Middle Passages by James T. Campbell

Author:James T. Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

LIKE SHIPS AT SEA, Du Bois and Schuyler passed within hailing distance of one another in the 1920s and early 1930s and then proceeded on their way, bound for the far shores of the Left and Right. In 1934, Du Bois resigned from the N.A.A.C.P. Though prompted by the association’s refusal to endorse his controversial “black economy” plan, the resignation was also a by-product of his rivalry with Schuyler, who had become an influential figure within the association, under the auspices of its new executive director, Walter White. (As if to pour salt in the wound, Schuyler was appointed business manager of The Crisis in 1935.) Though he was sixty-six years old when he resigned, Du Bois did not retire, but instead returned to Atlanta University, where he embarked on the most productive phase of his entire career. In addition to his work as a teacher, he launched a new journal, called Phylon, renewed work on his long-dreamed-of Encyclopedia Africana, and published a steady stream of articles and books, including the magisterial Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880; Dusk of Dawn, a classic autobiography; and Black Folk, Then and Now, a four-hundred page “essay” on the “history and sociology of the Negro race.”

In 1944, Walter White invited Du Bois to return to New York as the N.A.A.C.P.’s Director of Special Research. The post was clearly intended as a sinecure, a symbolic act of atonement to an injured elder statesman before his presumably imminent passing. But White had underestimated the old man, who proved to be as energetic as ever, and just as prickly. From the moment of his return, Du Bois protested everything from the failure to include him in important decisions to the location of his office, which opened onto a noisy common area. (He waged a constant battle with Thurgood Marshall, head of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, who conducted rowdy impromptu seminars with his clerks and colleagues in the main office.) More important than the clash of personalities, however, was the clash of philosophies. For leaders like White and Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.’s first priority was the home front, the struggle of African Americans for full equality in the United States. For Du Bois, that struggle could not be separated from the injustice and irrationality of the global economic order. The conflict came to a head in the early years of the Cold War, with an increasingly marginalized Du Bois decrying the N.A.A.C.P.’s craven surrender to anti-Communist hysteria and insisting on the continuing importance of Pan-Africanism and the wider anticolonial struggle. In 1948, Du Bois was fired, after the leaking of a memo in which he accused White of aligning the association “with the reactionary, war-mongering colonial imperialism of the [Truman] administration.”

Du Bois, now eighty, found a more congenial home at the Council on African Affairs, a New York-based organization founded in the 1940s as a clearinghouse for information about Africa. But the council came in for merciless Red-baiting during the McCarthy era and was forced to close in 1955.

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