W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

Abstract

David Levering Lewis's W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963, which like the first volume published in 1993 received the Pulitzer Prize for biography, begins with Du Bois's responses to the lynchings and violence against African Americans in the years after World War I and closes with Du Bois's self-imposed exile and death in Ghana as the civil rights movement in the United States was reaching a high point in August 1963 with the March on Washington. This volume is scrupulously researched and filled with a wealth of details about the complex and multifaceted experiences of African America's most influential scholar and leader in the first half of the century. Reviewers of the first volume, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, complained about Lewis's failure to interrogate sufficiently Du Bois's encounters with southern black culture, particularly the religious practices, that informed various chapters of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his projection of his own preoccupations with mulattoes and color issues onto Du Bois, and his conclusion that Du Bois “was profoundly averse to compromise” and generally intransigent on matters of principle affecting the race, although evidence from decisions Du Bois made throughout his life suggested otherwise. These really are not issues raised in the second volume. However, Lewis's discussion in the first volume of Du Bois's “sexual conquests,” which some suggested was based on personal interviews that really boiled down to nothing more than “undocumented gossip,” continued in volume 2, as did a general attitude of condescension rationalized somewhat as a biographer's commitment to presenting a “balanced” perspective to avoid the charge of hagiography. Du Bois devotees reading passages describing encounters projected as adulterous sexual liaisons are likely to respond as did the vast majority of Americans polled about the exposés associated with the Bill Clinton—Monica Lewinsky affair: these are private matters that may have occurred, but they are being shoved down our throats for political (or personal) reasons. And, in all fairness, it must be pointed out that earlier biographers were often undisguised partisans who abhorred or adored Du Bois and everything he stood for. Lewis may have felt compelled, particularly in the first two-thirds of this volume, to provide a narrative that is both richly descriptive and sharply critical. Thus, while the autobiographical work Darkwater was “one of the most controversial works published that year” (1920), some of the essays were “time-bound by their Late Victorian matrix or from melodramatic compulsions of the author—or from both” as well as “encrusted with prose of such deep purple as to render them increasingly inaccessible to many modern readers” (a charge some readers might hurl with justification at Lewis). The novel Dark Princess. (1928) “was remarkable for its time and place as a meditation on the use and abuse of race”; however, “as a literary experiment . . . the novel was a failure.” Even Black Reconstruction in America (1935), which Lewis admits was “one of the superlative achievements in the writing of American history,” cannot escape the dreaded, “on the other hand” for the absence of primary sources due to the Jim Crow restrictions on African American scholars' use of southern repositories. Fortunately, this will-to-balance is broken in the later chapters, and Lewis provides a sympathetic account of Du Bois's conflicts with Florence Read and Rufus Clement at Atlanta University and with Walter White and Roy Wilkins at the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the 1940s, his seduction by younger members of the Communist party in the late 1940s and the 1950s, and his refusal to break publicly with the Communists even in light of Nikita Khrushchev's revelations in 1956 of Joseph Stalin's murderous depredations in the Soviet Union.