W. E. B.

Du Bois:
Education, Race and Economics from 1903-1961


Paul T. Miller, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate,
Department of African American Studies, Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA


By the beginning of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the preeminent
public intellectuals in the world. Although he is best known for his work concerning the
color line, he also cautioned against bourgeois indulgencies, rallied for an education to
service the less fortunate, and maintained a program of Pan-Africanism. Thus, this essay
explores the context of Du Bois as an advocate for global justice and world peace, a
clear thinker on the nexus of issues concerning race and class, and his attempt to
explicate the emerging global capitalist system.
Paul T Miller (ptm@temple) is a doctoral candidate in the African American Studies Department at Temple
University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is writing his dissertation on the history of African Americans
in San Francisco from 1945-1975, and lives in Oakland, California.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of America's
preeminent public intellectuals. From his role as co-founder of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and editor of The Crisis to his
leadership in organizing five Pan-African conferences, from his position as a professor
and sociologist to his active membership in the Peace Information Center, his writings
and speeches shaped progressive opinions and policies in America and abroad.
During the many stages of his life, Du Bois set out to address contemporary problems
with the keen insight of a top rank sociologist and the contextual depth of a seasoned
historian. And, while he was a "race man" who was deeply knowledgeable and fiercely
proud of his African and African American heritage, his analyses were seldom
provincial; rather, they often incorporated an international perspective, focusing on how
and where African descended people in particular and oppressed populations in general
might fit into a world characterized by social justice and brotherhood, rather than by
conflict and inequality.

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As an unrelenting advocate for global justice and world peace, Du Bois often critically
addressed: the power of education in creating a better world, the question of the color
line, how African descended people would be incorporated equally into the United States
and the world (the "Negro Question"), and the unnecessary and irrational inequality of
world wealth distribution, and how it propelled propensity toward selfish and
materialistic habits.

Education as the chief means of ameliorating problems of race and class held sway with
Du Bois his entire life. As a sort of response to "The Negro Question", Du Bois
advocated planned education that would cultivate the intellect as well as direct the actions
of students for the purpose of improving the life chances of African Americans in specific
and the condition of all people in general. In chapter six of The Souls of Black Folk, he
writes to stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to
flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in
our very laps. The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the
path of honor and humanity (1969:123). Du Bois (1969) notes that effective education
will develop training that will best use the labor of all men without enslaving or
brutalizing, and that such training will, ...encourage the prejudices that bulwark society,
and stamp out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within
the Veil (123-4).

Du Bois concerns about Negro colleges were, in 1930, combined with a concern for
students and their connections to the economic environment surrounding African
Americans. Specifically, he worried that Historically Black Colleges and Universities
lacked an over-arching curriculum that would equip students with the intellectual tools
necessary to negotiate the modern world while simultaneously applying their particular
learned skills to a well thought out and explicit program of racial uplift. In a speech
given at Howard University, Du Bois notes, ...there cannot be the slightest doubt but that
the Negro college, its teachers, students, and graduates have not yet comprehended the
age in which they live: the tremendous organization of industry, commerce, capital, and
credit which today forms a super-organization dominating and ruling the universe,
subordinating to its ends government, democracy, religion, education, and social
philosophy; and for the purpose of forcing into the places of power in this organization
American black men either to guide or help reform it, either to increase its efficiency or
make it a machine to improve our well-being, rather than the merciless mechanism which
enslaves us; for this the Negro college has today neither program nor intelligent
comprehension (1973:66).
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He continues moreover, and perhaps for this very reason, the ideals of colored
college-bred men have not in the last thirty years been raised an iota. Rather in the
main, they have been lowered. The average Negro undergraduate has swallowed hook,
line, and sinker, the dead bait of the white undergraduate, who, born in an industrial
machine, does not have to think, and does not think. Our college man today is, on the
average, a man untouched by real culture. He deliberately surrenders to selfish and even
silly ideals, swarming into semiprofessional athletics and Greek letter societies, and
affecting to despise scholarship and the hard grind of study and research. The greatest
meeting of the Negro college year like those of the white college year has become vulgar
exhibitions of liquor, extravagance, and fur coats. We have in our colleges a growing
mass of stupidity and indifference (1973:67).
Hence, concludes that acquiring as we do in college no guidance to a broad economic
comprehension and a sure industrial foundation, and simultaneously a tendency to live
beyond our means, and spend for show, we are graduating young men and women with
an intense and overwhelming appetite for wealth and no reasonable way of gratifying it,
no philosophy for counteracting it (1973:67). Clearly, Du Bois realizes that the goal of
training a cadre of well educated African Americans who would put their skills to use for
racial uplift is at odds with the aspirations of many of the "Talented Tenth.

Naturally, Du Bois recognized that critique without meaningful proposals for solutions
rang hollow, and in 1946 outlined a program of study that would connect the non-college
trained to their better educated counterparts in an effort to positively impact American
society.
He proposed that... the college should be closely integrated with its surrounding social
setting. One of the great limitations of the older Negro college was that they came up
with the idea of detachment from the town, city and state where they were. In part this
was forced upon them by slavery and its consequences but it afterward became a habit;
so that an intellectual class was trained which had no organic connection with the
community around. In the small college which I have in mind this should no longer be
true. The college should be an integral part of the community, of the colored community,
of course, first; but also and just as needfully of the white community, so that in all its
work and thinking, its government and art expression the community and college should
be one and inseparable and at the same time the college could retain its leading function
because of its independence and its clear ideals (1973:148).

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In this way Du Bois was trying to ensure some measure of unity between the better
educated and more financially secure African Americans and their less educated and
poorer counterparts, thereby guarding against the bifurcations that might result from such
educational and economic differences.
Next, when writing Souls Du Bois asks ...the real question, how does it feel to be a
problem? (1969:44). To answer this question Du Bois expresses what being African in
America means and the unique challenges this poses stating, ...the Negro is a sort of
seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, --a
world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world. 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 world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness, --an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder (1969:45).
Moreover, toward the end of Souls Du Bois forecasts that many African Americans
would find themselves in noting that they must perpetually discuss the "Negro
Problem,"--must live, move and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its light or
darkness. With this come, too, peculiar problems of their inner life, --of the status of
women, the maintenance of Home, the training of children, the accumulation of wealth,
and the prevention of crime. All this must mean a time of intense ethical ferment, of
religious heart-searching and intellectual unrest. From the double life every American
Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the
nineteenth century, --from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid
sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds
within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the
same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul,
a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts,
double duties, and double classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and
tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism (1969:221-22).
Congruently, as Souls would outline the turmoil caused by living under the burden of the
Color Bar, Du Bois would, in subsequent books, speeches and essays, urge African
Americans to choose the path of revolt and radicalism.

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In the same way that he had put his finger on the pulse of the "Negro Problem" early, by
the 1940s Du Bois was evaluating his life's work and constructing programs of action
intended to reduce, and eventually eliminate color prejudice. In his essay from Rayford
Logan's edited volume What the Negro Wants, Du Bois reflects upon over forty years of
his own work and thought, a span of time that included two World Wars and a global
economic depression, and attempts to explicate the position of African Americans at mid-
century. He begins by writing about his Harvard classmates I was exceptional among
them, in my ideas on voluntary race segregation; they for the most part saw salvation
only in integration at the earliest moment and on almost any terms in white culture; I was
firm in my criticism of white folk and in my more or less complete dream of a Negro self-
sufficient culture even in America (2001:40). He goes on to note that while teaching at
Atlanta University from 1897-1910, he hoped his program of study on the "Negro" would
lead to the lessening of color discrimination. He states my faith in its success was
based on the firm belief that race prejudice was based on widespread ignorance. My
long-term remedy was Truth: carefully gathered scientific proof that neither color nor
race determined the limits of a man's capacity or desert (2001:49). It is with a sincere
optimism then, that Du Bois would return from the 1911 Races Congress in London
noting I returned to America with a broad tolerance of race and a determination to
work for the International, which I saw forming; it was, I conceived, not the ideal of the
American Negroes to become simply American; but the ideal of America to build an
interracial culture, broader and more catholic than ours (2001:58).
However, the onset of the first World War would cast a long shadow on his optimism and
he would write for now there was no doubt in my mind: Western European civilization
had nearly caused the death of modern culture in jealous effort to control the wealth and
work of colored people (2001:59).

Moving forward, during the 1920s Du Bois would devote significant time and energy
attempting to forge a Pan-African alliance with African American leadership in order to
resolve the crisis of color and class. He showed how, between 1890 and 1910 it was
the age of triumph of Big Business, for Industry, consolidated and organized on a world-
wide scale, and run by white capital with colored labor, and how it was imperative that
African people unite to struggle against such exploitation (2001:50).


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In spite of his plan he notes from 1910 to 1920, I had followed the path of sociology as
an inseparable part of social reform, and social uplift as a method of scientific social
investigation; then, in practice, I had conceived an interracial culture as superseding as
our goal, a purely American culture; before I had conceived a program for this path, and
after throes of bitter racial strife, I had emerged with a program of Pan-Africanism as
organized protection of the Negro world led by American Negroes. But American
Negroes were not interested (2001:60).
Subsequently, Du Bois propose another program to alleviate poverty and racial
discrimination during and after the Great Depression, and even though he took as his
foundation some of the ideas of Karl Marx, he eschewed Soviet-style Communism's rigid
one-size-fits-all approach, noting that the program of the American Communist party
was suicidal. He explains, ...I did believe that a people where the differentiation in
classes because of wealth had only begun, could be so guided by intelligent leaders that
they would develop into a consumer-conscious people, producing for use and not
primarily for profit, and working into the surrounding industrial organization so as to
reinforce the economic revolution bound to develop in the United States and all over
Europe and Asia sooner or later. I believed that revolution in the production and
distribution of wealth could be a slow, reasoned development and not necessarily a blood
bath. I believed that 13 millions of people, increasing, albeit slowly in intelligence, could
so concentrate their thought and action on the abolition of their poverty, as to work in
conjunction with the most intelligent body of American thought; and that in the future as
in the past, out of the mass of American Negroes would arise a far-seeing leadership in
lines of economic reform (2001:61-2).
But despite his best efforts Du Bois laments that The Great Depression and the Read
Scare would put to rest any hope of enacting a "Socialist" solution to racial and economic
problems, and toward the end of his life he was still entreating people to struggle toward
racial equality and economic justice. However, in Souls his comments about racial
equality were written for a mainly white readership whereas in later writings, such as his
1960 essay "Wither Now and Why", he is clearly reaching out to African American
community as he writeswhat I have been fighting for and am still fighting for is the
possibility of black folk and their cultural patterns existing in America without
discrimination; and on terms of equality. If we take this attitude we have got to do so
consciously and deliberately (1973:150).

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Du Bois concludes, we must accept equality or die. What we must also do is to lay down
a line of thought and action which will accomplish two things: The utter disappearance
of color discrimination in American life and the preservation of African history and
culture as a valuable contribution to modern civilization as it was to medieval and
ancient civilization (1973:151).

Moreover, especially in his later writings, Du Bois focused on the connection between
race and economics and how too often class differences divided the African Americans
who needed each other for solidarity to battle racial bigotry. For example, in his final
book, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, he writes that this dichotomy in the
Negro group, this development of class structure, was to be expected, and will be more
manifest in the future, as discrimination against Negroes as such decreases. There will
gradually arise among American Negroes a separation according to their attitudes
toward labor, wealth and work. It is still my hope that the Negro's experience in the past
will, in the end, lead the majority of this intelligentsia into the ranks of those advocating
social control of wealth, abolition of exploitation of labor, and equality of opportunity for
all (1968:371).
Unfortunately, just pages later he is less optimistic about the possibility of a positive
outcome when he states the very loosening of outer racial discriminatory pressures
had not, as I had once believed, left Negroes free to become a group cemented into a new
cultural unity, capable of absorbing socialism, tolerance, and democracy, and helping to
lead America into a new heaven and new earth. But rather, partial emancipation is
freeing some of them to ape the worst of American and Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, luxury,
showing-off, and 'social climbing (1968:393).

Du Bois' concern for education as a tool of liberation and his zeal for struggling against
racial injustice were tied closely to his critique on the emerging national and international
propensity toward materialism, over-consumption and unnecessary disparities in wealth
distribution. In 1903 he cautioned those who had managed some success against
mistaking "golden apples" for the goal of racing rather than the incidents by the way. He
writes Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the
touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread; it is
replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-getters; it is burying the
sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretense and ostentation.

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For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged, --wealth to overthrow the
remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect wealth
to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for
law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal
of the Public School (1969:112).
Continuing, by 1945 Du Bois had linked the problem of economic inequality to the lack
of democracy in the world. Intolerance of cultural and ethnic diversity, control of
governance and economics by only a select elite and avarice among the rich as well as the
poor are a few of the problems he examines in Color and Democracy. For
example, explaining the situation arising from European colonies and the mandate system
Du Bois indicates that if the Social development in these cases led to the gradual
integration of mass and class, of minority groups into the dominant culture, bringing with
them such cultural gifts and modifications as would enrich and vary that culture into a
new national unity; if the colony gradually became the partially autonomous dependency
and eventually a free and independent nation--this would be a development satisfactory
in the end and calling for patience in the process. But no, the development as we see it is
cock-eyed and illogical; the group antagonism leads to friction and tensions in the
country, and is usually solved only by the physical elimination of some minorities or the
cultural disappearance of any individual patterns which they might contribute.
Americanization has never yet meant a synthesis of what Africa, Europe, and Asia had to
contribute to the new and vigorous republic of the West; it meant largely the attempt to
achieve a dead level of uniformity intolerant of all variation. The ideal of the poor in
America is usually to become rich and ride on the necks of the poorer (1945:71-2).
Stating plainly the direction that America and the West were headed, Du Bois would
return to this theme repeatedly in an attempt to cajole, jolt and persuade people do better
by each other and work for a greater good.

At the end of his life Du Bois was still a sharp critic of global conditions in need of
improvement, and a solution oriented scholar who would posit alternatives to mainstream
thinking. Nowhere was this feature of his intellectual thought more prominent than in his
late criticisms of the developing situation now called "Globalization", and the integration
of political-economies of nations into one consumer driven capitalistic system lead by the
United States and buttressed by J apan, England and to a lesser extent, China, Canada and
France.
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In a 1960 message intended to warn Africa about borrowing capital from the West Du
Bois noted boycott the export of big capital from the exploiting world, led by America.
Refuse to by machines, skills and comforts with cocoa, coffee, palm oil and fruit sold at
ridiculously low prices in exchange for imported food, liquor, refrigerators and
automobiles sold at exorbitant prices. Live simply. Refuse to buy big capital from
nations that cheat and overcharge. Buy of the Soviet Union and China as they grow able
to sell at low prices. Save thus your own capital and drive the imperialists into
bankruptcy or into Socialism (1968:402).
Clearly Du Bois anticipated that transnational corporations (TNCs), aided by the
governments of the most powerful industrial nations, would become increasingly more
powerful and accelerate their drives for profit at the expense of developing nations and
people.

Furthermore, Du Bois was not only aware of this emerging global system but of the
position of African descended people when he writes we must admit that the majority
of the American Negro intelligentsia, together with much of the West Indian and West
African leadership, shows symptoms of following in the footsteps of Western acquisitive
society, with its exploitation of labor, monopoly of land and its resources, and with
private profit for the smart and unscrupulous in a world of poverty, disease, and
ignorance, as the natural end of human culture. I have long noted and fought this all too
evident tendency, and built my faith in its ultimate change on an inner Negro cultural
ideal. I thought this ideal would be built on ancient African communism, supported and
developed by memory of slavery and experience of caste, which would drive the Negro
group into a spiritual unity precluding the development of economic classes and inner
class struggle (1968:392).
However, his final sentence to this thought is uncharacteristically pessimistic as he
concludes this was once possible, but it is now improbable, and as his most pointed
criticisms often called the United States to task for failing to create a nation wherein
equality and freedom were meaningful guideposts in the day-to-day lives of many
Americans.
And his Autobiography exposes the contradictions between the ideals and the practices of
American democracy indicating that perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of
current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless
love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of
science for destruction.
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Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is
sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and
selling again? Even today the contradictions of American civilization are tremendous.
Freedom of political discussion is difficult; elections are not free and fair. Democracy is
for us to a large extent unworkable. In business there is a tremendous amount of
cheating and stealing; gambling in card games, on television and on the stock exchange
is widely practiced. It is common custom for distinguished persons to sign books,
articles, and speeches they did not write; for men of brains to compose and sell opinions
which they do not believe. Ghost writing is a profession. The greatest power in the land
is not thought or ethics, but wealth, and the persons who exercise the power of wealth are
not necessarily it owners, but those who direct its use, and the truth about this direction
is so far as possible kept a secret. We do not know who owns our vast property and
resources, so that most of our argument concerning wealth and its use must be based on
guesswork.
Those responsible for the misuse of wealth escape responsibility, and even the owners of
capital often do not know for what it is being used and how. The criterion of industry
and trade is the profit that it accrues, not the good which it does either its owners of the
public. Present profit is valued higher than future need. We waste materials. We refuse
to make repairs. We cheat and deceive in manufacturing goods. We have succumbed to
an increased use of lying and misrepresentation. In the last ten years at least a thousand
books have been published to prove that the fight to preserve Negro slavery in America
as a great and noble cause, led by worthy men of eminence (1968:418-19).
These words, written around 1961, aim to make readers think about just how abysmal
much of American behavior had become and that perhaps it was time to join the struggle
in making America live up to its ideals.
Lastly, Du Bois suggests that even though America is leading the world, doing so by
building up its military will impede its ability to resolve domestic issues such as
unemployment, crime and poverty. He writes today the United States is the leading
nation in the world, which apparently believes that war is the only way to settle present
disputes and difficulties. For this reason it is spending fantastic sums of money, and
wasting wealth and energy on the preparation for war, which is nothing less than
criminal. Yet the United States dare not stop spending money for war. If she did her
whole economy, which is today based on preparation for war, might collapse.

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Therefore, we prepare for a Third World War; we spread our soldiers and arms over the
earth and we bribe every nation we can to become our allies. We are taxing our citizens
into poverty, crime and unemployment, and systematically distorting the truth about
socialism (1968:419).
He concludes we tax ourselves into poverty and crime so as to make the rich richer
and the poor poorer and more evil. We know the cause of this: it is to permit our rich
business interests to stop socialism and to prevent the ideals of communism from ever
triumphing on earth. The aim is impossible. Socialism progresses and will progress. All
we can do is to silence and jail its promoters and make world war on communism. I
believe in socialism. I seek a world when the ideals of communism will triumph--to each
according to his need, from each according to his ability. For this I will work as long as
I live. And I still live (1968:422).
Although the situation looks grim toward the end of his life, Du Bois is willing and able
to expend his time and energy working for a better world, one in which all people might
live with the security and stability enjoyed by the world's well off.

W.E.B. Du Bois, surely one of the leading public intellectuals of the twentieth century,
occupied a position at the forefront of progressive thought on nearly every issue he
tackled via three topics he repeatedly addressed throughout his life, i.e.: using education
as a tool for creating a more socially responsible and just society, dismantling racial
inequality and redressing economic imbalances while slowly changing people's attitudes
from being centered on selfishness and material prosperity to being guided by a greater
sense of social altruism.
From The Souls of Black Folk to The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, Du Bois
challenged people to examine their assumptions about racial issues and economic
organization, and work to build a better world, one that all people might share in equally.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the words of Du Bois ring as true one hundred
years later as they did when he first penned them, saying it is, then, the strife of all
honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the
survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that
we man be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and
strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty"
(1969:188).

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References
Du Bois, W.E.B. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1945.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My
Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International Publishers,
1968.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet Classics, 1969.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960. Herbert
Aptheker (Ed), New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.

Du Bois, W.E.B. My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom in What the Negro Wants,
Rayford W. Logan, ed. (pp. 31-70). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2001.

















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