A Fierce Discontent by Michael McGerr

Author:Michael McGerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Du Bois offered more than a rejoinder to Washington. In his work, Du Bois explored the duality of African-American identity: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois envisioned a pluralist America, one in which blacks could be themselves rather than appear as whites wanted them to appear. The nation had to be black as well as white. “He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world,” Du Bois wrote. “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.” 32

To help create a pluralist America, Du Bois arranged for a small meeting on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in July 1905. What came to be known as the Niagara Movement firmly rejected accommodation of Southern whites, protested disfranchisement, praised collegiate as well as industrial education, and demanded protest as well as economic self-help. “We do not hesitate to complain,” the meeting declared, “and to complain loudly and insistently.” By 1909, the Niagara Movement had helped give rise to a new organization that became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People a year later. The association included white supporters and benefactors—Lillian Wald and William English Walling, for instance—as well as African-Americans. Du Bois became its director of publicity and research and began to edit its journal, aptly named The Crisis. 33

There were other African-American protests, including a passionate campaign against lynching. Georgia African-Americans held an Equal Rights Convention at Macon in 1906. “We must encourage Negro business-men,” the convention’s president, William Jefferson White, declared. “And at the same time we must agitate, complain, protest, and keep protesting against the invasion of our manhood rights … and above all organize these million brothers of ours into one great fist which shall never cease to pound at the gates of opportunity until they shall fly open.” Bishop Henry M.

Turner was still bolder. “To the Negro in the country the American flag is a dirty and contemptible rag …,” he declaimed. “I wish to say that hell is an improvement upon the United States when the Negro is involved.” Few African-Americans were ready to go that far. Many may have liked what Du Bois had to say—but they also heeded Washington’s message. North and South, the realities of white power tempered black emotion. The streetcar boycotts faded away; the NAACP struggled. A true African-American mass movement against segregation was a long way off. 34

The differences between Du Bois and Washington are obvious, and often remarked. The ideas they shared, including an uneven relationship to progressivism, are less plain but nonetheless revealing about the prospects for a “middle-class paradise” in America.

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