Defining the Struggle by Susan D. Carle

Author:Susan D. Carle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 9.3 Cover page from August 1908 issue of the Horizon magazine (UCLA).

Figure 9.4 Cover page from March 1912 issue of The Crisis (New York Public Library).

As Du Bois’s organizing energies switched to helping create the NAACP, his reporting switched focus too. In The Horizon he would announce with approval the first meetings of the National Negro Committee and then would offer words of advice to both the white philanthropists who were moving in to contribute their social and financial capital to a project that had begun decades before and to the African American activists who had been long at this work:

Hitherto there has been in this country a strange, to some, almost inexplicable hiatus between the cause of Negro uplift and other great causes of human advance. If one met the workers for women’s rights, prison reform, improvement in housing, consumers leagues, social settlements, universal peace, socialism—almost any of the myriad causes for which thinkers and doers are today toiling, one met persons who usually either knew nothing of the Negro problem or avoided it if they did know. On the other hand Negroes have long been working on the theory that the Negro problem is separate and distinct from other social problems in America, and [needed] to be settled by peculiar remedies. Today both sets of social workers are awakened to their mistake . . . Social workers who called [the] conference, like Jane Addams, . . . Florence Kelly, Oswald Garrison Villard, Charles Edward Russell, Lillian D. Wald, William English Walling and others are today realizing that there is in America today no human problem of advance and uplift which does not in a more or less subtle way involve the Negro American . . . So too, the Negroes who responded eagerly to the call are beginning to learn that the Negro problem is simply a problem of poverty, ignorance, suffrage, women’s rights, distribution of wealth, and law and order among both blacks and whites, and that to attack any of these evils properly involves close cooperation with the great reform forces of the day. 48

Here, of course, Du Bois was exaggerating for the sake of a point: T. Thomas Fortune had seen the struggle for racial justice as inextricably intertwined with other great reform movements back in 1883. What Du Bois was offering, however, was a vision of connection among social reform movements and issues, and between “social work” and political activism; this vision would help inspire the NAACP’s founding and subsequent sense of its mission. He also could not have failed to realize that this blueprint connected racial justice activists’ work to funding networks available to progressive white social reformers whose allegiance might be wooed away from Booker T. Washington. 49

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