Honoring Dr. DuBois
By: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Tonight we assemble here to pay tribute to one of the most remarkable
men of our time. Dr. Du Bois was not only an intellectual giant
exploring the frontiers of knowledge, he was in the first place a
teacher. He would have wanted his life to teach us something about our
tasks of emancipation. One idea he insistently taught was that black
people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog
of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient and deservedly
doomed to servitude to the grave. So assiduously has this poison been
injected into the mind of America that its disease has infected not only
whites but many Negroes. So long as the lie was believed the brutality
and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience
to bear. The twisted logic ran if the black man was inferior he was not
oppressed-his place in society was appropriate to his meager talent and
intellect. Dr. Du Bois recognized that the keystone in the arch of
oppression was the myth of inferiority and he dedicated his brilliant
talents to demolish it. There could scarcely be a more suitable person
for such a monumental task. First of all he was himself unsurpassed as
an intellect and he was a Negro. But beyond this he was passionately
proud to be black and finally he had not only genius and pride but he
had the indomitable fighting spirit of the valiant.
To pursue his mission, Dr. Du Bois gave up the substantial privileges
a highly educated Negro enjoyed living in the North. Though he held
degrees from Harvard and the University of Berlin, though he had more
academic credentials than most Americans, black or white, he moved South
where a majority of Negroes then lived. He deliberately chose to share
their daily abuse and humiliation. He could have offered himself to the
white rulers and exacted substantial tribute for selling his genius.
There were few like him, Negro or white. He could have amassed riches
and honors and lived in material splendor and applause from the powerful
and important men of his time. Instead, he lived part of his creative
life in the South-most of it in modest means and some of it in poverty,
and he died in exile, praised sparingly and in many circles ignored.
But he was an exile only to the land of his birth. He died at home in
Africa among his cherished ancestors, and he was ignored by a
pathetically ignorant America but not by history.
History cannot ignore W. E. B. DuBois. Because history has to reflect
truth and Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer
of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth
about his own people. There were very few scholars who concerned
themselves with honest study of the black man and he sought to fill this
immense void. The degree to which he succeeded discloses the great
dimensions of the man.
Yet he had more than a void to fill. He had to deal with the army of
white propagandists - the myth-makers of Negro history. Dr. Du Bois took
them all on in battle. It would be impossible to sketch the whole range
of his intellectual contributions. Back in the nineteenth century he
laid out a program of 100 years of study of problems affecting American
Negroes and worked tirelessly to implement it.
Long before sociology was a science he was pioneering in the field of
social study of Negro life and completed works on health, education,
employment, urban conditions, and religion. This was at a time when
scientific inquiry of Negro life was so unbelievably neglected that only
a single university in the entire nation had such a program, and it was
funded with $5,000 for a year's work.
Against such odds Dr. Du Bois produced two enduring classics before the twentieth century. His
Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, written in 1896, is Volume I in the Harvard Historical Studies. His study
The Philadelphia Negro,
completed in 1899, is still used today. Illustrating the painstaking
quality of his scientific method, to do this work Dr. Du Bois personally
visited and interviewed 5,000 people.
He soon realized that studies would never adequately be pursued nor
changes realized without the mass involvement of Negroes. The scholar
then became an organizer and with others founded the NAACP. At the same
time he became aware that the expansion of imperialism was a threat to
the emergence of Africa. He recognized the importance of the bonds
between American Negroes and the land of their ancestors, and he
extended his activities to African affairs. After World War I he called
Pan-African Congresses in 1919, 1921, and 1923, alarming imperialists in
all countries and disconcerting Negro moderates in America who were
afraid of this restless, militant, black genius.
Returning to the United States from abroad, he found his pioneering
agitation for Negro studies was bearing fruit and a beginning was made
to broaden Negro higher education. He threw himself into the task of
raising the intellectual level of this work. Much later, in 1940, he
participated in the establishment of the first Negro scholarly
publication,
Phylon. At the same time he stimulated Negro
colleges to collaborate through annual conferences to increase their
effectiveness and elevate the quality of their academic studies. But
these activities, enough to be the life work for ten men, were far from
the sum of his achievements. In the six years between 1935 and 1941 he
produced the monumental seven-hundred-page volume on
Black Reconstruction in America, at the same time writing many articles and essays.
Black Reconstruction was
six years in writing but was thirty- three years in preparation. On its
publication, one critic said: "It crowns the long, unselfish and
brilliant career of Dr. Du Bois. It is comparable in clarity,
originality and importance to the
Beards' Rise of American Civilization."
The New York Times said,
"It is beyond question the most painstaking and thorough study ever
made of the Negroes' part in Reconstruction," and the
New York Herald Tribune proclaimed
it "a solid history of the period, an economic treatise, a
philosophical discussion, a poem, a work of art all rolled into one."
To understand why his study of the Reconstruction was a monumental
achievement it is necessary to see it in context. White historians had
for a century crudely distorted the Negro's role in the Reconstruction
years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history, and
the stakes were high. The Reconstruction was a period in which black men
had a small measure of freedom of action. If, as white historians tell
it, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular
stupidity, were wanton, evil, and ignorant, their case was made. They
would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior
beings. One generation after another of Americans were assiduously
taught these falsehoods, and the collective mind of America became
poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.
Dr. DuBois confronted this powerful structure of historical
distortion and dismantled it. He virtually, before anyone else and more
than anyone else, demolished the lies about Negroes in their most
important and creative period of history. The truths he revealed are not
yet the property of all Americans but they have been recorded and arm
us for our contemporary battles.
In
Black Reconstruction Dr. DuBois dealt with the almost
universally accepted concept that civilization virtually collapsed in
the South during Reconstruction because Negroes had a measure of
political power. Dr. DuBois marshalled irrefutable evidence that, far
from collapsing, the Southern economy was recovering in these years.
Within five years the cotton crop had been restored, and in the
succeeding five years had exceeded pre-war levels. At the same time
other economic activity had ascended so rapidly the rebirth of the South
was almost completed.
Beyond this he restored to light the most luminous achievement of the
Reconstruction--it brought free public education into existence not
only for the benefit of the Negro, but it opened school doors to the
poor whites. He documented the substantial body of legislation that was
socially so useful it was retained into the twentieth century even
though the Negroes who helped to write it were brutally disenfranchised
and driven from political life. He revealed that, far from being the
tragic era white historians described, it was the only period in which
democracy existed in the South. This stunning fact was the reason the
history books had to lie because to tell the truth would have
acknowledged the Negroes' capacity to govern and fitness to build a
finer nation in a creative relationship with poor whites.
With the completion of his book
Black Reconstruction,
despite its towering contributions, despite his advanced age, Dr. DuBois
was still not ready to accept a deserved rest in peaceful retirement.
His dedication to freedom drove him on as relentlessly in his seventies
as it did in his twenties. He had already encompassed three careers.
Beginning as a pioneer sociologist, he had become an activist to further
mass organization. The activist had then transformed himself into an
historian. By the middle of the twentieth century, when imperialism and
war arose once more to imperil humanity, he became a peace leader. He
served as chairman of the Peace Information Bureau and, like the Rev.
William Sloane Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock of today, he found himself
indicted by the government and harried by reactionaries. Undaunted by
obstacles and repression, with his characteristic fortitude he fought
on. Finally in 1961 with Ghana's independence established, an
opportunity opened to begin the writing of an African Encyclopedia, and
in his ninety third year he emigrated to Ghana to begin new intellectual
labors. In 1963 death finally came to this most remarkable man.
It is axiomatic that he will be remembered for his scholarly
contributions and organizational attainments. These monuments are
imperishable. But there were human qualities less immediately visible
that are no less imperishable.
Dr. DuBois was a man possessed of priceless dedication to his people.
The vast accumulation of achievement and public recognition were not
for him pathways to personal affluence and a diffusion of identity.
Whatever else he was, with his multitude of careers and professional
titles, he was first and always a black man. He used his richness of
talent as a trust for his people. He saw that Negroes were robbed of so
many things decisive to their existence that the theft of their history
seemed only a small part of their losses. But Dr. DuBois knew that to
lose one's history is to lose one's self-understanding and with it the
roots for pride. This drove him to become a historian of Negro life, and
the combination of his unique zeal and intellect rescued for all of us a
heritage whose loss would have profoundly impoverished us.
Dr. DuBois
the man needs to be remembered today when despair
is all too prevalent. In the years he lived and fought, there was far
more justification for frustration and hopelessness, and yet his faith
in his people never wavered. His love and faith in Negroes permeate
every sentence of his writings and every act of his life. Without these
deeply rooted emotions his work would have been arid and abstract. With
them his deeds were a passionate storm that swept the filth of falsehood
from the pages of established history.
He symbolized in his being his pride in the black man. He did not
apologize for being black and, because of it, handicapped. Instead he
attacked the oppressor for the crime of stunting black men. He
confronted the establishment as a model of militant manhood and
integrity. He defied them and, though they heaped venom and scorn on
him, his powerful voice was never stilled.
And yet, with all his pride and spirit he did not make a mystique out
of blackness. He was proud of his people, not because their color
endowed them with some vague greatness but because their concrete
achievements in struggle had advanced humanity, and he saw and loved
progressive humanity in all its hues, black, white, yellow, red, and
brown.
Above all he did not content himself with hurling invectives for
emotional release and then to retire into smug, passive satisfaction.
History had taught him it is not enough for people to be angry--the
supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes
a transforming force. It was never possible to know where the scholar
DBois ended and the organizer DuBois began. The two qualities in him
were a single, unified force. This life style of Dr. DuBois is the most
important quality this generation of Negroes needs to emulate.
The educated Negro who is not really part of us and the angry
militant who fails to organize us have nothing in common with Dr.
DuBois. He exemplified black power in achievement and he organized black
power in action. It was no abstract slogan to him.
We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was a
radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that
he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham
Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War
and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English
speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O'Casey was a
literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo
Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also
served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting
the fact that Dr. DuBois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our
irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires
to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.
In closing, it would be well to remind white America of its debt to
Dr. DuBois. When they corrupted Negro history they distorted American
history, because Negroes are too big a part of the building of this
nation to be written out of it without destroying scientific history.
White America, drenched with lies about Negroes, has lived too long in a
fog of ignorance. Dr. DuBois gave them a gift of truth for which they
should eternally be indebted to him.
Negroes have heavy tasks today. We were partially liberated and then
re-enslaved. We have to fight again on old battlefields, but our
confidence is greater, our vision is clearer, and our ultimate victory
surer because of the contributions a militant, passionate black giant
left behind him.
Dr. DuBois has left us but he has not died. The spirit of freedom is
not buried in the grave of the valiant. He will be with us when we go to
Washington in April to demand our right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.
We have to go to Washington because they have declared an armistice
in the war on poverty while squandering billions to expand a senseless,
cruel, unjust war in Vietnam. We will go there, we will demand to be
heard, and we will stay until the administration responds. If this means
forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have
done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we will embrace it,
for that is what America's poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept
it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by
exploitation and discrimination.
Dr. DuBois would be in the front ranks of the peace movement today.
He would readily see the parallel between American support of the
corrupt and despised Thieu-Ky regime and Northern support to the
Southern slave masters in 1876. The CIA scarcely exaggerates, indeed it
is surprisingly honest, when it calculates for Congress that the war in
Vietnam can persist for one hundred years. People deprived of their
freedom do not give up-Negroes have been fighting more than a hundred
years, and even if the date of full emancipation is uncertain, what is
explicitly certain is that the struggle for it will endure.
In conclusion let me say that Dr. DuBois' greatest virtue was his
committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction
with all forms of injustice. Today we are still challenged to be
dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and
material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind,
freedom and until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a
dark past and every family will have a decent, sanitary house in which
to live. Let us be dissatisfied until the empty stomachs of Mississippi
are filled and the idle industries of Appalachia are revitalized. Let us
be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at
the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative
agenda. Let us be dissatisfied until our brother of the Third World-
Asia, Africa, and Latin America-will no longer be the victim of
imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of
poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Let us be dissatisfied until this
pending cosmic elegy will be transformed into a creative psalm of peace
and "justice will roll down like waters from a mighty stream."
The Centennial Address delivered by Nobel Laureate Dr. Martin
Luther King at Carnegie Hall in New York City, February 23, 1968. The
occasion was the International Cultural Evening sponsored by FREEDOMWAYS
Magazine on the 100th birthday of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and launching an
"International Year" (1968) honoring his life and works.
