W.E.B. Du Bois in the Tradition of Radical Blackness: Radicalism, Repression, and Mutual Comradeship, 1930–1960

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Notes

1. See e.g., W.E.B Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (International Publishers, 1968); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986); and Bill V. Mullen, W.E.B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Antheneum, 1962 [1935]).

3. John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945–1960 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 18–19; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 16.

4. For an analysis and contextualization of Du Bois’s move to Ghana, see Herbert Aptheker, “On Du Bois’s Move to Africa,” Monthly Review 45 (1993): 36–40.

5. Eric Foner, “Black Reconstruction: An Introduction,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (2013): 412.

6. On the American Negro Academy, see e.g., “The American Negro Academy organization constitution,” ca. 1900 and “American Negro Academy Membership List,” 1917, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (subsequently, Du Bois Papers). Also see Alfred A. Moss, Jr., The American Negro Academy: Voices from the Talented Tenth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) and Nahum Dimitri Chandler, ed. The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1-32, 99-110. For challenge to Booker T. Washington, see Kelly Miller to W.E.B. Du Bois, February 17, 1903; W.E.B. Du Bois to Kelly Miller, February 25, 1903; W.E.B. Du Bois to Kelly Miller, November 2, 1903; Kelly Miller to W.E.B. Du Bois, November 4, 1903; and Kelly Miller to W.E.B. Du Bois, April 23, 1904, Du Bois papers.

7. Kelly Miller, “The Renunciation of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Part II,” January 4, 1938, Du Bois Papers.

8. W.E.B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” January 1940, Du Bois Papers.

9. Alfred Harcourt to W.E.B. Du Bois, December 2, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to Abram Harris, January 6, 1933; “Courses in Atlanta University, Second Semester, 1933”; “Summer School at Atlanta University,” 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to Joel Spingarn, February 22, 1933; “Memorandum to Dr. Whittaker,” n.d. [1933]; W.E.B. Du Bois to James Whittaker, September 14, 1933; “Library List,” n.d.; Abram Harris to W.E.B. Du Bois, January 7, 1933; “Memorandum to President Hope from W.E.B. Du Bois,” March 9, 1933, Du Bois Papers; Du Bois, Autobiography, 308. Also see Shawn Leigh Alexander, W.E.B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 92–95.

10. Du Bois, Autobiography, 308, 301.

11. W.E.B. Du Bois to E. Franklin Frazier, October 16, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to E. Franklin Frazier, October 19, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to Abram Harris, December 4, 1933; Emmett E. Dorsey to W.E.B. Du Bois, December 6, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to Harold O. Lewis, December 7, 1933; Emmett Dorsey, “Reconstruction Bibliography,” 1933, Du Bois Papers.

12. David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Doxey Wilkerson, Tape #7; “Interview with Esther and James Jackson, Tape #14 and #15,” David Levering Lewis Papers (MS 827), Interview Transcripts, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Subsequently, DLL Papers). Also see Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

13. “Members of the Amenia Conference,” 1933; “Second Amenia Conference On a New Programme for the Negro,” January 9, 1933; “Notes on Amenia Conference,” 1933; “Proposed Program of the Amenia Conference,” 1933, Du Bois Papers. Also see Beth Tompkin Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941,” The American Historical Review 102 (1997): 340–377; Eben Miller, Born Along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Holloway, Confronting the Veil, 1–34.

14. “Second Amenia Conference Press Release,” September 1, 1933, Du Bois Papers.

15. W.E.B. Du Bois to Clarence Senior, September 15, 1932; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The American Federation of Labor and the Negro,” The Crisis, July 1929; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Color Caste in the United States,” The Crisis, March 1933; Will W. Alexander to W.E.B. Du Bois, December 12, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to George Streator, April 17, 1935; “A Tentative Plan Looking Toward Consumers’ and Producers’ Co-Operation Among American Negroes and Negroes the World Over,” February 27, 1936; W.E.B. Du Bois to Edwin R. Embree, February 27, 1936, Du Bois Papers; Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), 132–134.

16. “Second Amenia Conference Press Release,” Du Bois Papers.

17. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Statement of the Negro Problem,” 1933, Du Bois Papers.

18. Du Bois, Autobiography, 290–291; Du Bois to Streator, April 17, 1935, Du Bois Papers.

19. Ibid., 294–296.

20. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Right to Work,” The Crisis, April 1933; “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” Current History 42 (1935): 265-270; “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?,” Journal of Negro Education 4 (1935): 328–335; “Social Planning for the Negro, Past and Present,” Journal of Negro Education 5 (1936): 110–125.

21. W.E.B. Du Bois to Harry E. Davis, January 16, 1934, Du Bois Papers.

22. W.E.B. Du Bois to Rachel Davis Du Bois, March 27, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to Ruthanna Fisher, September 26, 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois to Harold O. Lewis, December 7, 1933; Harcourt Brace & Company to W.E.B. Du Bois, April 17, 1935; W.E.B. Du Bois to Walter White, April 23, 1935; Telegram from W.E.B Du Bois to Harcourt Press, May 28, 1935; W.E.B. Du Bois to Rachel Davis Du Bois, May 29, 1935, Du Bois Papers.

23. Foner, “Black Reconstruction,” 409–410. Also see Clare Parfait, “Rewriting History: The Publication of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935),” Book History 12 (2009): 266–294.

24. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Outline of Black Reconstruction,” October 21, 1931, Du Bois Papers.

25. Lewis, “Doxey Wilkerson, Tape #7”; Ibid., “Interview with Doxey Wilkerson, Tape #A/4,” DLL Papers.

26. Alexander, W.E.B. Du Bois, 95–97; Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois, 133–134

27. Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches,” Souls 19 (2017): 213–237; and Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxx–xxxii.

28. James Ford, “The Negro Question: Report to the IInd World Congress of the League Against Imperialism,” The Negro Worker, August 1929, 1–8.

29. Claudia Jones, “On the Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt,” Political Affairs, January 1946, 62.

30. Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (Chicago, IL: Liberator Press, 1976 [1948]), 46–48.

31. Louise Thompson Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” Woman Today, April 1936; Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis 42, (November 1935). Also see Mary Anderson, “The Plight of Negro Domestic Labor,” The Journal of Negro Education 5 (1936): 66–72.

32. Erik McDuffie, “Esther V. Cooper’s ‘The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism’: Black Left Feminism and the Popular Front,” American Communist History 7 (2008): 205.

33. Claudia Jones, “For New Approaches to Our Work Among Women,” Political Affairs 27 (1948): 738–739.

34. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Keeping Blacks and Whites Apart,” February 9, 1935, Du Bois Papers. The published version of this draft appeared in June 1935 as “A Negro Nation within a Nation” in Current History.

35. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The American Negro Woman” (unpublished), ca. 1949, Du Bois Papers.

36. “Statement by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois,” July 12, 1950, Du Bois Papers.

37. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The American Labor Party,” October 8, 1953, Du Bois Papers.

38. W.E.B. Du Bois, “My Platform,” ca. 1950, Du Bois Papers.

39. Horne, Black and Red, 136–146.

40. “Minutes of Peace Information Center Executive Committee Meeting,” April 18, 1950, Du Bois Papers.

41. Horne, Black and Red, 126.

42. Doxey Wilkerson, “They Are Trying to Sentence Dr. Du Bois to Death,” New York Times, October 19, 1951.

43. New York Daily Mirror, February 10, 1951; Amsterdam News, April 21, 1951. Also see, National Committee to Defend Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center, “Is peace a crime?,” 1951, Du Bois Papers.

44. Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F Robinson, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 161.

45. Elizabeth Moos, “Report on W.E.B. Du Bois’s indictment and trial,” Du Bois Papers.

46. David Levering Lewis, “Interview with Bernard Jaffe, Tape #17,” DLL Papers.

47. Moos, “Report on W.E.B. Du Bois’s indictment and trial.”

48. “The Marcantonio-Du Bois television program,” April 3, 1953, Du Bois Papers.

49. Shirley Graham Du Bois to Esther V. Cooper, May 31, 1964; Shirley Graham Du Bois to Bernard Jaffe, December 13, 1964, Bernard Jaffe Papers (MS 906) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (subsequently Jaffe Papers); The Editors, “W.E.B. Du Bois—Trailblazer of the Freedomway,” Freedomways 5 (Winter 1965): 5–6. Also see John Henrik Clarke et al., eds., Black Titan W.E.B. Du Bois: An Anthology by the Editors of Freedomways (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970). For responses to this letter, very deferential in tone, see John Henrik Clarke to Shirley Graham Du Bois, June 5, 1964, Box 18, Folder 10 and Esther Cooper Jackson to Shirley Graham Du Bois, June 20, 1964, Box 18, Folder 12, Papers of Shirley Graham Du Bois (MC 476), Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.

50. Jodi Dean, “Four Theses on the Comrade,” E-flux Journal 86 (2017): 2.

51. Ibid., 11.

52. Ibid., 5–13.

53. See e.g., Kenneth R. Janken, “From Colonial Liberation to Cold War Liberalism: Walter White, the NAACP, and Foreign Affairs, 1941–1955,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (1998): 1076–1095; Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War Years,” The Journal of American History 94 (2007): 75–96; William A.J. Cobb, “Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931–1945,” (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2003); and Eric Arnesen, “The Traditions of African American Anticommunism,” Twentieth Century Communism 6 (2014): 124–148.

54. Dean, “Four Theses,” 11.

55. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1963]), 5.

56. Charlotta Bass, Forty Years: A Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles: C. A. Bass, 1960), 134.

57. James W. Ford to W.E.B. Du Bois, July 11, 1952, Du Bois Papers.

58. National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, “Press Release,” December 9, 1952, Du Bois Papers.

59. “Statement for Amnesty for Benjamin J. Davis,” 1952, Du Bois Papers.

60. National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership, “An Appeal in Defense of Negro Leadership,” 1952, Du Bois Papers.

61. David Theo Goldberg, Ethical Theory and Social Issues: Historical Texts and Contemporary Readings, Second Edition (Belmont: Wadsworth Group, 1995), 1–4, 188–189. Also see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Second Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 204–225.

62. Doxey Wilkerson to W.E.B. Du Bois, March 12, 1947, Du Bois Papers.

63. W.E.B. Du Bois to People’s Voice, April 30, 1947; People’s Voice to W.E.B. Du Bois, May 5, 1947, Du Bois Papers.

64. Memorandum from W.E.B. Du Bois to Walter White, October 20, 1947; Jefferson School of Social Science to W.E.B. Du Bois, December 12, 1947, Du Bois Papers.

65. Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois: Portrait of the Black Woman Artist as Revolutionary,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle edited by Dayo F. Gore et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 104; Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day is Marching On (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), 104–105.

66. Kathy A. Perkins, “The Unknown Career of Shirley Graham,” Freedomways 25 (1985): 12; Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 123; Andrew Paschal, “The Spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Black Scholar 2 (1970): 27; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. Du Bois, May 16, 1935; Shirley Graham to W.E.B Du Bois, September 9, 1935, Du Bois Papers.

67. Paschal, “The Spirit of Du Bois,” 28; W.E.B. Du Bois to Shirley Graham, November 17, 1943; Du Bois to Julius Rosenwald fund, December 10, 1937; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. Du Bois, September 20, 1939; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. Du Bois, November 30, 1942; W.E.B. Du Bois to Rayford Logan, January 4, 1945; W.E.B. Du Bois to Shirley Graham, October 20, 1947; Memorandum from W.E.B. Du Bois to Walter White, October 20, 1937; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. Du Bois, January 20, 1943, Du Bois Papers; Horne, Race Woman, 124–133.

68. David Levering Lewis, “Interview with John Henrik Clarke, Tape #H-7,” DLL Papers; Ibid., “Interview with Ethel Ray Nance, Tape #1,” DLL Papers.

69. Ibid., “Interview with Alice Childress, Tape #D-1”; “Interview with Ana Livia Cordero, Tape #H-4,”; “Interview with Esther and James Jackson, Tapes #14 and #15,” DLL Papers.

70. “Committee is Set up to Defend Dr. Du Bois,” New York Times, September 29, 1948; John Hudson Jones, “Du Bois Ousted by NAACP Board as Research Head,” Daily Worker, September 15, 1948; Horne, Race Woman, 111–112; Horne and Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois,” 103–104; File NY 100-20789, April 12, 1955, April 30, 1955, Central Intelligence Agency; Horne, Black & Red, 93–97.

71. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Colonies in the post-war world,” November 1, 1944, Du Bois Papers.

72. Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Why was Du Bois fired?” Masses & Mainstream, November 1948, 15–26. James W. Ford echoed Graham’s sentiments. For him, the dismissal elicited both shock and chagrin, as Du Bois’s critique of the “corrupt” elements of the Association buttressed “the ever-growing movement of progress and of the Negro people here and abroad in particular.” James W. Ford to W.E.B. Du Bois, September 15, 1948, Du Bois Papers.

73. Graham and Du Bois married on February 27, 1951.

74. “National Committee to Defend Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center announcement,” 1951, Du Bois Papers.

75. Horne, Race Woman, 136; “A Call to Negro Women,” File 66-35 Sub 264-SA, May 14, 1952, Cleveland Federal Bureau of Investigation.

76. “A Call to Negro Women.” Also see Erik Mc Duffie, “A ‘New Freedom Movement of Negro Women’: Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War,” Radical History Review 101 (2008): 81–106.