## IN MEMORIAM

The lifetime of William Burghardt DuBois spans almost a century. His was a long, supremely remarkable life, made meaningful no less by its high idealism than by its urbane sense of the practical. Dr. DuBois has been a teacher of men and a spiritual progenitor of nations. He spent his last days in Ghana of which State he became a citizen, but all Africa reveres him as the Father of Pan-Africanism. In the land of his birth he is — for, alas, too many — a prophet without his full meed of honor.

The aim of the DuBois Memorial Committee is to secure to the Afro-American consciousness the personality, image and cultural significance of the most illustrious Afro American scholar of our time, and to present to Americans at large a proper sense of Dr. DuBois' intellectual contributions to American life.

It is hoped that this function in his honor will not only serve to call attention to Dr. DuBois' singular capacities and achievements, but that it will be a means of bringing into being a living memorial to one of Africa's and of America's greatest sons.

### OSSIE DAVIS

For the DuBois Memorial Committee

-2-

CULTURAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF DR. DUBOIS

The Negro people, in their fight against chattel slavery and to obtain and keep their citizenship rights over the past century and a half, have needed political and cultural leaders and spokesmen who were giants. And they have produced them: Frederick Douglass, Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. DuBois; men who could inspire and move a whole people.

W.E.B. DuBois was born and grew up during the period which ran from the high point of Reconstruction democracy for Negroes and poor whites in the South after the Civil War to the nadir or lowest point around the turn of the century from Negro voting and high office-holding, integrated schools and gains in the struggle for land in the South through the overthrow of Reconstruction, the driving of Negroes and poor whites from power, the massacres, the many hundreds of lynchings, the burning of Negro schools and churches, the taking of Negro land, the forced free labor of the convict lease system, the plantation share-cropping and the enactment of stringent laws segregating southern Negroes and whites from the cradle to the grave. It was a period in which the Negro people were oppressed so hard in the South that compromisers like Booker T. Washington arose willing to be half men and to accept half a loaf.

And through all of this terrible period Du Bois was preparing himself at Fisk University, Harvard University and the University of Berlin. At Fisk he wrote many articles, essays and a novel, was editor-in-chief of the Fisk Herald and became quite an orator, debater and public speaker. At Harvard he studied under many great men: William James in psychology, George Santayana and Josiah Royce in philosophy, Shaler in geology, Palmer in ethics, Barrett Wendell in English and Albert Bushnell Hart in history. DuBois distinguished himself here, was graduated and received a Harvard fellowship to do graduate work in history and in what would be called social science today. This fellowship and its renewal carried him to his master's degree and through his dissertation for a Ph.D. degree, all on the suppression of the African slave trade. He was guided through this work by Prof. Hart as a brilliant student and scholar. DuBois worked on a number of general studies at Harvard and his dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was published in 1896 as volume one in the Harvard Historical Studies series.

Then with a Slater Fund half gift and half loan, he went to Europe for two years of post-doctoral study at the University of Berlin. There DuBois again distinguished himself in economics, history and sociology, sitting under such outstanding German scholars as Gustav Schmoller and Wagner. It was at the University of Berlin in 1893 that DuBois, at 25 years of age, dedicated himself, not grimly but with great determination, to the search for truth and to "work for the rise of the Negro people" since "their best development means the best development of the world; to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race." All of the cumulatively Herculean and stupendous work of DuBois's long and fruitful life fitted into his over-all plan of making a name in literature and in the social science disciplines and (broadening his original view) doing other writing and organizing work in a more direct effort to raise and advance the Negro people. All of his great physical resources and all of his many and prodigal

W.E.B. DuBois (second from left) with Fisk University graduating class of 1888.

Dr. DuBois with his friend and colleague in the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson (right), the poet and novelist.

talents, even genius, he devoted unstintingly and per-
severingly to the uplift of all peoples of African descent.

Dr. Du Bois's cultural contributions may be broken
down roughly into three categories: literary-political
works (essays, poetry, novels, autobiography) historical
sociological, biographical works (pertaining to the Negro
in the U.S.); and his work as an Africanist. Tracing
each of these groups chronologically, we get a concerted
and cumulative view of this man's work and his impact
as a towering Afro-American, a giant American intel-
lectual and world thinker and scholar.

His literary-political work began with The Souls of
Black Folk (1903), a now classic book of essays and
sketches. Written in simple, beautiful, Biblical rhetoric,
this book is a passionate polemic justifying Reconstruc-
tion, criticizing Booker T. Washington and giving a
devastating picture of the Black Belt. It also demanded
the right to vote, civic equality, the education of youth
according to ability and all rights implicit in the Declara-
tion of Independence. Finally, the book set forth the
cultural gifts of the Negro to America. This book, said
James Weldon Johnson, had a greater effect upon and
within the Negro race in America than any other single
book published in this country since Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The Gift of Black Folk; Negroes in the Making of
America (1924) sets forth in great detail the cultural
and historical gifts of Negroes to America. But before
this book there were the novel The Quest of the Silver
Fleece (1911), DuBois's literary and militant editorship
of the NAACP's Crisis Magazine beginning in 1910 and
extending into 1934, and Darkwater (1920). Darkwater
(at one time subtitled "the twentieth century completion
of Uncle Tom's Cabin;" at another "voices from within
the veil") is a continuation of the essays and sketches of
The Souls of Black Folk and contains that famous and
passionate poem "A Litany at Atlanta" about the ter-
rible Atlanta (Ga.) riot of 1906 and his beautiful
"Credo" written in 1904.

DuBois's works were part of the background for the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's and early thirties.
DuBois participated in this movement as the encouraging
editor of the Crisis during this period; also as the author
of "The Black Man Brings His Gifts" for the book
The New Negro (1925) edited by Alain Locke and of
another novel Dark Princess (1928). In 1940 came his
beautifully written autobiography, Dusk of Dawn: The
Autobiography of a Race Concept. Here DuBois uses
his own life, as he had earlier in the booklet A Pageant
in Seven Decades (1938), to probe the sociology and
psychology of American racism. In 1940 DuBois also
founded at Atlanta University the quarterly literary
magazine Phylon, a review of race and culture, which
is still being published although more sociological now.
In 1952 DuBois returned to autobiography with In Battle
for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday, this time
to tell inimitably and with masterful pen the story of that
monstrous frame-up attempt, trial and acquittal of him-
self and his colleagues of the former Peace Information
Center on charges of failing to register as "foreign
agents."

His Black Flame trilogy of novels, The Ordeal of
Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959) and
Worlds of Color (1961), covering the story of the Negro
people and Negro-white relations from the end of the
Reconstruction era in the late 1870's to the middle
1950's is a tremendous achievement of American litera-
ture and written when DuBois was in late 80's and early
90's! Here he tries to sum up in historical fiction what
has really happened in Negro and U.S. history since the

Reconstruction period as he knows it from study and
experience. Finally, at the time of his death in 1963, there
appeared An ABC of Color edited by him and consisting
of some of his important speeches through the years and
excerpts (poetry and prose) from his books and magazine
writings, mostly from the Crisis Magazine. Also to be
added here are the hundreds of articles over the many
years from his prolific pen.

DuBois's historical, sociological and biographical works pertaining to the Negro in the U.S. began with his above-mentioned The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States, 1638-1870 (1896), an authoritative work of sound scholarship which was the first scientific history of the Negro. He turned quickly from history, when the opportunity opened at the University of Pennsylvania, to sociology then in its infancy. He made a study of the Negro in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), so thorough and complete that it has withstood the criticism of forty years and was the first scientific sociological study done in the U.S. This study showed the Negro group as a symptom and not a cause; as a striving, palpitating human group and not an inert, sick body of crime as the city fathers of Philadelphia had wanted him to prove.

From the University of Pennsylvania DuBois moved
to Atlanta University where his careful monographs in
the Atlanta University Publications series (1899-1912)
were the first genuine social science studies to appear
in the South by whites or Negroes and much better
done than any other attempted similar work anywhere
in the world. These studies gained international atten-
tion. They dealt with the college-bred Negro American,
the Negro common school, economic cooperation, efforts
for social betterment and morals and manners among
Negro Americans; also Negro crime, the Negro artisan,
the Negro American family, the Negro church and Negro
health. Dr. W. M. Cobb of the Howard University School
of Medicine calls the monograph The Health and Physi-
que of the Negro American (1906) in this Atlanta Uni-
versity series the first significant scientific approach to
the health problems and biological study of the Negro.
But, says Cobb, neither the Negro medical profession nor
the Negro educational world was ready for it. Its po-
tential usefulness was not realized by Negroes. Whites
were hostile to such a study embracing the anthropology,
psychology and health of the Negro in all of their as-
pects. This study, DuBois's single excursion into the
health field, was, says Cobb, an extraordinary forward
pass heaved the length of the field, but there were no
receivers.

In 1909 came DuBois's elegiac, brooding, prose-poem
biography of John Brown in which he treats the facts
from a different point of view; that is, from the view-
point of the little known important inner development of
the Negro American. And viewed in this way, John
Brown becomes the white American who perhaps came
nearest to touching the real souls of black folk. DuBois's
John Brown and Oswald Garrison Villard's John Brown
(1910) both commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of
Brown's death in 1859, were two voices crying in the
wilderness of the venomous anti-Brown American history
and biography of that time.

His work on the Reconstruction period which began
in 1910 when he read a paper on "Reconstruction and
its Benefits" before the American Historical Association
(American Historical Review, July 1910), culminated
with his great work Black Reconstruction in America,
1860-1880 (1935). This book is a comprehensive defense
of the role of Negroes and Radical Republicans during

-4-

Dr. DuBois in the office of the *Crisis* which he edited for the NAACP from 1910 to 1934.

(NAACP photo)

Reconstruction and a repudiation of the widespread opinion of the period as a tragic era productive only of evil and corruption. Black Reconstruction and James S. Allen's Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (1937) published two years later, rescued this period from white historiography and forced American historians to revise and reconsider their biased work on Reconstruction.

As early as 1909 DuBois started an Encyclopedia Africana project to commemorate the fiftieth year of the Emancipation Proclamation (1913) and the 300th anniversary of the landing of the Negro in America (1919). Later in 1931 an Encyclopedia of the Negro project was initiated by the Phelps-Stokes Fund involving Negro and white scholars and with DuBois heading the group. In 1945 Dr. DuBois and Guy B. Johnson edited the Encyclopedia of the Negro (revised in 1946), a small preparatory volume with reference lists and reports but representing only a portion of the material which the editors had prepared from 1931 to 1943. This volume is all that the project has published. DuBois, as Director of Special Research for the NAACP, also edited a lengthy, documented, published petition Appeal to the World which was presented to the United Nations in 1947 for redress of the grievances of and discrimination against U.S. Negroes.

DuBois says that he became tired of finding in newspapers, textbooks and history fulsome praise of white people and either no mention of dark people at all or disparaging or apologetic statements. He decided that Africa must have a history and destiny, and that one of his jobs was to dig up and reveal this unknown past and help make certain a splendid future. And so over a number of years, he did a lot of reading, writing, research and planning as an Africanist and architect of African freedom. His very important work as an Africanist begins again with his doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896). His second book on African history was The Negro (1915), a volume in The Home University Library. There was his work at the great Races Congress of 1911 in Europe dealing with the scientific bases of racial and social relations of various ethnic and cultural groups. Then his Herculean

work in helping to organize and participating in the six Pan-African congresses of 1900, 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945. These pioneering conferences brought together Africans, West Indians, American Negroes and interested whites to discuss the problems of colonial peoples and African freedom. We must also include here DuBois's many articles in books and magazines on Africa.

Black Folk, Then and Now (1939), an enlargement of DuBois's The Negro, was an historical, anthropological and sociological study of the Negro in Africa and in the Americas. After World War II came Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) which took up the post-war world peace plans from the point of view of the colored colonial peoples and presented a ringing challenge to the imperialist countries. Concentrating on the study of colonial peoples and peoples of Negro descent throughout the world as Director of Special Research for the NAACP, DuBois produced The World and Africa (1947), a pioneering inquiry into and bold outline of the part which Africa has played in world history, the details of which may be filled in by William Leo Hansberry and other Africanists. Finally, after he went to Ghana in the fall of 1961 his six Information Reports (edited with W. Alphaeus Hunton) for cooperation toward a many-volumed, monumental Encyclopedia Africana and a provisional draft plan defining and setting the scope and contents of the Encyclopedia prepared for the Dec. 18, 1962 conference on this great work at the University of Ghana.

Langston Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" dedicated to W.E.B. DuBois echoes some of this African history and concludes with:

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Countee Cullen captures the life and career of this incredible Negro giant and genius of a man — DuBois — with these lines:

Men raised a mountain in your path,

Steep, perilous with slime,

Then smouldered in their own hot wrath

To see you climb and climb.

— ERNEST KAISER

— 5 —

SOME
MEMORIES

I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation ... My own people were part of a great clan. Fully two hundred years before, Tom Burghardt had come through the western pass from the Hudson with his Dutch captor, "Coenraet Burghardt", sullen in his slavery and achieving his freedom by volunteering for the Revolution at a time of sudden alarm. His wife was a little, black, Bantu woman, who never became reconciled to this strange land; she clasped her knees and rocked and crooned:

"Do bana coba — gene me, gene me!
Ben d'nuli, ben d'le —"

Tom died about 1787, but of him came many sons, and one, Jack, who helped in the War of 1812. Of Jack and his wife, Violet, was born a mighty family, splendidly named: Harlow and Ira, Cloe, Lucinda, Maria and Othello! I dimly remember my grandfather Othello and my grandmother Sarah — a stern, tall, Dutch-African woman, beak-nosed, but beautiful-eyed and golden-skinned. Ten or more children were theirs, of whom the youngest was Mary, my mother. Mother was dark shining bronze, with a tiny ripple in her hair, black-eyed, with a heavy, kind face. ... She met and married Alfred Du Bois and went to live by the golden river where I was born.

Alfred, my father, must have seemed a splendid vision in that little valley under the shelter of those mighty hills. He was small and beautiful of face and feature, just tinted with the sun. ... In nature he was a dreamer. ... His father, Alexander Du Bois cloaked under a stern, austere demeanor a passionate revolt against the world. ... Long years before him Louis XIV drove two Huguenots, Jacques and Louis Du Bois, into wild Ulster County, New York. ... A descendant, Dr. James Du Bois, a gay, rich bachelor. . . made his money in the Bahamas where he. . . had plantations. There he took a beautiful little mulatto slave as his mistress, and two sons were born: Alexander in 1803, and John later. . . He brought them to America and put Alexander in the celebrated Cheshire School, in Connecticut. Here he often visited him, but one last time fell dead. He left no will, and his relations made short shrift of these sons. . . . So with some circumstance having finally gotten myself born. . . I come to the days of my childhood. They were very happy. . . . As I peer back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and afterthought, I seem to view my life divided into four great parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the Second Miracle Age. The Age of Miracles began with Fisk. . . . I willed and lo! I was walking beneath the elms of Harvard. . . . I asked for a fellowship and got it. I announced my plan of studying in Germany. I crossed the ocean in a trance. . . After two long years I dropped back into . . . America. . . . I went to Wilberforce with high ideals. . . . In 1896 I married — a slip of a girl, beautifully dark-eyed. . . . I essayed a thorough piece of work in Philadelphia. . . . My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my twenty-ninth to my forty-second birhday. . . . Away back in the little years of my boyhood I had sold the **Springfield Republican**. . . . I dreamed of being an editor myself some day. I am an editor. In the great, slashing days of college life I dreamed of a strong organization to fight the battles of the Negro race. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is such a body and it grows daily . . .

— From "Darkwater" 1920

Mary Sylvina
Burghardt DuBois,
shown with her
infant son, William.
She died in 1884.

— 6 —

Founders of the Niagara Movement, inaugurated at a meeting in Buffalo, New York in 1905. Dr. DuBois, (second from left, rear) was General Secretary of the group, the forerunner of the NAACP.

Paul Robeson and Dr. DuBois.

With Vincent Hallinan, a leader of the Progressive Party

## CHRONOLOGY

1868, February 23: Birth at Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
1883-1885: Great Barrington correspondent for N. Y. Globe and Freeman
1887-1888: Chief Editor of Fisk Herald
1888: B. A., Fisk University
1890: B. A., Harvard University
1891: M. A., Harvard University
1892-1894: Graduate Student, University of Berlin
1894-1896: Professor of Greek and Latin, Wilberforce University
1895: Ph. D., Harvard University
1896: "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States," Harvard Historical Studies Number One
1896-1897: Instructor, University of Pennsylvania
1897-1910: Professor of Economics and History, Atlanta University
1897-1911: Editor of Atlanta University Studies of the Negro Problem
1899: The Philadelphia Negro
1903: The Souls of Black Folk
1905-1909: Founder and General Secretary, the Niagara Movement
1906: Founder and Editor of The Moon
1907-1910: Founder and Editor of The Horizon
1909: John Brown
1909: Among original Founders and Incorporators of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
1910-1934: Director of Publicity and Research, NAACP Editor (and Founder) The Crisis
1911: Quest of the Silver Fleece
1915: The Negro
1919: Founder Pan-African Movement; Organizer Pan-African Congresses
1920: Darkwater
1924: The Gift of Black Folk
1928: Dark Princess
1933-1944: Chairman, Department of Sociology, Atlanta University
1933-1945: Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopaedia Project of the Negro
1935: Black Reconstruction
1939: Black Folk: Then and Now
1940: Dusk of Dawn
1940-1944: Founder and Editor of Phylon
1944-1948: Director of Special Research, NAACP
1945: Chief Editor: Preparatory Volume: Encyclopaedia of the Negro
1945: Color and Democracy
1945: Consultant: United Nations Organization at San Francisco
1947: Editor: An Appeal to the World (Petition to the U.N. from NAACP)
1947: The World and Africa
1949: Chairman: Council on African Affairs
1949: Chairman: Peace Information Center
1950: Candidate for U. S. Senator from New York on the American Labor Party ticket
1950-1951: Indictment, trial and acquittal on charge of "unregistered foreign agent" because of leadership in Peace efforts
1951: In Battle for Peace
1958-1960: The Black Flame: A trilogy
1961: Joins the Communist Party of the United States
1961-1963: At Invitation of President Nkrumah of Ghana, takes up residence in Accra as Director of Encyclopaedia Africana Project
1963: Becomes a citizen of the Republic of Ghana
1963: ABC of Color
1963: (August 27): Dies; given a State Funeral; lies buried in Ghana

- 8 -

HONORS:

Spingarn Medalist

Special Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from the United States to Liberia

Fellow and Life Member: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Member, National Institute of Arts and Letters

One of five people in history to have been in Who's Who for fifty consecutive years

Knight Commander of the Liberian Order of African Redemption

Honorary Degrees from Fisk University, Howard University, Atlanta University, Wilberforce University, Morgan State College, University of Berlin, Charles University (Prague)

Winner, International Peace Prize

Winner, Lenin Peace Prize

Mrs. Shirley Graham DuBois, (left) editor-in-chief of *Freedomways*, goes over plans for an issue with her husband and Esther Jackson, managing editor.

NOTE:

Chronological treatment necessarily omits whole areas of Dr. DuBois' public life. Thus, he performed economic and sociological studies for the U. S. Census Bureau; he wrote weekly columns in several newspapers, including the *Chicago Defender*, the *Pittsburgh Courier* and others; he delivered thousands of lectures in colleges, churches, halls, schools in every State in the United States and in most countries of the world, as Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc.; he wrote poetry that is in many anthologies; he helped inspire hundreds of novelists, poets, playwriters, sculptors, musicians and scientists, not only by his work and example, but by direct assistance. And always he was a fighter and organizer against racism, colonialism, imperialism, illiteracy, poverty, exploitation, and war. One of his earliest important essays — written while still an undergraduate at Fisk in 1887 — was entitled "An Open Letter to the Southern People", and was an appeal for civilized conduct and an excoriation of jim crow; among his last acts was the inspiration of a protest march upon the U. S. Embassy in Accra, in August, 1963 (the month of his death), in solidarity with the historic "March for Jobs and Freedom" to Washington of that month.

— Chronology by Dr. Herbert Aptheker, named by Dr. DuBois as his literary executor

Dr. DuBois, honored by
Fisk University, his *alma mater*,
on the 70th anniversary
of his graduation.

DR. DU BOIS SPEAKS TO YOUTH,

BEHOLD THE LAND!

Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy.

To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the GREAT SACRIFICE; this is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South.

There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practised it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina.

Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and races — without poverty, ignorance and disease!

— Excerpt from a speech to the youth of the South at Columbia, South Carolina, 1946

(Robert Joyce photo, National Guardian)

Dr. DuBois with his great-grandson, Arthur Edward McFarlane 2nd, grandson of his only daughter, Yolanda. (Center) Mrs. Alice Burghardt Crawford, his cousin and close associate for many years.

— 10 —

# I, TO AMERICA, TO THE WORLD!

## THE NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

Many who scream for freedom, and despair because struggling humanity is so often coerced by Thou Shalt Not, appear to forget that, compared with the realm of physical law and even of biological and psychological compulsions, the regions where the spirit of man may range, free of all distortion and restraint, are infinitely larger, deeper and broader than the narrow margins of compulsion. Beyond that, while in our ignorance and fear, and with our utter lack of faith in the capacities of the human soul, we stand compelled here and today to remain prisoners of our bellies to an extent which disgraces our science and history. We nevertheless know that we also stand this instant tiptoe on the threshold of infinite freedoms, freedoms which outstretch this day of slavery as the universe of suns outmeasures our little earthly system.

There is of course a grey borderland, where human effort and natural law combine to raise food, build shelter and train the young. Here inflexible law merges with wish and will, and freedom is an indeterminate variable. Here men may restrain action in order to protect and guide ignorance and inexperience toward using freedom aright. It is in this borderland that more often too many men seek artificially to restrain such freedom as emerges for selfish and shortsighted aims. They choose ignorance, for fear too many will know; give the masses too little, so that a few may have too much; prefer hate to love, lest power change hands and prestige wane. They forget that it is the wide reaches of more complete freedoms that can ultimately best teach and guide our twilight ignorance amid the inescapable iron of law. The borderland where freedom chokes today may easily, as freedom grows, fade into its more complete realm.

Two barriers and two alone hem us in and hurl us back today: One, the persistent relic of ancient barbarism — war: organized murder, maiming, destruction and insanity. The other, the world-old habit of refusing to think ourselves, or to listen to those who do think. Against this ignorance and intolerance we protest forever. But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell: the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears: the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls.

— Excerpt from a paper presented at a conference of the World Peace Council, 1953

Dr. DuBois and Mrs. Shirley Graham DuBois on a triumphal visit to China in 1959.

## Editorial Policy: THE CRISIS

Humanity is progressing toward an ideal; but not, please God, solely by help of men who sit in cloistered ease, hesitate from action and seek sweetness and light; rather we progress today, as in the past, by the soul-torn strength of those who can never sit still and silent while the disinherited and the damned clog our gutters and gasp their lives out on our front porches. These are the men who go down in the blood and dust of battle. They say ugly things to an ugly world. They spew the luke-warm fence-straddlers out of their mouths, like God of old; they cry aloud and spare not; they shout from the housetops and they make this world so damned uncomfortable with its nasty burden of evil that it tries to get good and does get better.

Evolution is evolving the millenium, but one of the unescapable factors in evolution are the men who hate wickedness and oppression with a perfect hatred, who will not equivocate, will not excuse, and will be heard. With the sainted spirits of such as these The Crisis would weakly but earnestly stand and cry in the world's four corners of the way; and it claims no man as friend who dare not stand and cry with it.

From The Crisis

— 11 —

Dr. DuBois met with leaders of varying political views for discussions on a united movement in the mid 50's.
(Left to right) Eugene Dennis, Dr. DuBois, Rev. A. J. Muste, Robert Baldwin, Norman Thomas.

## TRIBUTE TO DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS

"My warmest greetings to you who have gathered to pay tribute to Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.

"For a considerable part of the last twenty years I had the privilege and benefit of close association with him — first in New York in work for the liberation of Africa, and again later, toward the eve of his life, in independent Ghana where he made his last home and where he received full governmental support for the last great work he was to undertake, the launching of plans for an Encyclopedia Africana, truly a fitting capstone to a long life of outstanding achievement.

"In view of this background of association, I am indeed most grateful for the opportunity of participating in this Memorial Tribute to W.E.B. DuBois.

"Much has been said and will be said about the remarkable and varied accomplishments of DuBois. Sometimes and in some quarters there has appeared a tendency to speak about what he stood for and did with a sort of smug and deliberate emphasis on the past tense. But as it was impossible to daunt the courage or still the voice of DuBois while he lived, so is it now im-

possible to bury his works with him, as some would like to do, albeit sanctimoniously.

"I am wholly confident that the present Memorial Tribute to Dr. DuBois will place emphasis upon the abiding, on-going significance and value of his life and accomplishments for all of us in comprehending and facing up to the problems of today and all the tomorrows. I believe you will share my conviction that the influence of DuBois in the land of his birth, in the land where he died, and elsewhere far and wide, will continue to grow with the ever-increasing demand and widening struggle for the social goals he defined and strove for.

"My sincere hope, then, is that this Memorial Tribute to Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, may mean for us above all else the reaffirmation of our determination to carry on his battle for peace — for peace, for democracy, for socialism; for human decency, dignity, and progress."

W. ALPHAEUS HUNTON

Accra, Ghana

(Dr. Hunton in recent years collaborated with Dr. DuBois on the *Encyclopaedia Africana* project, and has been named his successor as its director).

— 12 —

"Few individuals symbolize as much in their person and in their role in life, the noblest aspirations of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas for freedom and human dignity, as you do. None have been more eloquent and passionate in fusing the struggle for peace with the struggle against colonial oppression . . . one of the mightiest of all voices against world oppression of peoples based on race, color, national origin, and religion".

TIBOR ZABOR, on occasion of naming Dr. DuBois an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

"I asked Dr. DuBois to come to Ghana to pass the evening of his life with us and also to spend his remaining years in compiling an Encyclopedia Africana, a project which is part of his whole intellectual life."

"We mourn his death. May he live in our memory not only as a distinguished scholar, but as a great African patriot. Dr. DuBois is a phenomenon. May He Rest In Peace."

KWAME NKRUMAH
President, Ghana

"William E. B. DuBois was undoubtedly one of the greatest Americans this country has produced. Negro Americans have produced no more outstanding figure. His name will go down in history among the immortals for he lived with history, understood its driving forces and identified himself with the most advanced of these."

"To honor such a man is to honor all that one could hold as sacred and to honor oneself."

WILLIAM L. PATTERSON

"I have always looked upon Dr. DuBois as the cheerful and refreshing leader of the opposition. But on a deeper level he challenged many complacent assumptions concerning freedom and intellectual integrity much to the benefit, though sometimes discomfort, of the conventional society. One hopes that such a gathering as this Memorial may inspire some of the younger generation of both the light and dark races to develop similar capacities".

CLARENCE E. PICKETT

"Dr. DuBois declared 'We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now... We want discrimination in public accommodation to cease... We want the constitution of the country enforced... We want our children educated ... We are men! We will be treated as men. And we shall win.'"

"We have not won yet. None of the things he projected as democratic objectives for the Negro a half century ago have been realized in full and, in some sections of our country, not even partially. Dr. DuBois died in Africa a few months ago. Had he lived until this February, he would have been 96 years old. He was the most able and militant freedom fighter our times have produced."

—LANGSTON HUGHES

"His contributions to the ageless struggle for human rights are imperishable. His passing leaves a great void which there is no immediate prospect of filling. . . ."

"His literary, historical and sociological contributions were so vast and all inclusive that no serious research in the Negro field can be done without reference to the works of W.E.B. DuBois."

"... He was the prime inspirer, philosopher and father of the Negro protest movement . . . an impassioned and eloquent spokesman for equal rights, a fierce and uncompromising foe of colonialism and promoter of the African Congresses, and the most eminent scholar and historian of the Negro race in America and Africa."

From NAACP OBITUARY STATEMENT

"Ranking as he does among the foremost writers of true importance in this country, one selfishly wishes sometimes (as a writer oneself) that he could devote all his time to the accomplishment of that fine and moving prose which distinguishes his books. But at the same time one realizes, self-reproachfully, that with Dr. DuBois it is a cause—an ideal—that overcomes the personal egotism of the artist. . . . It seems to me inevitable that, awakened and encouraged by Dr. DuBois' leadership, there will spring up a group of creative spirits, who with a proud sense of their racial integrity and an unembittered sense of our common humanity as their background, will interpret life and beauty afresh, — perhaps, who knows, as it has never been interpreted before. This is an exciting thing to look forward to. . ."

EUGENE O'NEILL

"Strong eagle, we, the fledglings, try
Our wings, though thinly spun,
Because we know you watch, and cry
Us "Courage!" from the sun."

COUNTEE CULLEN

From the poem, "To W.E.B. DuBois: The Fledglings to the Eagle"

"Dr. DuBois, without a question, was one of the great men of our time. Although there are those who do not agree with this statement, I am quite sure that time will prove that my conviction is correct!"

DR. BENJAMIN E. MAYS

"No man in this century has done more to secure the white man's reluctant gesture of respect for the Negro's attainments than Burghardt DuBois."

MARY WHITE OVINGTON

"Dr. W. E. B. DuBois was the true pioneer in the heroic struggle of the American Negro in this century for equality and dignity. Through his vision and leadership, the Emancipation Proclamation belatedly began to have real meaning, and he became the father of all the efforts now being exerted by black and white Americans alike to fulfill the promise of both the Proclamation and the Constitution."

RALPH J. BUNCHE

— 13 —

["SPONSORS OF\nTHE MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO\nDR. W. E. B. DU BOIS", "Rev. Gross W. Alexander", "Mrs. Marilyn Alexander", "Mr. and Mrs. John Abt", "Mrs. Lois Allan", "Atty. George R. Anderson", "Mr. James Aronson", "Mr. and Mrs. Keith Baird", "Mr. James Baldwin", "Rev. Leo H. Ball", "Mrs. Charlotta A. Bass", "Mrs. Daisy Bates", "Mrs. Marguerite Belafonte", "Mr. Elmer Benson", "Mr. and Mrs. L. P. Beveridge", "Mr. Leon Bibb", "Mr. Algernon B. Black", "Mr. Arna Bontemps", "Mrs. Mathieu V. Boutté", "Mr. Richard Boyer", "Dr. G. Murray Branch", "Rabbi Stanley R. Brav", "Dr. Dorothy Brewster", "Dr. Walter Briehl", "Mr. Alvin J. Bronstein", "Miss Edith Brooks", "Dr. Ralph J. Bunche", "Mrs. Dorothy Burnham", "Mr. Warren J. Bunn", "Dr. Marguerite Cartwright", "Rev. P. W. Caton", "Mr. John Caughey", "Rev. Mark A. Chamberlin", "Mr. Russell N. Chase", "Mr. Meyer Chessin", "Dr. Kenneth B. Clark", "Mr. John H. Clarke", "Dr. Rufus E. Clement", "Mr. Robert S. Cohen", "Mr. John Collier", "Mrs. Alice Burghardt Crawford", "Rabbi Abraham Cronbach", "Prof. Ephraim Cross", "Mr. Frank Cunningham", "Rev. Wolcott Cutler", "Atty. Arthur A. Daronatsy", "Mr. Benjamin J. Davis", "Mr. Charles C. Davis", "Mr. Hugh DeLacy", "Dr. Irene Diggs", "Mr. James Dombrowski", "Dr. Lewis A. Eldridge", "Mrs. Virginia W. Epstein", "Rev. J. E. Feller", "Mrs. Lyonel C. Florant", "Mr. Ishmael Flory", "Dr. John Hope Franklin", "Mr. H. S. Freeman", "Dr. Milton A. Galamison", "Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn", "Mrs. Walter Goens", "Dr. Marcus I. Goldman", "Dr. Charles G. Gomillion", "Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett", "Hon. Ruth G. Goring", "Dr. Ralph H. Gundlach", "Mr. Walter Haffner", "Mr. Gus Hall", "Miss Lorraine Hansberry", "Mr. E. Y. Harburg", "Dr. Ann Arnold Hedgeman", "Mr. Merritt A. Hedgeman", "Dr. Eugene C. Holmes", "Dr. John Haynes Holmes", "Dr. Mary R. Hopkinson", "Mr. William B. Houston, Jr.", "Mr. Langston Hughes", "Miss Grace Hutchins", "Mr. and Mrs. B. Hutchinson", "Mrs. Jean Blackwell Hutson", "Mr. James E. Jackson", "Mr. Bernard Jaffe", "Hon. Jacob Javits", "Hon. Thomas R. Jones", "Mr. Sanford M. Katz", "Mr. Rockwell Kent", "Dr. David Kennell", "Mr. John Killens", "Miss Freda Kirchwey", "Mrs. Fanny B. Klein", "Mr. Albert E. Kahn", "Mr. I. W. Kolthoff", "Mr. John W. Lamperti", "Dr. John Howland Lathrop", "Mr. John Lewis", "Mr. David Livingston", "Mrs. Edna P. Logan", "Dr. Myra Logan", "Dr. Sol Londe", "Bishop Edgar A. Love", "Mr. Staughton Lynd", "Dr. John A. Mackay", "Mr. Carl Marzani", "Mr. and Mrs. Alexander F. Miller", "Mr. Russ Nixon", "Mr. Harvey O'Connor", "Mr. J. H. O'Dell", "Dr. William Obrinsky", "Dr. Fritz Pappenheim", "Prof. Harold L. Parsons", "Mr. William L. Patterson", "Dr. Linus Pauling", "Mr. Victor Perlo", "Dr. Rufus P. Perry", "Atty. Raymond Pickett", "Mr. Clarence Pickett", "Miss Rosalie L. Pinckney", "Mr. Dale Pontius", "Mr. Ted Poston", "Mr. P. L. Prattis", "Mr. A. Philip Randolph", "Mr. Anton Refregier", "Rev. Harry V. Richardson", "Mr. Holland Roberts", "Mr. J. A. Rogers", "Mr. and Mrs. Paul Robeson", "Mr. Cleveland Robinson", "Mr. Theodor Rosebury", "Miss Maud Russell", "Miss Rose Russell", "Atty. Simon Schachter", "Mr. Meyer Schapiro", "Mr. Seymour Schuster", "Mr. Arthur Schutzer", "Rev. Robert D. Sherard", "Dr. Samuel R. Siegel", "Mr. Abbott Simon", "Mr. Arthur B. Spingarn", "Mr. William T. Starr", {"bbox": [77

(Ida Berman phot.)

I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter; it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong. I am glad that the partial Puritanism of my upbringing has never made me afraid of life. I have lived completely, testing every normal appetite, feasting on sunset, sea and hill, and enjoying wine, women and song.

I have seen the face of beauty from the Grand Canyon to the great Wall of China; from the Alps to Lake Baikal; from the African bush to the Venus of Milo.

Perhaps above all I am proud of a straightforward clearness of reason, in part a gift of the gods, but also to no little degree due to scientific training and inner discipline. By means of this I have met life face to face. I have loved a fight and I have realized that Love is God and Work is His prophet; that His ministers are Age and Death.

This makes it the more incomprehensible for me to see persons quite panic-stricken at the approach of their thirtieth birthday and prepared for dissolution at forty. Few of my friends have openly celebrated their fiftieth birthdays, and near none their sixtieth. Of course, one sees some reasons: the disappointment at meager accomplishment which all of us to some extent share; the haunting shadow of possible decline; the fear of death. I have been fortunate in having health and wise in keeping it. I have never shared what seems to me the essentially childish desire to live forever. Life has its pain and evil — its bitter disappointments; but I like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold, even though one misses THE END.

— Concluding paragraphs from autobiography, "Dusk of Dawn", 1940

One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life. Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.

The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

— From "Last Testament to the World" 1963

— 15 —