college age. Other developments impinged on his mission to single-handedly elevate his race, such as the shame he felt over an illegitimate half-brother or the desertion of his father. Du Bois went so far as to shade, or even hide, some of those events in his personal writings, Lewis says.

"When he can't remember his wife's birthday, or when she died, or when his mother died, or when he can't remember how to spell his half-brother's name, those things are not a result of propaganda but the screening of pain that Du Bois took trouble to guard himself from," Lewis says.

Lewis consciously chose a commercial press for his biography to reach a broader audience. His academic roots come to the surface on occasion, when he talks of "the jeremiads and Carlylian effulgences" lacing Du Bois's Crisis editorials. More typically, though. Lewis stays his exhaustively researched course, building a picture of the young Du Bois that even includes pieces Du Bois himself did not want found.

The flurry of accolades has given Lewis extra motivation as he begins writing volume two the older, more elusive Du Bois and finishes a work that is much more than he originally bargained for.

"I went into this with a degree of confidence that was misplaced." he says. "I thought, `Four years. Five years at the most.' We were talking one volume, not two. Who wants to read two volumes, even on a life as fascinating as Du Bois? And then, I discovered that the life was far more complex."

Jim Zook is an assistant editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Copyright (c) 1993, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission.