The Great Enunciator

By R.Z. Sheppard

WILLIAM EDWARD BURGhardt Du Bois was born an African American in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and died an American African 95 years later in Accra, Ghana. His lifetime included two Johnson Administrations (Andrew's and Lyndon's) and stretched from the betrayal of Reconstruction after the Civil War to the unfinished dream of civil rights. He was "the Old Man" to generations of black leaders and Moses to their followers. But Old Testament robes were a poor fit, as David Levering Lewis' painstaking scholarship makes clear in W.E.B. Du Bois, the first of a two-part biography (Henry Holt; 735 pages).

Du Bois was cut out to be a modern intellectual: conflicted, inconsistent and alienated from the conditions and customs of the race he strove to transform. To begin with, he was a Northerner and nearly as white as he was black. There were Dutch and French as well as West African branches on his family tree. He was a child prodigy who became an editor, activist and writer. His best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), gave new dimension to understanding racism through the concept of double consciousness, which he described as "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

Lewis, who holds the Martin Luther King Jr. chair in history at Rutgers University, puts ideas on an equal footing with his cast of characters. They include Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute and Du Bois' principal rival for the souls of black folk. "The Great Accommodator," as Washington was known, stressed vocational training as the road to progress. Aim higher, was Du Bois' response, especially meant for the ears of those he called "the talented tenth," men and women like himself.

This was brave talk in a society where descendants of slaves had traditionally been admired for their muscles, not their mind. Du Bois' program for broadening education has been well documented, but Lewis demonstrates the extent to which the Old Man fought to make African Americans heirs to their own intellectual and cultural past.

More than any other black leader, Du Bois gave his people a story of their own. To charges that he was an imaginative historian he replied, "There is little danger of long misleading here, for the champions of white folk are legion." Yet for all his insights, he was uneasy about his own identity. His writings are full of references to skin tone, the lighter the more becoming. "This subtext of proud hybridization is so prevalent," Lewis writes, "that the failure to notice it in the literature about him is as remarkable as the complex itself."

Did this ironic racism contribute to Du Bois' aloofness and inability to work and play well with others? Did it underlie his conflicting positions on racial inclusion and separatism? The second volume of this impressive study of a divided soul should provide some answers. They are necessary if people of all tints are to find common ground in their own flawed natures.