THE GREAT DUBOIS & WOMEN

by Mumia Abu-Jamal

[Col. Writ. 12/01/02]

The great scholar-activist, W.E.B. DuBois, is remembered for many things: principally, perhaps, his classic work, "The Souls of Black Folk," which set forth the notion of the "twoness" of being both Black and American, in an America which feared, hated and rejected Blackness.

He was a scholar of the first rank, who wrote deeply and passionately about the plight of African-Americans, with an incisive, biting wit, and a sweetness, almost a melancholy tone to his prose. He is lesser known for his other works, among them the searing "Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil" (1920), in which a middle-aged DuBois rails at the present state of the nation, a nation that was then in the barbarous throes of what was called Red Summer (1919) when lynchings ripped across the country, and the American terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan were millions strong. In "Darkwater," DuBois emerges as the Tribune of his people, blasting American hypocrisy:

Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to make the "World Safe for Democracy"! Can you imagine the United States protesting against the Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvian compared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersburg and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America's Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders? [19-20]

DuBois loved women, and he advocated, before many Black and white men of his generation, that women be allowed to vote, and that they be paid at equal levels as men. He decried that American flaw that supposed one can know another, by mere presumption:

It always startles us to find folks thinking like ourselves. We do not really associate with each other, we associate with our ideas of each other, and few people have either the ability or courage to question their own ideas. None have more persistently and dogmatically insisted upon the inherent inferiority of women than the men with whom they come in closest contact. It is the husbands, brothers, and sons of women whom it has been most difficult to induce to consider women seriously or to acknowledge that women have rights which men are bound to respect. So, too, it is those people who live in closest contact with black folk who have most unhesitatingly asserted the utter impossibility of living beside Negroes who are not industrial or political slaves or social pariahs. All this proves that none are so blind as those nearest the thing seen, while, on the other hand, the history of the world is the history of the common humanity of human beings among steadily-increasing circles of men. [86]

At the time DuBois wrote these words, it was illegal for women in America to vote, and the notion of a woman working was so radical it seemed downright revolutionary! DuBois was right on time, for it would be 1920 when the right of women to vote would be made into law.

W.E.B. DuBois loved and respected women, but Black women, whom he called "daughters of sorrow," touched him deeply. He was an unapologetic booster of Black women, and admired their special beauty and their strength:

For this, their promise, and their hard past, I honor the women of my race. Their beauty -- their dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes, crumpled hair, and soft, full-featured faces -- is perhaps more to me than to you, because I was born to its warm and subtle spell; but their worth is yours as well as mine. No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modest and womanliness that they retain. [p. 107-8]

One of the founders of the NAACP, Dr. DuBois was as radical as they came. He opposed U.S. wars overseas as colonial adventures. He advocated an end to European colonialism in Africa. He organized for Pan-Africanism among the Black peoples of the world.

He worked tirelessly for civil and political rights for Blacks in the United States. For decades he wrote scathing editorials in "The Crisis" magazine, critical of U.S. domestic terrorism and racism. He worked relentlessly for global peace.

His passport was seized by the government, and the government tried to throw him in jail because they bitterly opposed his views.

He remained radical to his dying day, in voluntary African exile, at 95 years of age.

He set a high standard for scholars to come.

 

Text © copyright 2002 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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