W.E.B. Dubois: Criteria of Negro Art

One of the most prominent of all African American leaders of the 20th century, William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), a self-proclaimed "race man" was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. DuBois was educated primarily in the North at Harvard and in Germany where he prepared for his Ph.D. However, it was when attended school at Fisk    that he was confronted the appalling racism prevalent in the South: an experience that helped to shape his political philosophy and life's work. By the time he became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio, DuBois was a published author. DuBois had made it his mission to seek out "forums beyond academe from which he could address fundamental problems of race and justice in the United States" and one of those forums was the written page. 

He was published in such prestigious literary journals as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial, and his essays focused on sociological aspects of the black experience that pertained to experiential and socio-economic issues affecting blacks such as land ownership, family, the church, urbanization, and mortality. Dubois conducted extensive research concerning criminality among the newly-freed African American population following Reconstruction. In a theory similar to that of Emile Durkheim, DuBois concluded that criminal behavior escalated among African Americans due to the socio-economic marginalization of blacks following the war as Reconstruction had been a colossal failure. Further, Du Bois contended that criminality among newly freed blacks would decrease as blacks were enabled to enjoy rights on par with whites. Finally, in order to uplift the circumstances of freed blacks in the South, a select group of gifted intellects--the Talented Tenth--would emerge to lead African Americans to a secure footing in American culture.

By the turn of the last century, DuBois outlined his philosophies on race and distilled his ideas concerning the cultures, traditions, values, and experience that went to construct the 'soul' of African Americans. In 1903, he published the text for which he is most readily known, The Souls of Black Folk.

In Souls of Black Folk, DuBois explored the experience of "Double Consciousness": a term he used to describe the peculiar experience of African Americans in seeking out a means of self-definition in the face of a white power structure. To be able to forge an identity that coupled one's African origins with a New World experience was chief among DuBois's concerns. Further, DuBois articulated the struggles of post-Reconstruction African Americans initiated by the color line that separated whites from blacks in the U.S. This color line he articulated throughout Souls of Black Folk through the metaphor of the "veil."

By 1910, Dubois was rising in rank as a key civil rights leader: he founded and served as editor of the magazine, The Crisis, the principle publication for the NAACP. Though he frequently used the magazine as a forum in which he outlined American racial politics, his focus was broadening to encompass questions concerning Pan-African issues. Envisioning a "Great Council of Darker People, Dubois arranged international Pan-African conferences in the United States and in Europe, hoping to forge a greater sense of global community bound by historical and cultural memory. DuBois's actions during this time set the precedent for the waves of Black National thinking that would later be embraced and expanded upon by thinkers such as the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary, Franz Fanon, and African-Martinican poet and educator, Aimie Cesaire. 

His essay, "Criteria of Negro Art" outlines his conviction that all art is propaganda, and as such, is created for the purpose of racial uplift. In the late 1920s and 1930s during the Harlem Renaissance, Dubois would find his views in contest with many of his contemporaries. According to our text, his comparatively radical views rankled fellow leaders and the artists of the time, who resisted his adherence to art-as-propaganda. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston criticized his staunch politicization of creative output; his resistance to an incorporation of folk tradition as a primary motif of African American literary expression, and many writers of the time scoffed at his comparatively pretentious, "priggish" literary style (Gates). 

Despite his lack of popularity among some writers of his day, Dubois's name still resonates, as he was the father of Black Studies, and his contribution to African American Academics is immeasurable. Dubois remained active politically well into his life: in 1961, he and his wife accepted an invitation from President Kwame Nkrumah to visit Ghana and commence work on the Encyclopedia Africana. When he was refused a return passport, Dr. Dubois renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Ghanan citizen. He died in Accra, Ghana in 1962, just one day before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech (1). 

above photo: wikipedia.org

Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed" (BTW 586). The "Sage of Tuskegee," Booker T. Washington was born in slavery in 1856 in what is now West Virginia. He had reached the age of seven by the time of Emancipation (1863), and recalls in his autobiography Up From Slavery with characteristic lucidity and plaintive effect the joy that he witnessed among the adult slaves when word came that they were free. Booker T. Washington came of age during the period known as Reconstruction. This period immediately following the Civil War (1861-1864) in which the South slowly rebuilt its financial losses from the war, and African American slaves, free from the constraints of chattel slavery, were fleeing the North to find enfranchisement and escape the racial tension of the South. Aided by the Army and the Freedman's Bureau, a Republican coalition, attempted to rehabilitate the South, and negotiations began concerning how to incorporate the seceding southern states back into the Union.
 
However, tensions grew as southerners resisted the South resented northern intervention into the affairs of what they envisioned as a "Solid (Democratic) South;" and raised arguments concerning the Constitutional and voting rights of freedmen. The Freedman's Bureau, an agency that assisted freed slaves, founded schools funded by missionaries and aid societies, to educate and edify freed slaves who were desirous of an education. By 1866, a Congressional Act enabled Freedman's Schools to be funded through the confiscation of Confederate property toward educational purposes (1). 

However, despite meagerly hopeful beginnings, the Freedman schools suffered from lack of funding. The increasing incidences of violence in the South and growing white Democratic power led to the dissolution of the Bureau and its projects. In light of the struggle of the Freedman schools, the accomplishments of Booker T. Washington stand as a major triumph against the white oppression of blacks in the U.S. following the Civil War. Practicing and advocating a credo of self-respect, hard work, and unwavering ethics, Washington extolled blacks of the South to "cast down your bucket where you are;" in other words, to make use of the soil where you stand by building an institution of learning, by pursuing self-education and improvement. Washington, who at fourteen made the journey to Hampton, Virginia to work for his tuition to attend the Hampton Institute. There he dusted and cleaned the libraries and offices of the Institute until he graduated with honors three years later. After serving on the faculty at Hampton, Washington was granted authorization from the Virginia legislature to found the Tuskegee Institute where all potential students worked the land, tilled the soil, assisted in the building of each structure in order to pay his or her tuition. Washington advocated self-improvement among blacks take place on the very soil where their ancestors had toiled; and to build this great school, Washington developed and utilized the multiple connections he had among white entrepreneurs, businessmen, and politicians.

americaslibrary.gov

"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board of Directors and Citizens: One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race. No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success. I but convey to you, Mr. President and Directors, the sentiment of the masses of my race when I say that in no way have the value and manhood of the American Negro been more fittingly and generously recognized than by the managers of this magnificent Exposition at every stage of its progress. It is a recognition that will do more to cement the friendship of the two races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom. Not only this, but the opportunity here afforded will awaken among us a new era of industrial progress. Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden. A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,Water, water; we die of thirst! The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, Cast down your bucket where you are.

A second time the signal, Water, water; send us water! ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, Cast down your bucket where you are. And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, Cast down your bucket where you are. The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: Cast down your bucket where you are— cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race,Cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South."