The Abolitionist Tradition in the Making of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Marxism and Anti-Imperialism

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Notes

1. Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2. Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

3. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: Soliloquy of My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 66-67.

4. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, in Nathan Huggins, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 559.

5. W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: International Publishers, 1962), 39.

6. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, in Writings, 567-568; Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 25-27.

7. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” (1903), in Writings, 854.

8. Du Bois, The Autobiography, 132. Historians have made little of the possible influences of Lowell on Du Bois. Likely, Du Bois did not interact with the elder poet much, yet he quoted Lowell’s abolitionist poetry in his later writings. Lowell’s antislavery prose contains thrilling analyses of the relations between class struggle and revolution, the intersections of race and class in America, and sympathetic accounts of anticolonialism in Haiti, Ireland, and elsewhere. See, James Russell Lowell, The Antislavery Papers of James Russell Lowell, 2 Volumes (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1902).

9. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638-1870, in Writings, 193.

10. Ibid, 74-96.

11. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: Ginn and Co., 1899).

12. George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1880, Volume II, 1800-1880 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 60.

13. Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789-1850 Translated by Kaethe Mengelberg (Bedminster Press, 1964).

14. George Fitzhugh, The Sociology of Slavery; or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond Virginia: A. Morris, Publisher, 1854).

15. Slave narrative writers always privileged fact and empirical observation over sentiment. See especially abolitionist-sociologist Richard Hildreth’s scathing reply to Tocqueville’s sociology, Despotism in America: An Inquiry into the Nature, Results, and Legal Basis of the Slaveholding System in the United States (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854).

16. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 715.

17. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), in Writings, 995.

18. Liberator, 18 June 1847.

19. Du Bois, “The Negro in Art and Literature” (1913) in Writings, 864.

20. Thomas Smallwood, A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood, (Colored Man): Giving an Account of His Birth—The Period He was Held in Slavery—and Removal to Canada, Etc., Together with An Account of the Underground Railroad (Toronto: James Stephens, 1851), iv.

21. James Edward Ford, “The Imperial Miracle: Black Reconstruction and the End(s) of Whiteness,” in Nick Bromell, ed., A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (University of Kentucky Press, 2018), 101-120. As Ford rightly points out, Du Bois’s wide-ranging poetry quotations were not literary adornments, they were often arguments in themselves.

22. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings , 372.

23. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings, 537; Fugitives and abolitionists first collected slave songs and published them. See Lucy McKim-Garrison, “Introduction,” in Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867); Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in A Black Regiment (Boston: Fields and Osgood, 1870), 197-223; John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London: Passmore and Alabastor, 1867), 35-37.

24. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writing, 500-501; Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

25. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings, 397.

26. Ibid.

27. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” (1903), in Writings, 844-845.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid, 846.

30. W.E.B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World” (1900), in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader (New York: Oxford University, 1996), 626.

31. Du Bois, “The Niagara Movement” (1906), in Du Bois Reader, 375. Du Bois believed the Niagara Movement re-consecrated the sacrifices of John Brown, but it followed more the tactics of Garrison. In fact, Du Bois wrote a “Garrison Pledge” for the Niagara movement, offering up the radical white abolitionist as the model for the interracial group of reformers to follow. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Garrison and the Negro” (1905), in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 81-83.

32. Du Bois, The Autobiography, 29-43.

33. Ibid, 259.

34. Earlier The Souls of Black Folk had also departed from social science, but they were fugitive essays put together into a book later. For the argument that John Brown had been a poetic departure from social science, see Robinson, Black Marxism, 196.

35. Part of the reason he wrote John Brown in this way, was that he had originally desired to write a biography of either Frederick Douglass or Nat Turner. Instead he put the driving ideas for those never-written biographies into John Brown. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume 1, 1877-1934 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 61-64.

36. Herbert Aptheker, The Literary Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Kraus International, 1989), 65.

37. Du Bois, John Brown, 9.

38. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 13.

39. Ibid, 20.

40. Ibid, 13; See also, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1939), 202.

41. Ibid, 81.

42. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women” (1920), in Writings, 956. There are many commentaries and critiques on this essay, which show its nascent notions of “intersectionality” as well as Du Bois inability to acknowledge some of the black female sources he quotes. See Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction, 97-115.

43. For a deeper elaboration, see Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Gendering the General Strike: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism’s ‘Propaganda of History,’” South Atlantic Quarterly Summer (2013), 437-462. As Weinbaum discusses, Du Bois had a prescient understanding of the importance of enslaved women’s reproductive labor to the rise of capitalism, but he only stresses resistance to productive labor in the chapter on the “general strike.” Nevertheless, as Weinbaum rightly argues, Du Bois did intimate things necessary for black feminist assessments of slave resistance.

44. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

45. Jesse Olsavsky, “Women, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Militant Abolitionism, 1835-1859,” Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018), 357-382.

46. Shirley Graham, There was Once a Slave: The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass (New York: Julian Messner, 1947), 73-74. It is known, however, that Anna Murray gave Douglass essential aid in escaping slavery.

47. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk (Boston: The Stratford, Co., 1924), 261.

48. Ibid, 261, 273.

49. Ibid, 273.

50. Du Bois, John Brown, 64.

51. Du Bois, Reconstruction, 13.

52. Ibid, 20.

53. Ibid, 83. Du Bois had no illusions about abolitionism. Abolitionism critiqued and helped overthrew one labor system compatible with capitalism but did not always go all the way in critiquing capitalism writ large. Thus, in Black Reconstruction, Du Bois usually treats abolitionism as a revolutionary movement, but occasionally criticizes it as a bourgeois movement, with some compatibilities with northern capitalism.

54. Robinson, Black Marxism, 196; Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011).

55. W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Enquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 53-54; On the profound impact of Haiti on Atlantic slavery and abolition, see Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The US, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015).

56. Ibid, 65-66.

57. Ibid, 60.

58. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 53.

59. Du Bois, John Brown, 296.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid, 287.

62. Ibid, 299.

63. Ibid, 296. Emphasis added.

64. Du Bois, “The Present Outlook for the Darker Races of Mankind” (1900), in Du Bois Reader, 52-53.

65. Scholarship is now catching up with Du Bois’s insight that slavery was not simply capitalist, but imperialist. Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

66. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 66. Here Du Bois followed Eric Williams, but Du Bois always emphasized wealth drain from India alongside West Indian slavery as the makers of British industrial-imperial power.

67. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 30.

68. James Russell Lowell, “Texas,” in The Antislavery Papers of James Russell Lowell, Volume 1 (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1902), 9-10.

69. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 9.

70. Ibid, 47.

71. Theodore Wright and Samuel Cornish, The Colonization Scheme Considered (Newark, New Jersey: Aaron Guest, 1840).

72. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). This is one of the few works to explore the anti-imperialist dimensions of abolition.

73. William Howitt, Christianity and Colonization: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by Europeans in All their Colonies (London: Longman, 1838).

74. Du Bois, The World and Africa, ix.

75. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Trans., Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 873-943.

76. In fact, many abolitionists, Garrisonian and otherwise, called for the dissolution of the expansionist US State. See, for instance, Smallwood, A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood.

77. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 327.

78. Ibid, 358. C.L.R. James, presumably learning from Du Bois, also saw in Reconstruction an anticipation of twentieth-century peasants’ struggles. C.L.R. James, “Peasants and Workers,” in Spheres of Existence (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 209.

79. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: Holt, 1915), 69-70.

80. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of A Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 38-39.

81. T. Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert), IV, 14.

82. Bill V. Mullen, Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 86-95.

83. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Russia and America,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b222-i001

84. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Russia and America,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b222-i001

85. A number of historians have studied Du Bois’s turn to anticolonial politics during this period. See, for instance, Bill Mullen, Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

86. Du Bois, “Haiti,” (1944), in Against Race, 244-249.

87. Du Bois, The Negro; Then and Now, 380.

88. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Color of Asia,” in Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 94.

89. Du Bois, “The Freeing of India,” in W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia, 151.

90. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 339-381.

91. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 37. Only Cedric Robinson has passingly noted the importance of this wave of revolt in the context of Du Bois’s thought. See Black Marxism, 239-240.

92. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Russia and America,” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b222-i001

93. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 48.

94. Zach Sell, “Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation,” International Labor and Working Cass History 91 (2017), 8-27; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015), 274-312.

95. Imperialism was also a response to internal economic crises. In this way, the 1870s was almost identical to the 1970s. Anti-imperialist revolt mixed with economic crisis leads to counterrevolutionary restructuring of the global imperialist economy.

96. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 635.

97. Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974 (New York: Brunner, 1978), 149, 263.

98. C.L.R. James, “The Haitian Revolution in the Making of the Modern World” in You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James (Oakland California: AK Press, 2009), 60.

99. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2009).

100. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Ballantine: 1964), 179.

101. Russell Shoatz, Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz (Oakland California PM Press, 2013); Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).

102. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 40-41.

103. Du Bois, John Brown, 298. Emphasis added.