W. E. B. Du Bois with Derrick Alridge | Black Intellectuals Series #6

0:00 we’re now what uh coming up on what a hundred and twenty uh three years or so uh uh after the publication of souls of black folk if we look at what’s taking place in our country uh today around issues of equality democracy the emergence of what looked like uh another

0:22 cultural war taking place that if we re divorces the souls of black folk we will see that we’ve been here before [Music] hi this is tony williams senior fellow at the bill of rights institute and we are pleased to bring you another episode in the scholar talk series on black intellectuals and the african-american

0:44 experience for this episode we’re honored to have scholar dr derrick aldridge who is going to discuss web the voice derrick aldridge is professor of education and an affiliate faculty member in the carter g woodson institute for african american and african studies he focuses on african american education

1:04 and the civil rights movement and he is the author of among several books the educational thought of w.e.b du bois in intellectual history and the co-editor of the black intellectual tradition in the united states in the 20th century he serves as the associate editor for the journal of

1:25 american history and is also the founder director and principal investigator of teachers in the movement an oral history project on teachers in the civil rights movement that just sounds fascinating so derek i want to thank you very much for joining us and all your great work thanks for having me appreciate it all right well my first question is a little

1:46 bit of an introductory question and uh so can you maybe start by giving us a little a brief overview of of who w.e.b du bois was and maybe some of his views on on what were the black struggles during the late 19th and early 20th century okay sure sure so to begin divorce was born

2:07 in great barrington massachusetts on february 23rd 1868. you know he would attend uh school in great barrington graduated from great barrington high school uh was interested in going to harvard uh to study as an undergraduate at first but decided to um attend fifth

2:28 university down in nashville tennessee and it was that this that the world was opened up to him or i think it would better it would be better to say the black world was opened up to to the boys during this period he uh uh was in close interaction with uh other black students

2:48 many black people but he was also in close proximity with uh african americans who were only a few decades removed from slavery or had a memory of slave and so during his time at fisk uh for two summers he went out into the what he called the hills of tennessee

3:08 to teach uh school uh and it was a great experience for him it’s an eye-opening experience for him in terms of allowing him to see what black was like black life was like in the south something that he hadn’t been you know exposed to previously so that really kind of um

3:29 was revolutionary a revolutionary period in his intellectual development after um fisk he he traveled to harvard after graduating from fisk received another bachelor’s degree at harvard and then he would go on to receive an

3:49 m.a in history from harvard and after that he would uh spend some time at the university of berlin working on his phd and uh ran out of money and returned and as he said he had to accept getting a phd in history from

4:11 harvard and that just gives you a sense of what kind of person du bois was but you know throughout his studies there one thing that he uh became committed to from his studies but also from his observations and that was the idea that he could use social science to solve the so-called negro problem and

4:32 the negro problem was a term that was used quite frequently in the late 19th early 20th century and for the most part the negro problem was a problem uh was a question some people called it a question and a question a problem was what do we do with these recently free black people or black people who are just a few decades

4:53 removed from slavery what what do we do with them what is their future and if you read the work of george frederickson he tells you that uh even some progressive social scientists at the time in looking at the negro problem so-called negro problem believed that the negro would be extinct in just a few years uh you know

5:14 after the 20th century he said you know we shouldn’t put uh he he argued that some progressives said there was no use in putting uh major amounts of funding uh money into solving the negro problem because the negro would become extinct right because of you know his problems his mental inferiority etc so du bois

5:37 was very sensitive about this and of course he did not buy into the idea of negro mental inferiority and he also argued uh in an essay called the conservation of races you know race was a social construct anyway so he set out during the early part of the 20th century

5:58 to address the negro problem by producing social science research and showing that the negro or african americans were not actually inferior so he published a study called the philadelphia negro which was a study of the seventh award in philadelphia which was published in 1899 and this was a social science study to

6:18 show that african americans faced uh discrimination they faced a lot of problems that were due to their economic situation etc that really put them in the position that they were in in terms of uh not climbing up the social and economic ladder so he committed the first part of his career his life the

6:39 20th century late 19th century early 20th century to solving or addressing the negro problem through social science research until something happened and i’m not i’m going to stop there because i know you want to get to the next question but this is the the context within which du bois uh worked in their late 19th early 20th

7:00 century right very very helpful thank you so my next question is du bois wrote of a veil or a double consciousness experienced by black americans in the souls of black folk what did he mean by uh these terms and and how did he apply them to understanding the african-american experience yeah so you know one of

7:21 dubois is uh prob probably most many people know du bois uh by his uh seminal work the source of black folk uh which was written in 1903 and i i should say that the souls of black folk really a compilation of essays that dubois um had had you know written and brought

7:42 together into one cohesive piece and it’s been said by some historians that the two most popular books to be found uh in an african-american household in the early part of the 20th century would be the bible and the voices the souls of black folk because the souls of black folk spoke to the african-american

8:04 condition in a very uh literary way but also in a historical way so when du bois talked about this concept of double consciousness he was you know speaking for african americans that they find himself in this dilemma and this dilemma was on the one hand african americans are encouraged

8:26 uh to be americans to do what americans do to to to buy into this notion of amer meritocracy right and to uplift themselves to higher levels of civilization right but at the same time african americans were not treated as americans they were

8:48 discriminated against we have you know uh you know jim crow all these kinds of discriminatory practices that african americans experienced in the first part of the 20th century and he said there’s a tension there and that tension is am i african am i black because i’m sure being discriminated against

9:09 and he said but at the same time i’m told that i’m american so what do i do with this dilemma right and so uh if you look at du bois’s writings uh he says over the period he he gives us a solution he said that we can transcend this double consciousness or the psychic duality

9:30 and i think it would be fitting here if i was just to read just a piece of what dubois said about uh double consciousness and he said after the egyptian and the indian the greek and the roman the tutan and the mongolian the negro is a sort of seventh son born with a veil

9:51 and gifted with second sight in this american world a world which yields him no self-consciousness but only lets himself see through the revelation of the other world and he goes on and he says one ever fills his twoness an american a negro two souls two thoughts two unreconciled drivings two warring ideals

10:13 and one dark body whose dog is strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder beautiful world words that express the condition of blacks in the early part of the 20th century but in souls du bois doesn’t give us great detail in terms of how one can transcend this double consciousness but he does in his

10:34 novels and many people don’t know that some argue some one scholar has argued that you know that du bois kind of abandoned his concept of double consciousness after uh the souls of black folk after 1903 and certainly after 1907 i would argue that if you look at the many novels that du bois wrote his published

10:56 and unpublished novels he does provide us with some insights on how african americans can just transcend double consciousness and in his stories the protagonist always experiences this double consciousness when she or he moves outside of the black community right

11:16 and in some cases they experience this kind of schizophrenia this kind of mental instability but when the protagonist reengages the black community black culture and black history to navigate the larger white society he or she is able to do so with sound foot right

11:38 in the with their grounding in the african-american experience and that was the only way he argued that blacks could engage the sense of double consciousness or to transcend it would be to always go back to the black community to black culture right and we find this throughout his many as i said his writings his novels even um in some of

12:00 his um you know his correspondence he he mentions this so this is what he means by double consciousness and that’s why this book is so important so it’s a black book very much so and i was just going to ask you a follow-up what do you think is the lasting importance of the souls of black folk yeah i think um you know i was just

12:20 thinking about this uh a few months ago that while much has changed uh and it has in terms of you know issues of equality for african americans very much different world today than it was in 1903 but at the same time there uh problems around race and inequality

12:40 continue to persist and i’m reminded what um um that du bois died i think it was the day before the march on washington in 1963 right uh august 28 1963 and um you know that was fitting i don’t

13:02 remember the uh who who mentioned this but someone one of the speakers mentioned that it was dubois it’s his souls of black folk in 1903 that was calling the marchers uh to washington dc in 1963 and that what he wrote about the

13:24 experiences of black people in 1903 was as relevant in 1903 as it was 1963 and i thought that was a very um you know profound profound statement and i would argue that we’re now what uh coming up on what a hundred and twenty uh three years or

13:44 so uh after the publication of souls of black folk if we look at what’s taking place in our country uh today around issues of equality democracy the emergence of what looked like uh another cultural war taking place that if we re divorcing the souls of black

14:06 folk we’ll see that we’ve been here before and i think i would encourage folks to to read the souls of black folk and think about the legacy of what he’s written about double consciousness issues of race culture right very very interesting bridge from from the medium for more distant past to the the more recent past uh i didn’t i

14:28 had forgotten he he died on that day and and then to the present that that’s very very well put so you’ve done a lot of scholarly work on du bois’s views on education what was his concept of the talented tenth which i think you you mentioned briefly and what was significance of education for du bois in terms of

14:48 achieving greater black equality and justice in the american regime yeah yeah so um dubois had actually uh in term the the idea of the town to temple course was popularized uh in the souls of black folk but dubois had ashley mentioned the term uh in some of his earlier works uh but do that du

15:13 bois’s concept of the times attempt was uh similar to some of the ideas of um thomas jefferson all right in terms of having an educated citizenry and so that’s very important to know but du bois believed that it was a responsibility of the most educated african americans

15:34 uh the most economically secure african-americans to uplift uh the black masses and he believed that he was certainly a part of this town to tent uh and he talked about this quite often he even mentioned this in his notebooks um in a diary so to speak and when he

15:57 was at the university of berlin he dedicated himself in his diary as the moses of his people and he said that it was his responsibility along with other people who were educated like him to uplift um uh you know black masses and he really believed in that and he identified you know individuals that he thought she’d

16:18 be doing that and he called these individuals the college spread negroes right and wrote frequently about this and spoke frequently about college bred negros in the first part of the 20th century one of the challenges that we see in the his not the one something we see in the historical

16:39 literature that i think we need to pay attention to there’s this idea that du bois supported this idea of the talented 10th who should receive a classical and liberal education whereas booker t washington was his polar opposite and uh really wasn’t an advocate of the time to tent but he believed that african

17:00 americans should dedicate themselves to vocational and industrial education so to be clear um that dichotomy is somewhat of a false dichotomy there is some truth to that uh to that that idea but dubois never disavow vocational

17:21 industrial education in and of in and of itself as a bad thing for some african americans he recognized that there were some people who would receive uh college education or higher education whose responsibility was to uplift the others uh other african-americans but he recognized that

17:41 there was there were some people who would build this kind of economic floor or economic base who would serve as you who become artists who would make their way in industry and into vocations so i think teachers educators need to be um you know cognizant of this when they teach

18:02 about uh the dichotomy or dialectic between washington and du bois uh they were different in their approach but there also was some similarities and du bois himself would note this later on after washington’s death that um pretty much that that debate so-called debate and discussion

18:24 was not useful anymore and that the world was a much more complex place for black americans uh than it was in the earlier part of the 20th century when that debate was pretty much a part of the consciousness of what we thought black education should be right and and i should say one other

18:46 thing if you don’t mind this gets in 1948 du bois gave a speech called the taltatif memorial address in which he called in which he called out the talent to 10th for not reaching back and uplifting uplifting the black masses so

19:08 that should be pointed out and some people argue that in the town to tenth memorial address du bois completely jettisoned the idea of the time to temp i would argue that he did not but that he did call them out and did and he offered another approach he said instead of calling this the town to 10th i argued that we should promote the idea

19:31 of the guiding hundreds and the guiding hundredth was a concept in which du bois believed all african americans should be trained for some type of leadership moving forward right and so that was a little more nuanced perspective of his get his

19:51 talented tenth uh address of his talent attempt philosophy all right excellent uh and our final question uh pretty broad but what was uh w e b dubois’s contribution to understanding the black experience in america oh there were there were many and yeah that

20:11 is a bright question it’s a great question it’s hard to understand it’s it’s hard to nail down one thing because he did uh so many a good friend of mine uh and a colleague at penn state retired professor named wilson moses i asked him a question a similar question once and i said you know du bois did so

20:31 much what were his contributions and in fact when i read dubois closely i learned that he seemed to contradict himself uh over time and you know what what what what do i do with that as i began to write about dubois in his thinking and i would like to share with you what professor moses told me he sent me an

20:53 email he said while some scholars argue that divorce changes his thinking quite a bit another approach might be to recognize patterns of consistency accompanied by patterns of evolution or it might be correct to say that his personality did not change while some of his ideas did or you might say that he continued to put old wine and new bottles on the

21:15 other hand you might say he changed radically and fundamentally on some issues or you might say that while he believed himself to be changing he was a real stick in the mud or you might say all or some combination of the above in which case divorce would be like most people who live past 40. and so

21:35 when when whenever i’m asked that question i say all right so what do boys are we talking about i think we can look at du bois in different periods but overall i’m going to take a stab at death and say this that his greatest contribution i think uh to african americans is uh his contributions

21:55 in terms of teaching them about their own history and their own culture right du bois wrote many books many of them were textbooks uh could be textbooks there are history books and i’m thinking about

22:16 his book the world in africa the negro his book on john brown countless books and countless essays that educated blacks about their own history one of the most powerful uh historical uh pieces of literature that du bois was involved in was the crisis magazine

22:37 which he served as the editor of from i think it’s 1910 to 1934. and in the crisis magazine you can actually see du voice’s imprint all over it or you can see him in it because he’s constantly providing uh vignettes

22:58 uh of african-american history he’s constantly featuring um you know uh stories about uh black heroines and heroes and this is the way that he educated the black um african americans and i would argue that his work in the crisis was one way of him addressing the duality

23:20 of double consciousness and he also published something called the brownies book which was a children’s magazine which focused on teaching african-american children about their history so i would say his greatest contribution would be uh you know teaching black people about their history and culture

23:42 eric i want to thank you very much for joining us thank you i i bet my viewers will very much agree with me that uh we could listen to you all day uh and that it’s such an important conversation i wish we we had a few hours but uh but thank you again and uh again you can check out w.e.b dubois uh the educational thought

24:03 of w.e.v du bois and intellectual history and teachers in the movement i want to thank you all for joining us on this episode of scholar talks please check out our other installments of black intellectuals and the african-american experience as well as our previous series on the cold war and the presidency and our upcoming series on pivotal battles in american history

24:26 thank you you