Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture:

Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the

Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois David
Withun
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Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture
 Co-workers in the Kingdom of
Culture
Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W.
E. B. Du Bois

DAVID WITHUN
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eISBN 978–0–19–757960–2

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 Contents

Acknowledgments

W. E. B. Du Bois, the Classics, and Cosmopolitanism

1. The Classical Education of W. E. B. Du Bois
The Classics and Du Bois’s Enduring Moral Vision
Du Bois’s High School and College Education
Du Bois’s Education at Harvard
Classicism and Pragmatism at Harvard
Du Bois, Santayana, and Platonic Aesthetics
Du Bois Inside and Outside Western Civilization
Conclusion
2. American Archias: Cicero, Epic Poetry, and The Souls of Black
Folk
Cicero and The Souls of Black Folk
African American History and Epic Poetry
The Autobiography of a Culture Hero
Du Bois’s Epic Novels
Citizenship and Humanitas in Du Bois’s Thought
Conclusion
3. The Influence of Plato on the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois
Contemporary Context: Plato and Egalitarian Elitism
Sources for Du Bois’s Egalitarian Elitism
Du Bois’s Commitment to Truth
The Philosopher-Kings and the Talented Tenth
Du Bois and Washington on Civilization and Education
The Talented Tenth and the Message of Black Folk
The Sorrow Songs and the Allegory of the Cave
 Marxism and Platonism in Du Bois’s Thought
Conclusion
4. Anti-Racist Metamorphoses in Du Bois’s Classical References
Background: Whiteness and the Classics
A Time before Race: Ancient Culture as Nonracial Culture
Black People in Antiquity
Classical Subversion in the African American Tradition
Conclusion
5. The History of the “Darker Peoples” of the World: Afrocentrism
and Cosmopolitanism in the Later Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois
The Miseducation of the Negro
The Negro and The Star of Ethiopia
The World and Africa
The Unity of the “Darker Peoples”
Africa in Modern History
“Home” to Africa
Conclusion
Conclusion
From the Particular to the Universal
From the Parochial to the Cosmopolitan
Du Bois and the Canon

Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

MY STUDENTS in my first year as a teacher at Savannah Classical

Academy in Savannah, Georgia, were the initial inspiration for the
research and writing that would, now nearly a decade later, lead to
this book. I am profoundly grateful to every student who has ever
sat in my classroom for the inspiration and the challenge that you all
have presented to me. It was my desire to be a better teacher for
you that granted me the insight, perseverance, and impetus to
complete this project.
I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Robert Woods, Jason
Jewell, Chad Redwing, David Stark, Mark Linville, and Benjamin
Lockerd at the Great Books Honors College of Faulkner University.
Your support in my intellectual endeavors; your consistent prompting
toward better, deeper thought and analysis; and the depth and
breadth of learning you both modeled and encouraged have allowed
me to think and to speak with clarity and charity. I am grateful also
to all of my former classmates. Our deep dives into the classics—the
conversations and comradery—are irreplaceable and much missed.
I am grateful to the many who have provided me with insightful
conversations, citations, and encouragement during the writing of
this book. Among these are Matt J. Harper, Benjamin J. Wetzel, Lilian
Calles Barger, Azmar K. Williams, Keisha N. Blain, Michael Okyere
Asante, Christopher Butynski, Benjamin Payne, Jeff Kreh, Stephen
Mitchell, Carolivia Herron, Shirley Moody-Turner, John Norman, Anika
Prather, and Michael Benjamin. I want especially to thank Patrice
Rankine for his support and for reading and commenting on an
earlier manuscript of this book and Michele V. Ronnick for her
continual willingness to take the time to answer questions and to
provide resources and insights. My thanks also go to Stefan Vranka
and the anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press for valuable
feedback that have significantly improved this book. Any remaining
shortcomings are, of course, my own.
Finally, I want most of all to thank Vanessa, my wife, and Isaiah,
Genevieve, and Manuel, our three children. Thank you for tolerating
my frequent absences as I researched, read, and wrote, and thank
you for tolerating my absence of mind even when I was present. You
have taught me more about the one essential question—what it
means to be human—than anyone. Thank you.
 W. E. B. Du Bois, the Classics, and
Cosmopolitanism

THE SIGNIFICANCE OFW. E. B. Du Bois as both a scholar and an activist

is widely acknowledged, and various aspects of his life and legacy
have been thoroughly explored by recent scholarship. His work as a
historian, including his 1896 doctoral dissertation on The
Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of
America, 1638–1870 and his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America,
1860–1880, as David Levering Lewis writes, has “been
transformative and enduring in the historiography of Reconstruction”
and slavery, often foreshadowing by decades the changes that would
take place in scholarly consensus on the interpretation of these and
related events.1 Similarly, Du Bois’s contributions to sociology have
had an enduring influence. His sociological studies of African
American communities during his time at Atlanta University and his
1899 study The Philadelphia Negro became models for subsequent
sociological studies of urban African American communities.2 A
recent issue of The British Journal of Sociology was dedicated to
reappraising the significance and renewing the acknowledgment of
these and other sociological works undertaken by Du Bois.3 There
has also been some recent resurgence in interest in Du Bois as a
philosopher and fiction writer.4 Du Bois’s legacy as an activist,
cultural commentator, and political and educational theorist have
been significant formative influences and catalysts for the Civil
Rights movement, the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist
movements, the Black Power movement, and Pan-Africanism, among
other diverse influences. One aspect of his life and legacy that
deserves further elucidation, however, is Du Bois’s role as a
classicist.
While Du Bois’s classical education and the enduring influence of
that education on his thought are often acknowledged, there has not
yet been a full treatment of influences by and responses to the
classics in Du Bois’s works and thought.5 Du Bois’s primary and
secondary education in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as well as
his undergraduate and graduate education at Fisk University and
Harvard University were steeped in the study of classical languages
and literatures. Du Bois’s first academic appointment was as a chair
of the department of classics at Wilberforce University. Allusions to
classical works are sprinkled throughout Du Bois’s writings, some of
which, such as The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), his first novel,
rely directly on themes and stories derived from the classics. While
there has been some discussion of these influences, much of it has
been confined to identifying and explicating those classical
influences and allusions or treating Du Bois’s reliance on the classics
in the context of a larger discussion of philosophical influences.6
Alongside a resurgent interest in Du Bois’s work and its legacy,
there has also been a rising scholarly interest in classical influences
in African American literature and thought, at the forefront of which
has been the work of Michele Valerie Ronnick, Patrice Rankine,
Margaret Malamud, James Tatum, William W. Cook, Eric Ashley
Hairston, and others.7 These have included explorations of classical
themes in the works of African American authors like Ralph Ellison
and Toni Morrison, rediscoveries of the work of early African
American scholars of the classics, and evaluations of the role that
classical thought has played in shaping American thinking and
rhetoric in relation to slavery, abolition, and civil rights.8
This book contributes to both this growing body of scholarship on
Du Bois as well as the wider study of African American classical
receptions by focusing on four themes in the work of Du Bois in
relation to the classics:
The first of these themes is an examination of the ways in which
Du Bois’s classical education shaped the style of his rhetoric and
writing. Developing the line of thought begun by Cook and Tatum, I
argue throughout, but especially in Chapters 1 and 2, for a
significant and lifelong influence from Cicero and other classical
authors on Du Bois’s work in the manner of composition.9 This
includes especially the influence of Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta, a work
which Du Bois mentions in The Souls of Black Folk and elsewhere,
and which he first read as an undergraduate student at Fisk
University, on the structure and message of The Souls of Black Folk
as a whole. In addition, I explain some of the peculiarities of Du
Bois’s later works, including especially John Brown (1909) and Black
Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), each of which was
criticized by contemporary reviewers for their departures from the
scholarly standards then prevalent in their respective fields, by
comparing them to classical models of biography and history.10
The second theme of this book, particularly of Chapter 3, is that of
classical philosophical influences in the thought of Du Bois.
Developing further the thought of Stephanie J. Shaw and Shamoon
Zamir, I explore the influence of Plato’s political and ethical thought
on Du Bois by expanding that discussion to bridge the gap between
Du Bois’s early Platonism and later turn to Marxism as well as
including in the discussion possible metaphysical and aesthetic
influences from Plato.
The third and fourth major themes of this book include positioning
Du Bois as a transition point from the race vindicationism that drove
the pursuit of classical studies by African Americans of the
nineteenth century to the turn toward greater interest in Afrocentric
education that arose in the twentieth century and opened the
pathway for a renewed cosmopolitanism in the present.11 The third
theme, then, places Du Bois in the line of thinkers, described by
Malamud, for whom the mastery of classical languages and
literatures was the presentation of living disproof of the popular
doctrine of Black intellectual inferiority.12 Adopting, in a somewhat
modified form, Malamud’s theory that Du Bois’s pageant The Star of
Ethiopia represents a turning point in African American perspectives
on history, Chapters 4 and 5 pursue the fourth theme, positing that
while Du Bois remained a devotee of classical Western culture, he
simultaneously looked to the ancient histories of non-European
peoples, including especially those of Africa and India, as a means of
answering the claims of advocates of white superiority.13
In pursuit of these themes, this book includes five chapters.
The first chapter examines Du Bois’s classical education and the
continued significance of the classics throughout his life. Among the
primary source documents discussed are the texts he studied in high
school, as an undergraduate at Fisk University, and as a graduate
student at Harvard University, as well as allusions and other
mentions of those texts in Du Bois’s later works. I argue here that
Du Bois’s education presented him with the challenge that would
later form the basis of much of his treatment of classical literature in
his later writing, namely, that he developed a passion for the
classical tradition but simultaneously found himself excluded from
participation in it because of his race.
The second chapter argues that his frequent allusions to classical
mythology, philosophy, and history in his various works present
evidence of the continued role of the classics in shaping his ideas.
Through a comparison of the structure of The Souls of Black Folk
with Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta, a work Du Bois references in Souls as
well as elsewhere, I demonstrate the possibility that Du Bois relied
on the ancient Roman work, in part, in shaping the structure and
argument of Souls through their shared goal of recognizing the full
citizenship rights of poets (in Du Bois’s case, the singers of the
Sorrow Songs, or African American Spirituals) regarded as foreigners
or outsiders.
The third chapter focuses on the numerous influences of Plato on
the thought of Du Bois. These include frequently noted influences,
such as the influence of Plato’s idea of a Guardian class of
Philosopher-Kings on the development of Du Bois’s idea of a
Talented Tenth, as well as influences that have received less
attention, such as the influence of Plato on Du Bois’s thought on
music and aesthetics, as well as Du Bois’s commitment to attaining
justice through the exposure of ignorance. The argument here
focuses primarily on two points: 1. That Du Bois’s conflict with
Booker T. Washington over the education of African Americans is
best understood through the framework of Du Bois’s Platonist social
and educational ideals and 2. That Du Bois did not abandon his
earlier Platonist-influenced aristocratic ideals with his adoption of a
Marxian outlook, but, rather, fitted this Marxian vision within a larger
and enduring Platonic vision.
The fourth and fifth chapters focus on Du Bois’s engagements with
the ancient and contemporary history of Africa in such works as The
Negro (1915), Africa, Its Geography, People and Products (1930),
Africa—Its Place in Modern History (1930), Black Folk Then and Now
(1939), The World and Africa (1947), and other works on African
history by Du Bois, as well as the work of Frank Snowden, Jr., and
Du Bois’s interest in it.14
Chapter 4 argues that Du Bois uses the ancient history of Africa in
relation to classical Greco-Roman history to advance his argument
for the intellectual and cultural equality of African people with
Europeans while also, continuing in the line of Phillis Wheatley, David
Walker, Charles Chesnutt, and other earlier writers, positioning Black
people at the foundations of Western Civilization as a means by
which to demand equal participation within contemporary Western
culture.
The fifth chapter continues the discussion of the previous chapter
by shifting focus to Du Bois’s engagement with the history of Africa
on its own terms rather than merely in relation to the history of the
classical Mediterranean and widening to encompass Du Bois’s
internationalism as exampled in his 1928 novel Dark Princess, which
places the ancient and contemporary history of India and the rest of
Asia in a relationship with the contemporary experience of African
Americans.15 Chapter 5 also expands upon Malamud’s argument that
Du Bois represents a turning point in the history of African American
engagement with the classics away from a focus on knowledge of
Latin and Greek as a means of race vindication and toward a greater
focus on the history of non-European peoples. In so doing, Du Bois
presents these non-European civilizations as worthy of equal
appreciation to that given to Greece and Rome, thereby undermining
ideas of racial inferiority. Chapter 5 also positions this discussion
within the context of a rising interest in ancient Asian civilizations
among European and American intellectuals at the turn of the
twentieth century as well as the increasing size and importance of
nationalist movements in those countries opposing European colonial
rule.
Finally, drawing upon Du Bois’s engagement with the classics as
well as these contemporary appeals to the ancient world, I formulate
an argument for a cosmopolitan education and outlook today. I
argue that Du Bois laid the groundwork for a democratic culture as
well as a concept of universal world heritage that surpasses, but,
importantly, does not negate, the particular and the local.

1. David Levering Lewis, Introduction to Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–

1880, by W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: The Free Press, 1998), xvi. See W. E. B. Du
Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America,
1638–1870 (1896), in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, edited by Nathan Huggins (New
York: Library of America, 1986), 1–356 and W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction
in America, 1860–1880 (1935; reprint, New York: The Free Press, 1998).
2. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; reprint,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed.,
Atlanta University Publications, vols. 1–18 (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1897–
1914).
3. The British Journal of Sociology 68, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–142.
4. See, for example, Stephanie J. Shaw, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Souls of Black
Folk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and Shamoon Zamir,
Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
5. As I wrote this book, a classical journal, the International Journal of the
Classical Tradition, finally published a collection of essays exploring classical
influences in Du Bois’s thought and writings. I was pleased to find that I had
independently reached some of the same conclusions as the authors, confirming
my interpretations, and that the portions of my own research that had already
been written offered substantial contributions to the discussions opened up by that
volume. I have incorporated aspects of the conclusions of the authors into my own
discussion when relevant. See Harriet Fertik and Mathias Hanses, “Above the Veil:
Revisiting the Classicism of W. E. B. Du Bois,” International Journal of the Classical
Tradition 26, no. 1 (March 2019): 1–9.
6. For an example of the former, see Carrie Cowherd, “The Wings of Atalanta:
Classical Influences in The Souls of Black Folk,” in The Souls of Black Folk: One
Hundred Years Later, ed. Dolan Hubbard (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
2003), 284–97. Shaw’s discussion of Platonic and Pythagorean influences on Du
Bois delves much deeper into Du Bois’s intellectual relationship to the classics, but
situates itself within a framework of other philosophical influences, including
especially those of G. W. F. Hegel, rather than focusing solely on classical
influence.
7. See, for example, Patrice D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism,
and African American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006);
Michele Valerie Ronnick, ed., The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough:
An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship, by William Sanders
Scarborough. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005); Margaret Malamud,
African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism (New York: I.
B. Taurus, 2016); William W. Cook and James Tatum, African American Writers and
Classical Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Eric Ashley
Hairston, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American
Reclamation of the West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013).
8. See, for example, Edith Hall, Richard Alston, and Justine McConnell, eds.,
Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011); Tracey L. Walters, African American Literature and the
Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Brian P. Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther:
Reading Huey P. Newton Reading Plato,” Journal of African American Studies 21,
no. 1 (March 2017): 26–41.
9. See Cook and Tatum, African American Writers.
10. See W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (1909; reprint, New York: International
Publishers, 1996) and Du Bois, Black Reconstruction.
11. St. Clair Drake uses the term “vindicationism” to refer to the attempts of
African American authors and thinkers to “vindicate” the race by proving the
intellectual and cultural equality of Black people with white people. See St. Clair
Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, Vol. 1
(Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los
Angeles, 1987). Orlando Patterson has referred to the same phenomenon as
“contributionism,” that is, the attempts to call attention to Black “contributions” to
civilization. See Orlando Patterson, “Rethinking Black History,” Harvard Educational
Review 41 (August 1971): 297–315.
12. Margaret Malamud, African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition
and Activism. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016.
13. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Star of Ethiopia” (1911), in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois
Reader, edited by Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 305–
10. I depart from Malamud in that I posit Du Bois’s 1947 book The World and
Africa as the better point from which to date Du Bois’s turn toward Afrocentric
history. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy
(1946–1947; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
14. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; reprint. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007); W. E. B. Du Bois, Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products and
Africa—Its Place in Modern History (1930; reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and
Sociology of the Negro Race (1939; reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007); and Du Bois, The World and Africa. Snowden’s work on Black people in the
classical world culminated in the publication of two books: Frank M. Snowden, Jr.,
Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 1970) and Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The
Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928; reprint. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
 1
The Classical Education of W. E. B. Du Bois

THE EDUCATION OF W. E. B. Du Bois was similar to that of many of his

educated white contemporaries in its focus on knowledge of classical
languages and literatures. As was common at the time, the classics
were central to Du Bois’s education beginning with his high school
education in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and continuing
through his undergraduate and graduate education at Fisk
University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin (then
Friedrich Wilhelm University). The impression of his education in the
classics on Du Bois’s intellectual and moral formation would continue
to mark his thought and work throughout his life. The education of
W. E. B. Du Bois marks the beginning of an intellectual life steeped
in and informed by classical thought—especially that of Cicero and
Plato—as well as classical mythology and rhetorical forms.1 While
influences on Du Bois’s thought include a number of sources that
depart in significant ways from classical thought, Du Bois often
adapted these influences in such a way that they became compatible
with the classical foundations of his most firm ideological
commitments. While at Harvard, for example, Du Bois was able to
incorporate elements of William James’s pragmatist philosophy into
his essentially Platonic metaphysics with the assistance of the
simultaneous influence of George Santayana. However, Du Bois’s
classical education also presented him with the challenge that would
later form the basis of much of his treatment of classical literature—
and Western canonical literature more generally—in his later writing,
namely, that he had discovered a passion for the tradition of
received canonical texts and thought, but simultaneously found
himself excluded from full participation in it because of the racist
ideas of his contemporaries. In spite of the persistent classical
foundations of Du Bois’s ideas, his life and thought were also marked
by an awareness of the profound injustice of racial and class
discrimination at the heart of the culture which claimed this classical
heritage as its own.
The central role of classics in Du Bois’s education provides the
background for a more complete understanding of Du Bois’s later
conflict with Booker T. Washington. While a number of
commentators have attempted to place Du Bois within the paradigm
of incipient progressive education represented by pragmatist thinkers
like John Dewey, this chapter instead places Du Bois in the camp of
the defenders of traditional classical education, such as Irving
Babbitt at Harvard.2 Such an understanding of Du Bois’s thought on
education entails a re-evaluation of his conflict with Washington over
the education of African Americans and the role that Du Bois’s
intellectual legacy continues to play in shaping contemporary African
American thought on education.

The Classics and Du Bois’s Enduring Moral Vision

While Du Bois was far from being a professional scholar of classics,
his thorough acquaintance with classical literature and thought,
beginning with his earliest education, remained a major resource for
his thought throughout his life.3 Du Bois, in fact, asserts in the first
of his three biographies, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
(1920), that he “did not know anything about Latin and Greek” when
he assumed his first academic appointment as a professor of
classical languages at Wilberforce University in 1894.4 As is
demonstrated by his high school and university academic records,
this assertion is far too modest to be true for someone who studied
these languages and read the works written in them for more than a
decade. In his final autobiography, published posthumously in 1968,
Du Bois offers a more honest evaluation of his appointment at
Wilberforce:
 I had been hired to teach “Latin and Greek.” They were not my specialty and
despite years spent in their study I really knew far too little to teach them.
But I had assumed that I was to assist Professor William Scarborough, a well-
known Negro scholar long working at Wilberforce. To my amazement I found
that I was to replace him, since in a quarrel between him and the President,
he had been ousted and I had been advertised as a learned professor just
from Germany.5

As this later passage reveals, Du Bois’s sense of inadequacy for the

position may have arisen from the expectation that he was to
replace William Sanders Scarborough. In spite of his long education
in Greek and Latin, Du Bois’s experience with classical languages
could not compare with that of Scarborough. Scarborough was, at
the time, undoubtedly the leading African American scholar of
classics who, as Du Bois’s senior by sixteen years, had helped to
pave the way for some of Du Bois’s ideas and achievements.6 While
Du Bois’s classical knowledge and skills in classical languages pale in
comparison to those of a scholar of classics like Scarborough, Du
Bois was not entirely unprepared for the job and brought to it an
enthusiasm for the ideas conveyed in classical works acquired in his
earlier education.
The influence from classical literature and thought evinced in Du
Bois’s work, as Carrie Cowherd has pointed out, can be classified
according to “three broad categories”: (1) “casual, incidental use” of
phrases in Latin and references to classical history, philosophy, and
mythology; (2) “direct references” that contribute to the structure of
a work or chapter of a work as a whole; and (3) “underlying
attitudes, associated with Cicero, Socrates, and Plato that are
expressed in varying ways throughout” Du Bois’s works.7 Du Bois’s
casual references and direct references to classics are numerous and
important to understanding the magnitude of classical influence in
his work, but it was the attitudes and ideas of the classical world
that were the greatest influences on his work and that helped to
shape Du Bois’s approach to his more central concerns throughout
his life.8 For example, drawing on the memories of Du Bois’s
students at Wilberforce, David Levering Lewis notes that at
Wilberforce Du Bois worked intensively “to convey to his first-year
Greek class something of the meaning and excitement of Sophocles’
Antigone.”9 The choice of Antigone by Du Bois as well as its place in
the memory of his students as recorded by Lewis is noteworthy as
an example of a text with a strong moral message applicable to the
circumstances of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth
century in its dichotomy between human law and divine law.10 As
Keith Byerman has noted of the whole of Du Bois’s work, “the moral
element” of his critique of American society “is ancient, and the
cultural aspect is common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
thinking. What is distinct in Du Bois is the application of the critique
to black life.”11 In spite of his relative lack of expertise and interest
in the intricacies of the languages, then, the ideas of classical works
were central to Du Bois’s outlook and interests from an early point.
That the influence of Du Bois’s early exposure to classical
literature persisted lifelong is evinced by the consistency exhibited in
his perspective and self-understanding throughout his life. A number
of quality biographies of Du Bois have been written in the past
several decades, including especially Lewis’s two-volume Pulitzer
Prize-winning biography of Du Bois.12 It has also become something
of a commonplace of Du Bois scholarship to rehearse the remarkable
events and circumstances of his early life. The most insightful
sources for Du Bois’s formative years, however, remain his own
autobiographies and the numerous autobiographical references and
insights sprinkled throughout his writings.13 Importantly, as Byerman
has noted, these autobiographies “are consistently narratives of
education, in which he knows more than he did and thus has a fuller
view of truth.”14 Notably, they are not generally narratives of change
or progression in viewpoint.
Throughout his life, however, Du Bois seems to have changed his
positions and ideas a number of times. This has led some
commentators, most notably Wilson Jeremiah Moses, to see Du
Bois’s self-presented trajectory of development as an ex post facto
teleology, imposed in retrospect rather than lived in reality.15 Du
Bois, for example, praised Washington’s famous Atlanta Compromise
speech given at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition
as a “phenomenal success” and “a word fitly spoken” a week after
Washington gave the speech.16 Within a few short years, however,
Du Bois would turn against Washington and the entire Tuskegee
philosophy, including the Atlanta Compromise, precipitating his well-
known dispute with Washington over education and the proper
approach to civil rights for African Americans.17 After helping to
establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) and working for years toward its project of the
social and economic integration of white and Black Americans as
equals, Du Bois began to endorse an incipient Black nationalism in
the form of his advocacy for Black “self-segregation,” leading to a
“viciously” conducted argument with his fellow NAACP leaders, his
eventual break with the NAACP, and an end to his nearly twenty-five
years as editor of its official magazine The Crisis.18 Finally, Du Bois
would seem to turn away from the civil rights movement in the
United States altogether with his renunciation of his American
citizenship, his move to Ghana, and his acceptance of official
membership in the Communist Party, which had already “been
decimated and thoroughly discredited even among radicals”—all in
1961.19 Throughout his life, it seems, Du Bois was determined, in
true Socratic fashion, to act as a “gadfly” who would question the
comfortable assumptions of both white and Black Americans,
including his allies in the fight for civil rights for African Americans.20
In spite of these and a number of other obvious changes in Du
Bois’s thought, none of his autobiographies contains an admission of
substantially changed ideas. Du Bois, in fact, quoted freely from his
earlier works in his final autobiography, even citing passages which
reflect ideas he clearly no longer accepted in their original form.21
Ultimately, Du Bois saw a unity in his own ideas, in spite of the ways
his thought had evolved and changed throughout his life. Byerman is
able to put his finger on precisely this unitive factor when he writes,
“What remains fixed in all the autobiographies is a set of absolutes
about reason, truth, and moral order that compel the self to put
itself at risk in voicing whatever conclusions about reality its
principles lead it to.”22 Ultimately, Byerman explains, this set of
moral absolutes consisted of the Platonic “trinity of Goodness, Truth,
and Beauty.”23 Du Bois laid out this moral vision in his own words in
a program for “Celebrating his Twenty-Fifth Birthday” in 1893:

What is life but life, after all? Its end is its greatest and fullest self—this end is
the Good. The Beautiful its attribute—its soul, and Truth is its being. Not three
commensurable things are these, they [are] three dimensions of the cube—
mayhap God is the fourth, but for that very reason incomprehensible. The
greatest and fullest Life is by definition beautiful, beautiful,—beautiful as a
dark passionate woman, beautiful as a golden hearted school girl, beautiful as
a grey haired hero. That is the dimension of breadth. Then comes Truth—
what is, cold and indisputable: that is height. Now I will, so help my soul,
multiply breadth by height, Beauty by Truth & then Goodness, strength, shall
bind them together into a solid Whole.
Wherefore? I know not now. Perhaps Infinite other dimensions do. This is a
wretched figure and yet it roughly represents my attitude toward the world.24
Figure 1.1 Lists the schedule of a Great Barrington High School debate on the
mandatory study of Latin and Greek languages. Participating in the debate are
Frank Baldwin, B. Tobey, L. Rogers, and W. Du Bois. “Programme of the H.S.L.”
(November 18, 1884), W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

This moral vision (see Figure 1.1) remained so essential to Du Bois’s

outlook throughout his life that he copied this same passage
verbatim into his final autobiography nearly seven decades later as a
continuing reflection of his thought.25 Throughout his life, Du Bois
acted according to what he believed to be a transcendent moral
order accessible to human reason and under which all “temporal
laws were subordinate.”26

Du Bois’s High School and College Education

The sources of Du Bois’s moral vision become clear when the
centrality of the classics to Du Bois’s education is considered. Raised
in Great Barrington, Massachusetts—comparatively more racially
egalitarian than much of the United States at the time—Du Bois had
access to educational opportunities that were out of reach for most
African Americans in the late nineteenth century, thanks in large part
to the interventions of his high school principal, Frank Hosmer. Much
like his great pupil, Hosmer had a lifelong commitment to service
and reform. He served as principal of Great Barrington High School
from 1879 to 1888. In 1890, he moved to Hawai’i and served for
several years as president of Oahu College (now Punahou School).
Hosmer later moved back to Massachusetts, serving for a time in the
state legislature. Practicing his ethic of service to the end of his life,
The New York Times attributed his death to “overwork” in the
service of the Red Cross in its 29 May 1918 obituary.27
He saw great potential in the high-achieving and academically
driven young Du Bois and spurred him on to the college preparatory
track. In addition to his encouragement and inspiration, Hosmer also
intervened to assist Du Bois in other matters. When Du Bois was
unable to pay for the textbooks he needed to study Greek, for
example, Hosmer coordinated the donation. Hosmer also intervened
to prevent a judge from sending Du Bois to reform school after Du
Bois’s youthful indiscretion—in the mold of St. Augustine—of stealing
fruit from a neighbor’s yard—though in Du Bois’s case, the fruits
were grapes rather than pears. As a result of Hosmer’s interventions,
Du Bois spent his high school years with his teachers “beating time
with their pointers to Latin declensions . . . while Frank Hosmer
presided over the complexities of Xenophon’s Anabasis, Virgil’s
Georgics,” and other classical and contemporary works of
literature.28 Du Bois’s high school curriculum included a total of “four
years of Latin and three of Greek” in its required course of study.29
Du Bois excelled in this intensive course of secondary school studies
and graduated with high honors and an acceptance to Fisk
University in Nashville, Tennessee, that would allow him to enter as
a sophomore because of the high quality of his high school
education.30
The place of functional knowledge of classical languages as an
entrance requirement for colleges, upon which his college
preparatory high school curriculum was based, however, was already
dissipating before Du Bois’s matriculation to Fisk. Du Bois wrote in
his second autobiography, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an
Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), that Hosmer had been
“quietly opening college doors to me, for in those days they were
barred with ancient tongues.”31 While this had been true when Du
Bois entered high school, it was no longer true when he graduated.
Eric Ashley Hairston writes of the sudden removal of Greek and Latin
requirements at universities in the United States in the last two
decades of the nineteenth century:
 The classical languages were no longer required for freshmen at Harvard after
1883, and in the first year of the new requirements 77 percent studied Latin
and 64 percent studied Greek. Those numbers dropped to approximately 33
percent and 16 percent by 1900. At Yale in 1886, approximately 33 percent of
students’ time was devoted to the ancient languages. In 1899, it only took up
20 percent, with Greek study nearly disappearing; entrance requirements
around the nation began to shed Greek as a prerequisite. In the high schools,
the population of students enrolled increased as education democratized. With
this enrollment surge, the study of Latin increased for a short while. Despite a
lingering patina of elite preparation that the classical languages provided,
Latin eventually declined in high school education, and with the exception of
private high schools that regularly fed into colleges and seminaries (which
actually saw an increase in Greek for some time), Greek was practically
extinct by 1910.32

A year before Du Bois’s high school graduation, then, and five years
before he became a student there, Harvard, in line with general
trends in education at the time, had ended its classical languages
entrance requirement. Du Bois, while perhaps unaware of the
specifics of the changing situation at his eventual alma mater under
the leadership of Charles Eliot, was not unaware of the growing
trend among universities to favor the elimination of classical
language requirements. He participated in a school-sponsored public
debate concerning the “mandatory study of Latin and Greek
languages” for college students during his senior year of high school.
In a foreshadowing of his eventual position contra Washington,
young Du Bois argued on the side of upholding the requirements
(see Figure 1.2).33
Figure 1.2 Du Bois in the group of the Six Speakers at the Graduation of 281
Harvard Students. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard Graduation” (1890), W. E. B. Du Bois
Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of
Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

At Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where Du Bois earned

the first of his two bachelor’s degrees—both in philosophy and both
with a heavy emphasis in classical philosophy—he read a great deal
more classical literature.34 Along with his application to Harvard
University in 1887, Du Bois enclosed a list of the classical works he
had studied in their original languages while a student at Fisk.
Included on his list of Latin works are books I–IV of Caesar’s Gallic
Wars, all four of Cicero’s orations Against Catiline as well as Cicero’s
Pro Archia and half of his Pro Marcello, Virgil’s Eclogues and the first
six books of the Aeneid, several of Horace’s Odes, the Ars Poetica
and other short works of Horace, Tacitus’s Agricola, and Livy’s Ab
Urbe Condita Libri through the twenty-first book.35 He also includes
thirty hours of Latin composition work. In addition to thirty hours of
Greek composition work, his list of Greek works studied includes
books I–IV of Xenophon’s Anabasis and Xenophon’s Memorabilia;
Plato’s Phaedo; the first book of Thucydides’s History of the
Peloponnesian War, selections from Herodotus’s History;
Demosthenes’s De Corona; the first two books of the Iliad;
Sophocles’s Antigone; and a number of works by Sophocles,
Aeschylus, and Euripides in translation.36 The letter of
recommendation written by Du Bois’s Latin professor, Helen Morgan,
to the Harvard admissions committee adds to this list “3 satires” and
“3 of the shorter epistles” in addition to her glowing commendation
of Du Bois’s “manliness, faithfulness to duty and earnestness in
study.”37 Du Bois would later proudly proclaim of his first
undergraduate alma mater and its professor of Greek and first
principal, Adam K. Spence, that “Fisk University maintained Greek
longer than most northern colleges, for the reason that it had in
Adam K. Spence not simply a finished Greek scholar, pupil of the
great D’Ooge, but a man of singularly strong personality and fine
soul.”38 As Du Bois summarized his secondary and undergraduate
education in one of his biographies, “I had taken in high school and
at Fisk the old classical course with Latin and Greek, philosophy and
some history.”39 Du Bois would throughout his life write of the high
quality of education he had received at Fisk, and with a special
esteem for Spence.40
Morgan and Spence, like Hosmer before them, saw Du Bois’s
potential and, rejecting their white contemporaries’ doctrine of Black
intellectual inferiority, refused to place artificial limits where no
natural limits existed. Near the end of his career, Spence reflected on
his years teaching young African American men and women at Fisk
shortly after the close of the Civil War, “Like early navigators, we
were out on the new seas of discovery. Would we come to the
charmed circle beyond which the Negro mind could not go? We
would try and when we came to that fatal place, we would stop, not
sooner . . . but we never came to that stopping place.”41

Du Bois’s Education at Harvard

From an early point, Du Bois saw in “the old classical course” of his
education and its significant effect upon him the means by which to
create a class of cultured and intelligent leaders for African American
communities, anticipating by more than a decade his split with
Washington in large part over the question of education. Accepted
as an undergraduate by Harvard, Du Bois found few friends among
the overwhelmingly white student body and entirely white faculty of
the university.42 He turned instead to the African American
community of Boston for companionship, though he found them
insufficiently cultured. Shortly after arriving in their midst, young Du
Bois set out to remedy what he saw as shortcomings in the level of
education among the Black bourgeoisie of Boston.43 Among these
efforts was a production of Aristophanes’s “The Birds” at a Black
church put on by Du Bois and a small group of friends (see Figure
1.3).44 Du Bois seems to have been the moving force behind the
production. He played the central role of Plausible (Pisthetaerus).45
According to Du Bois’s own account, “The rendition was good, but
not outstanding, not quite appreciated by the colored audience, but
well worth doing.”46 Although the play did not have the quite the
effect on its audience that Du Bois had intended, he persisted in his
efforts to bring his classically informed ideas about what constituted
high culture to Boston’s middle-class African Americans.
Figure 1.3 Outlining the cast, crew, and program of the performance of
Aristophanes’s “Birds,” to be held on Thanksgiving night, 1891, and featuring W. E.
B. Du Bois as “Pausible” [sic]. Charles St. Church (Boston, Mass.), “The Birds
Program,” (1891), W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

One of the most interesting relics of Du Bois’s attempts to

introduce literary culture to the middle-class African Americans of
Boston is the text of a speech he wrote and delivered to the National
Colored League of Boston on 10 March 1891. Entitled “Does
Education Pay?,” Du Bois’s speech discusses the state of education
among Boston’s black community and offers his own thoughts on the
value and content of a quality education that foreshadow his
advocacy of classical liberal education in opposition to Washington’s
philosophy of industrial training.47 He also provides his own
recommended reading list for those seeking the sort of education he
describes. Among the books he recommends are several
contemporary historical works on Greek and Roman history as well
as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plutarch’s Lives, “selections from
Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides,” Virgil’s Aeneid, and “selections from Horace, Ovid, Cicero,
Lucretius, Livy, and Tacitus.” These works and others like them, Du
Bois continues, form the foundation for an education which makes
life of “lasting value and deep meaning.” These are also, of course,
the works he read in the course of his own education.
While propounding the value of classical works to others, Du Bois’s
studies also continued to be shaped by classics. Fellows at Harvard
were required to file a report on their progress at the end of each
academic year.48 In the report for the end of his first year, Du Bois
writes of his continued study of several classical texts and histories
of the classical world: “In Roman Law I have taken the regular
course, paying especial attention to the law of slavery. . . . I have
read a text of the Sabine Law, Tacitus’s Germanic [sic], and several
critical works on the Family, landholding, etc.”49 In the same year,
the first year of his studies for the master’s degree, Du Bois also
began his research into the history of the development of laws
restricting the African slave trade to the United States that would
eventually become the subject of his doctoral dissertation.50 His
simultaneous studies into ancient Roman law, especially laws
regarding slavery, alongside this research in American law related to
the slave trade is reflective of the continued concern for bringing the
wisdom of the ancient world to bear on modern problems that would
mark the bulk of his subsequent work.
It was at Harvard that Du Bois also began to develop the Latinate
style of writing that would persist throughout his career. Du Bois was
trained in English composition by Barrett Wendell, who held Latin to
be, in his own words, “the only sound foundation of literary
English.”51 Du Bois, then, was thoroughly trained in a style of writing
“grounded squarely on the classical tradition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric
and Cicero’s speeches,” as Arnold Rampersad writes, pointing out
that “the influence of classical Latin” would be a defining feature of
Du Bois’s prose style throughout his life.52 While the biblical features
of Du Bois’s writing style have frequently been discussed, it is to be
noted that his writing evinces at least as much influence from Cicero
as it does from the King James Version and, unlike many who would
follow in his footsteps, almost none from the tradition of preaching
in African American churches.53 Indeed, much of the structure of the
chapters of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s most famous work, as
well as the book as a whole evince the influence of the structure of a
Ciceronian oration.54 Even in the study of English composition, then,
Du Bois’s education was marked by influence from the classics,
which in turn formed a persistent impression on his style and
thought (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 “Program for the celebration of my twenty-fifth birth day” (ca.
February 24, 1893), W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

Classicism and Pragmatism at Harvard

It was also at Harvard that Du Bois’s focus on the need for empirical
investigation and pragmatic action began to take shape. “Above all I
wanted to study philosophy!,” Du Bois wrote in his final
autobiography,

I wanted to get hold of the basis of knowledge, and explore foundations and
beginnings. I chose, therefore, Palmer’s course in ethics, but he being on
Sabbatical for a year, William James replaced him, and I became a devoted
follower of James at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy. . . .
William James guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to
realist pragmatism.55

Later in the same chapter, entitled “Harvard in the Last Decades of

the 19th Century,” Du Bois once again points to James’s significance
to his intellectual development:

I revelled [sic] in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young
George Santayana. But it was James with his pragmatism and Albert Bushnell
Hart with his research method, that turned me back from the lovely but sterile
land of philosophic speculation, to the social sciences as the field for
gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my program
for the Negro.56

Under James’s influence, Du Bois changed the course of his studies

from philosophy to history for both ideological reasons and more
practical, pragmatic reasons. Du Bois, unfortunately, does not
explain what he means by the phrases “sterilities of scholastic
philosophy” and “sterile land of philosophic speculation.” Cornel West
avers that “given what we know of James’s pragmatism, it surely
had something to do with sidestepping the Cartesian epistemological
puzzles of modern philosophy.”57 While Robert Gooding-Williams
views West’s guess as unjustifiably speculative in its attempt to
interpret Du Bois’s statement in terms of a specific problem in
epistemology, Du Bois’s language here seems to confirm the notion
that Du Bois is referring to the theoretical and socially disengaged
nature of contemporary academic philosophy.58 Whatever the
meaning of the phrase, it is clear that James precipitated Du Bois’s
turn from the study of philosophy to what he saw as more practical
fields of study, “history and then gradually . . . economics,” in his
impending confrontation with the “social problems” of the United
States and, eventually, the world.59 He was also confronted with the
problem of earning a living. Du Bois’s teaching options were severely
limited by the fact that no university would employ him to teach
white students at the time, and philosophy was not a subject in
demand at Black colleges. As James advised him, in Du Bois’s
recollection, “If you must study philosophy you will; but if you can
turn aside into something else, do so. It is hard to earn a living with
philosophy.”60 With this combination of pragmatic philosophical
influence and pragmatic practical reasoning, Du Bois turned from
philosophy to history and sociology, and, as Du Bois notes, “the
turning was due to William James.”61
There can be no doubt that James’s influence on Du Bois was
significant, and Du Bois’s own estimations of that influence
consistently accord James a place of distinction among Du Bois’s
mentors. As a result, a number of commentators on Du Bois’s work
have commented at length on the Jamesian dimension to Du Bois’s
thought, including especially the insights provided by Shamoon
Zamir in his examination of the relationship between Du Bois’s
thought and that of other contemporary American thinkers.62
However, to refer to Du Bois as a “Jamesian Organic Intellectual,” as
West does, implies an overestimation of the influence of James’s
pragmatic philosophy on Du Bois’s thought.63 Rampersad has noted
that while “empirical investigation, the statistical method, [and]
unbiased evaluation” would become increasingly important to Du
Bois’s methodology under the influence of James, “these would be
the basis of that social change which would justify assertions of
divine intervention and predict an ideal end.”64 While applying a
pragmatic approach and utilizing the tools of modern science, Du
Bois’s metaphysical commitments remained essentially classical,
including a Ciceronian dedication to duty and a Platonic conception
of society and human life.65 While James’s influence on Du Bois was
strong, then, Du Bois’s basic, foundational outlook had already been
thoroughly shaped by and infused with a perspective derived
ultimately from classical philosophy.
This is especially true of Du Bois’s ethical thought and belief in the
absolute demands of duty. As Byerman notes, and in line with the
classical thought Du Bois imbibed throughout his secondary and
post-secondary education, for Du Bois “virtue is found in those
willing to give up personal advantage for the sake of a transcendent
moral order.”66 For Du Bois, this entailed an extreme devotion to
duty above all else that he exemplified throughout his life in his
willingness, often to the detriment of his wife and daughter, to place
the concerns of justice for African Americans above personal and
familial considerations.67 Like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, Du Bois
often spelled Duty with a capital “D.”68 In fact, Rampersad
continues, “Du Bois boldly asserted that the fundamental question of
the universe is duty.”
The centrality of duty to Du Bois’s moral vision comes into high
relief in his numerous invocations of the concept throughout works
like The Souls of Black Folk. Again and again, Du Bois calls the
reader’s attention to the centrality of duty as a guiding ethical
principle for himself and for all people. In the span of the final three
pages of the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” Du
Bois refers in two succeeding paragraphs to “the duty of black men”
and “the imperative duty of thinking black men,” calls upon the white
South to “do her duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still
wronging,” and declares that “the black men of America have a duty
to perform, a duty stern and delicate.”69 All of these calls to duty in
quick succession, of course, pointedly emphasize the failure, from
Du Bois’s perspective, of Washington to perform his duty to the race.
Later, in the hagiographical “Of Alexander Crummell,” Du Bois points
to the shelves where “Fox’s ‘Lives of the Martyrs’ nestled happily
beside ‘The Whole Duty of Man’ ” in the library of Bishop Onderdonk,
directing the reader to the hypocritical irony in the bishop’s
unwillingness to do his martyrial duty in defiance of contemporary
racism.70 Immediately after, Du Bois turns to Crummell’s attempts to
“find and face [his] duty” and the tragedy of “the passing of a soul
that has missed its duty,” identifying the discovery and fulfillment of
one’s duty with the meaning of life itself.71 To die without
discovering and carrying out the duty that has been foreordained for
one’s life, Du Bois asserts, is “a death that is more than death.”
Hairston rightly detects the strong influence of Du Bois’s Greco-
Roman reading in this veneration of duty, especially the influence of
Cicero and Tacitus, for both of whom officium (duty) is the central
point of emphasis in the life well-lived—especially duty to one’s
country and one’s people.72 Even one’s time of otium, or leisure,
should be expended toward some object for the greater good of
one’s people.73 Du Bois would continue to follow this classical model
throughout his life.
Also noteworthy but often overlooked is the possibility of influence
by “young George Santayana” upon Du Bois’s ethical conceptions.74
Du Bois studied French and German philosophy under Santayana
while at Harvard.75 Du Bois, writing in Dusk of Dawn, remembers
these tutorials in terms that evoke biblical significance: “I sat in an
upper room and read Kant’s Critique with Santayana.”76 While it
would be unnecessarily conjectural to make too much of the term
“upper room,” its biblical connotation as the site of the Last Supper
according to the King James Version would surely not have been lost
on Du Bois.77 Du Bois uses the same language again in an extended
version of the passage in his final Autobiography.78 In a letter to
Herbert Aptheker, Du Bois’s friend and the eventual guardian and
publisher of his papers, written 10 January 1956, Du Bois writes:
 For two years I studied under William James while he was developing
Pragmatism; under Santayana and his attractive mysticism and under [Josiah]
Royce and his Hegelian idealism. I then found and adopted a philosophy
which has served me since; thereafter I turned to the study of History and
what has become Sociology.79

Du Bois here once again characterizes his study under Santayana in

religious terms.80 Importantly, he also characterizes it as both
making an important impression upon him and as decidedly different
from James’s pragmatism. While there are some similarities between
the thought of Santayana and James, Santayana emphatically
rejected the relativistic notions inherent in the foundations of
James’s pragmatism in favor of a notion of truth as a potentially
knowable absolute inherent in the nature of reality itself.81 While, as
Rampersad notes, Du Bois does not seem to have thought of
Santayana much after his time with him at Harvard—especially when
compared with Du Bois’s relatively more frequent references to his
time studying under James—there are indubitable points of marked
similarity between the thought of Santayana and the thought of Du
Bois, of which this realist adherence to a belief in the existence of
absolute truth is a notable example.82
Important for a discussion of classical influences is that
Santayana’s departure from James’s philosophy seems to have
largely hinged on a Platonically inspired conception of truth. Russell
Kirk—in his characteristically polemical style—describes the
relationship between Santayana’s thought and that of Plato as well
as the requisite break on the part of Santayana from James on
precisely those points at which Santayana falls under the influence
of Plato:

Santayana’s metaphysics, though at odds with dualism, repudiates the

common sort of mechanism, exposes the egoism of the Idealists, and, with a
good-natured nudge, consigns James’ pragmatism to the nursery. . . .
Something Hellenistic suffuses the thought of Santayana, who agrees with
Plato that only the knowledge of ideas can be literal and exact, while practical
knowledge necessarily is mythical in form; but, like the Hellenistic moralists,
he cannot accept a thoroughgoing dualism.83
According to Santayana, following Plato in spite of his rejection of
the notion of a spiritual or otherwise nonmaterial world in favor of a
strict materialism, truth exists in ideal form while attainable for the
human mind only through the world of experience and therefore
only partially and imperfectly. For James, however,

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to
an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event,
a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity
is the process of its valid-ation.84

An absolute, objective, and transcendent view of truth, then, is

antithetical to James’s notion of truth. According to Irving Singer,
however, “Unlike James, Santayana wanted to articulate beliefs that
were warranted not because they worked or served as a personal
convenience but simply because, in some ultimate and irreducible
manner, they were true.”85 While Santayana accepted elements of
James’s evasion of the problems of epistemology, Santayana was not
willing to follow James into a denial of the existence and ultimate
knowability of truth. Truth may be arrived at only empirically and
only ever partially, but it is, for Santayana, eternal rather than
mutable and inaccessible as in James’s description.86 As Singer
points out, this combination of a Jamesian approach to truth with a
Platonic conception of it created in Santayana’s mind a unique
amalgamation of materialism and Platonism that characterized
Santayana’s distinctive philosophical positions.87
This materialist/Platonic mixture of Jamesian methodology with a
Platonic belief in absolute truth is also an accurate description of Du
Bois’s approach, which, as he admitted in his letter to Aptheker, he
had often attempted to formulate in writing but found great difficulty
in explaining. After reading Aptheker’s then-recently published book
History and Reality, Du Bois offered one of the most complete and
succinct elucidations of his metaphysics:88
 I think in general I agree with your conclusion and criticism; but I would
express my philosophy more simply. Several times in the past I have started
to formulate it, but met such puzzled looks that it remains only partially set
down in scraps of manuscript. I gave up the search of “Absolute” Truth; not
from doubt of the existence of reality, but because I believed that gradually
the human mind and absolute and provable truth would approach each other
and like the “Asymtotes [sic] of the Hyperbola” (I learned the phrase in high
school and was ever after fascinated by it) would approach each other nearer
and nearer and yet never in all eternity meet. I therefore turned to
Assumption—scientific Hypothesis. I assumed the existence of Truth, since to
assume anything else or not to assume was unthinkable. I assumed that Truth
was only partially known but that it was ultimately largely knowable. Science
adopted the hypothesis of a Knower and something Known. The Jamesian
Pragmatism as I understood it from his lips was not based on the “usefulness”
of a hypothesis, as you put it, but on its workable logic if its truth was
assumed. Also of necessity I assumed Cause and Change. With these
admittedly unprovable assumptions, I proposed to make a scientific study of
human action, based on the hypothesis of the reality of such actions, of their
causal connections and of their continued occurrence and change because of
Law and Chance. I call Sociology the measurement of the element of Chance
in Human Action.89

The similarity that Du Bois’s explanation of his philosophical outlook

here bears to the ideas of Santayana is striking. Like Santayana, Du
Bois was content to accept the existence of Absolute Truth as the
best working hypothesis. In giving up the formal academic study of
philosophy, Du Bois gave up any attempt to attain Absolute Truth. In
consonance with Santayana’s thought, however, Du Bois turned to
empirical and scientific study as the best means by which to attain
greater proximity to Truth. This is perhaps what Du Bois intended by
referring to Santayana’s philosophy in terms that evoke the images
and ideas of mysticism and communion. Truth is, for Santayana,
experiential. It is attainable only partially and inadequately, but it is
attainable nonetheless.90 While Du Bois adopted James’s empirical
orientation, then, he retained, under the influence of Santayana, an
ultimately Platonic conception of Absolute Truth.
 Du Bois, Santayana, and Platonic Aesthetics
This similarity of viewpoint between Santayana and Du Bois, due
almost entirely to Santayana’s influence on Du Bois, manifested itself
in a number of other similarities between their respective bodies of
work. Like Santayana, for example, Du Bois remained committed to
the idea of a natural aristocracy throughout his life, even in defiance
of the Marxism he ostensibly espoused in his later years.91 One of
the points of greatest coincidence in the thought of Du Bois and
Santayana occurs in their respective ideas concerning art and
aesthetics, which, as Byerman points out, resemble each other so
closely as to be nearly identical—and, importantly, both follow Plato
closely.92 According to Plato, writes George Grube, a classical
scholar, democratic socialist activist, and late contemporary of
Santayana and Du Bois, the purpose of art is—or should be—“a
knowledge of ultimate values . . . the apprehension of the Forms
and especially the Form of beauty and of good.”93 Plato, Grube
continues, holds that the place of art in society is in “helping to
make men better by persuading them to do what they know is good
or by putting examples of right conduct before their eyes.” Plato
rejects those “rhetoricians and other artists [who] lose sight of the
moral aim of their craft and [for whom] the immediate pleasure of
their audience becomes their only aim.” Plato emphasized primarily
the moral value of art as a means by which to inculcate virtue and to
convey truth, and it is this theory of art which Santayana and Du
Bois through Santayana acquired from Plato.
Santayana’s adaptation of this aspect of Plato’s philosophy forms,
according to Singer, a central element of Santayana’s philosophy. So
central is Santayana’s emphasis on the artistic, and within the artistic
especially on the literary, that Singer avers to label him the “literary
philosopher.”94 Santayana, drawing on Plato, writes Singer, “insists
that the greatest poetry must be prophetic and visionary,” by which
he “sometimes seems to mean that it will convey deep truths, and
sometimes that it will show the importance of moral and spiritual
ends.”95 Indeed, Santayana saw the roles of artist and art critic in
terms that entailed that each must also be “a moral critic, even a
moral philosopher.”96 According to Santayana, art must provide
“visions of beauty, order, and perfection” for the audience.97 Art,
then, must be subservient to a moral order and render service to
this order and to humanity by translating the eternal truths and
universal goods into the context of its particular contemporary
circumstances.98 Upon this basis, Santayana, like Plato before him
and Du Bois alongside and after him, harshly critiqued the art and
literature of his day as “the poetry of barbarism” for its failure to
relate itself to the eternal order and to inculcate a sense of ultimate
goodness, truth, and beauty.99 Like Plato and Du Bois, Singer writes,
Santayana also held that art is able “to reform the world. Whether or
not it leads to direct action, which it occasionally does, its very ability
to enliven and to educate gives it a kind of practical efficacy.”100 For
all three thinkers, art is a teacher and this teacher must have the
right foundations in order to propagate the right ideas.
Du Bois’s ideas about art are one of the most commonly
misunderstood aspects of his thought. A large number of
commentators have traced his objections to certain aspects of
Harlem Renaissance literature to a persistent Puritanism derived
from his upbringing in New England during the Victorian Era, to an
obsession with bourgeois propriety derived from the same
upbringing, or to some combination of the two. In his recent
biography of Alain Locke, for example, Jeffrey C. Stewart
characterizes Du Bois’s assertion that “art is propaganda” as “in
reality, a demand by Du Bois to constrain the Black literary
awakening to producing positive, bourgeois images of the Negro to
counter the debased representations emanating from racist
American popular culture.”101 Stewart and other critics assert that
Du Bois was out of tune with contemporary anti-bourgeois trends in
culture and, as a result, was unable to understand the significance of
Harlem Renaissance literature. Ross Posnock, citing Du Bois’s essay
“The Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) has even gone as far as aligning
Locke’s theories of art with Plato and positioning Du Bois in
opposition as a Jamesian pragmatist:
 Because he finds Locke’s Platonic notion of beauty inadequate to the task of
this work, Du Bois turns from it and marries Beauty to Truth and Freedom, “to
the facts of the world and the right actions of men” (995). This enacts the
Jamesian pragmatist’s turn “toward facts, toward action, and toward power.”
While acknowledging that “somewhere eternal and perfect beauty sits above
Truth,” Du Bois insists that “here and now and in the world in which I work
they are for me unseparated and inseparable” (995).102

While Posnock correctly points toward Santayana’s early influence on

Du Bois’s theory of art, he fails to identify its Platonic origins. As a
result, he misidentifies Du Bois’s thought in “The Criteria of Negro
Art” as “pragmatist logic.”103 Leonard Harris offers a much needed
corrective to this association of Du Bois’s aesthetics with
pragmatism, instead arguing for an understanding of Du Bois as an
“aesthetic realist” and Locke as an “aesthetic pluralist.”104 As Harris
demonstrates, it is in fact Locke who stands in the pragmatist
camp.105 As such, he is necessarily opposed to Du Bois’s belief in a
stable conception of ultimate Beauty. For Locke—and in agreement
with pragmatists like John Dewey—beauty is multiform, unstable,
and subject to the varieties of individual experience.106 Art,
therefore, may manifest this multiform beauty (really, beauties) in a
multiplicity of forms, contents, and styles. For Du Bois, however,
Beauty exists as a metaphysical reality apart from individual taste
and perception. Consequently, all art must share in some unitive
factor in its attempt to convey this singular Beauty. While Du Bois,
then, clearly takes a Platonic position on the nature of art and
beauty, much of the confusion about Du Bois’s aesthetics has
stemmed from a failure to take into full consideration the influence
of Santayana on Du Bois’s theory of art.
For Du Bois, as for Santayana, Beauty exists as a perfect Platonic
idea and it is the task of art to propagandize on behalf of Beauty
and, through Beauty, on behalf of the Good and the True. Du Bois’s
frequently misunderstood declaration that “all Art is propaganda and
ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists,” then, is properly
understood in the light of Santayana’s influence on Du Bois.107 Du
Bois’s unique contribution to Santayana’s Platonic perspective on
aesthetics coupled with a pragmatic approach to the utility of art is
the application of that perspective to the situation of contemporary
African Americans. In his afterword for the Oxford University Press
editions of Du Bois’s Black Flame Trilogy, Mark A. Sanders explains
Du Bois’s theory of art in this context:

In his famous 1926 Crisis essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois articulated his
vision of art in what amounted to a recommendation to the budding
generation of Harlem Renaissance writers to resist market-driven black
portraiture and to create “beauty” as he saw it. According to Du Bois, creating
beauty necessarily involves telling the “Truth”—creating accurate portraiture
free of the racist caricature of the minstrel stage, popular literature,
advertising, and film; truth is also grounded in historical accuracy.
Furthermore, truth is necessarily tied to “right” and “justice” because for Du
Bois accurate representation and the accurate historical record invariably lay
claim to universal human needs, aspirations, and progressive political
change.108

The creation of art is a means of propaganda for the True and the
Good through the Beautiful. In applying this understanding of art to
the needs of African Americans, Du Bois saw in art a means of
overcoming the dehumanization of Black people both in the ability of
the artist to act as a conduit for the ideal world as well as in the
artist’s accurate representation of the totality of Black life. “Art is
universal and eternal” for Du Bois, Byerman notes, and “for those
very reasons, black achievement in art is proof of black humanity
and equality.”109 Du Bois’s pragmatic adaptation of Platonic thought
on aesthetics via the influence of Santayana is demonstrative of the
persistently classical foundations of his thought in spite of Du Bois’s
adoption and adaptation of a number of non-classical influences,
such as James’s pragmatism.
The persistently classical foundation to Du Bois’s core ideas in
ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics is exhibited by the outline of his
moral vision, quoted earlier, which Du Bois wrote in celebration of his
twenty-fifth birthday.110 At the time he wrote this, he had already
spent several years in the classrooms of James, Santayana, and his
other professors at Harvard and was now a student at Friedrich
Wilhelm University in Berlin, Germany. As if to emphasize the
essentially classical nature of the thought expressed therein, Du
Bois, Hairston notes, accompanied his elucidation of this moral vision
with a “classically pagan ritual with Greek wine, candles, prayers,
and singing.”111 In the text he produced, Du Bois writes that “the
Good” is the “end” and “greatest and fullest” fulfillment of life, “the
Beautiful its attribute—its soul, and Truth is its being.”112 In his
identification of Truth as the “being” of the Good, influence may be
detected from Jamesian pragmatism, which equates the true and the
good absolutely in a manner that departs from Plato. Du Bois’s
basically Platonic realist approach to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,
however, is apparent
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oath in heaven. He calmly and bravely heard the voice of doubt and
fear all around him; but he had an oath in heaven, and there was not
power enough on earth to make this honest boatman,
backwoodsman, and broad-handed splitter of rails evade or violate
that sacred oath. He had not been schooled in the ethics of slavery;
his plain life had favored his love of truth. He had not been taught
that treason and perjury were the proof of honor and honesty. His
moral training was against his saying one thing when he meant
another. The trust which Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the
people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and
well-founded. He knew the American people better than they knew
themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.
Fellow citizens, the fourteenth day of April, 1865, of which this is
the eleventh anniversary, is now and will ever remain a memorable
day in the annals of this republic. It was on the evening of this day,
while a fierce and sanguinary rebellion was in the last stages of its
desolating power; while its armies were broken and scattered before
the invincible armies of Grant and Sherman; while a great nation,
torn and rent by war, was already beginning to raise to the skies loud
anthems of joy at the dawn of peace, it was startled, amazed, and
overwhelmed by the crowning crime of slavery—the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln. It was a new crime, a pure act of malice. No
purpose of the rebellion was to be served by it. It was the simple
gratification of a hell-black spirit of revenge. But it has done good
after all. It has filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery
and a deeper love for the great liberator.
Had Abraham Lincoln died from any of the numerous ills to
which flesh is heir; had he reached that good old age of which his
vigorous constitution and his temperate habits gave promise; had he
been permitted to see the end of his great work; had the solemn
curtain of death come down but gradually—we should still have been
smitten with a heavy grief, and treasured his name lovingly. But
dying as he did die, by the red hand of violence, killed, assassinated,
taken off without warning, not because of personal hate—for no man
who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him—but because of his
fidelity to union and liberty, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory
will be precious forever.
Fellow citizens, I end as I begun, with congratulations. We have
done a good work for our race to-day. In doing honor to the memory
of our friend and liberator, we have been doing highest honors to
ourselves and those who come after us; we have been fastening
ourselves to a name and fame imperishable and immortal; we have
also been defending ourselves from a blighting scandal. When now it
shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no
appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of
ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond
the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the
monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham
Lincoln.

west india emancipation.

Extract from a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass in Elmira,
N. Y., August 1, 1880, at a great meeting of colored people, met to
celebrate West India emancipation, and where he was received with
marked respect and approval by the president of the day and the
immense crowd there assembled. It is placed in this book partly as a
grateful tribute to the noble transatlantic men and women through
whose unwearied exertions the system of negro slavery was finally
abolished in all the British Isles.
 A. Lincoln
Mr. President:—I thank you very sincerely for this cordial
greeting. I hear in your speech something like a welcome home after
a long absence. More years of my life and labors have been spent in
this than in any other State of the Union. Anywhere within a hundred
miles of the goodly city of Rochester, I feel myself at home and
among friends. Within that circumference, there resides a people
which have no superiors in point of enlightenment, liberality, and
civilization. Allow me to thank you also, for your generous words of
sympathy and approval. In respect to this important support to a
public man, I have been unusually fortunate. My forty years of work
in the cause of the oppressed and enslaved, has been well noted,
well appreciated, and well rewarded. All classes and colors of men,
at home and abroad, have in this way assisted in holding up my
hands. Looking back through these long years of toil and conflict,
during which I have had blows to take as well as blows to give, and
have sometimes received wounds and bruises, both in body and in
mind, my only regret is that I have been enabled to do so little to lift
up and strengthen our long enslaved and still oppressed people. My
apology for these remarks personal to myself, is in the fact that I am
now standing mainly in the presence of a new generation. Most of
the men with whom I lived and labored in the early years of the
abolition movement, have passed beyond the borders of this life.
Scarcely any of the colored men who advocated our cause, and who
started when I did, are now numbered among the living, and I begin
to feel somewhat lonely. But while I have the sympathy and approval
of men and women like these before me, I shall give with joy my
latest breath in support of your claim to justice, liberty, and equality
among men. The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored
man’s day. The great event by which it is distinguished, and by which
it will forever be distinguished from all other days of the year, has
justly claimed thoughtful attention among statesmen and social
reformers throughout the world. While to them it is a luminous point
in human history, and worthy of thought in the colored man, it
addresses not merely the intelligence, but the feeling. The
emancipation of our brothers in the West Indies comes home to us
and stirs our hearts and fills our souls with those grateful sentiments
which link mankind in a common brotherhood.
In the history of the American conflict with slavery, the day we
celebrate has played an important part. Emancipation in the West
Indies was the first bright star in a stormy sky; the first smile after a
long providential frown; the first ray of hope; the first tangible fact
demonstrating the possibility of a peaceable transition from slavery
to freedom of the negro race. Whoever else may forget or slight the
claims of this day, it can never be other to us than memorable and
glorious. The story of it shall be brief and soon told. Six-and-forty
years ago, on the day we now celebrate, there went forth over the
blue waters of the Carribean sea a great message from the British
throne, hailed with startling shouts of joy and thrilling songs of praise.
That message liberated, set free, and brought within the pale of
civilization eight hundred thousand people, who, till then, had been
esteemed as beasts of burden. How vast, sudden, and startling was
this transformation! In one moment, a mere tick of a watch, the
twinkle of an eye, the glance of the morning sun, saw a bondage
which had resisted the humanity of ages, defied earth and heaven,
instantly ended; saw the slave-whip burnt to ashes; saw the slave’s
chains melted; saw his fetters broken, and the irresponsible power of
the slave-master over his victim forever destroyed.
I have been told by eye-witnesses of the scene, that, in the first
moment of it, the emancipated hesitated to accept it for what it was.
They did not know whether to receive it as a reality, a dream, or a
vision of the fancy.
No wonder they were thus amazed, and doubtful, after their
terrible years of darkness and sorrow, which seemed to have no end.
Like much other good news, it was thought too good to be true. But
the silence and hesitation they observed was only momentary. When
fully assured the good tidings which had come across the sea to
them, were not only good but true; that they were indeed no longer
slaves, but free; that the lash of the slave-driver was no longer in the
air, but buried in the earth; that their limbs were no longer chained,
but subject to their own will, the manifestations of their joy and
gratitude knew no bounds, and sought expression in the loudest and
wildest possible forms. They ran about, they danced, they sang, they
gazed into the blue sky, bounded into the air, kneeled, prayed,
shouted, rolled upon the ground, embraced each other. They
laughed and wept for joy. Those who witnessed the scene say they
never saw anything like it before.
We are sometimes asked why we American citizens annually
celebrate West India emancipation when we might celebrate
American emancipation. Why go abroad, say they, when we might
as well stay at home?
 The answer is easily given. Human liberty excludes all idea of
home and abroad. It is universal and spurns localization.

“When a deed is done for freedom,

Through the broad earth’s aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic,
Trembling on from East to West.”

It is bounded by no geographical lines and knows no national

limitations. Like the glorious sun of the heavens, its light shines for
all. But besides this general consideration, this boundless power and
glory of liberty, West India Emancipation has claims upon us as an
event in this nineteenth century in which we live, for rich as this
century is in moral and material achievements, in progress and
civilization, it can claim nothing for itself greater and grander than
this act of West India Emancipation.
Whether we consider the matter or the manner of it, the tree or
its fruit, it is noteworthy, memorable, and sublime. Especially is the
manner of its accomplishment worthy of consideration. Its best
lesson to the world, its most encouraging word to all who toil and
trust in the cause of justice and liberty, to all who oppose oppression
and slavery, is a word of sublime faith and courage—faith in the truth
and courage in the expression.
Great and valuable concessions have in different ages been
made to the liberties of mankind. They have, however, come not at
the command of reason and persuasion, but by the sharp and
terrible edge of the sword. To this rule West India Emancipation is a
splendid exception. It came, not by the sword, but by the word; not
by the brute force of numbers, but by the still small voice of truth; not
by barricades, bayonets, and bloody revolution, but by peaceful
agitation; not by divine interference, but by the exercise of simple,
human reason and feeling. I repeat, that, in this peculiarity, we have
what is most valuable to the human race generally.
 It is a revelation of a power inherent in human society. It shows
what can be done against wrong in the world, without the aid of
armies on the earth or of angels in the sky. It shows that men have in
their own hands the peaceful means of putting all their moral and
political enemies under their feet, and of making this world a healthy
and happy dwelling-place, if they will faithfully and courageously use
them.
The world needed just such a revelation of the power of
conscience and of human brotherhood, one that overleaped the
accident of color and of race, and set at naught the whisperings of
prejudice. The friends of freedom in England saw in the negro a
man, a moral and responsible being. Having settled this in their own
minds, they, in the name of humanity, denounced the crime of his
enslavement. It was the faithful, persistent, and enduring enthusiasm
of Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Granville Sharpe, William
Knibb, Henry Brougham, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Daniel O’Connell,
George Thompson, and their noble co-workers that finally thawed
the British heart into sympathy for the slave, and moved the strong
arm of that Government in mercy to put an end to his bondage.
Let no American, especially no colored American, withhold a
generous recognition of this stupendous achievement. What though
it was not American, but British; what though it was not Republican,
but Monarchical; what though it was not from the American
Congress, but from the British Parliament; what though it was not
from the chair of a President, but from the throne of a Queen, it was
none the less a triumph of right over wrong, of good over evil, and a
victory for the whole human race.
Besides: We may properly celebrate this day because of its
special relation to our American Emancipation. In doing this we do
not sacrifice the general to the special, the universal to the local. The
cause of human liberty is one the whole world over. The downfall of
slavery under British power meant the downfall of slavery, ultimately,
under American power, and the downfall of negro slavery
everywhere. But the effect of this great and philanthropic measure,
naturally enough, was greater here than elsewhere. Outside the
British Empire no other nation was in a position to feel it so much as
we. The stimulus it gave to the American anti-slavery movement was
immediate, pronounced, and powerful. British example became a
tremendous lever in the hands of American abolitionists. It did much
to shame and discourage the spirit of caste and the advocacy of
slavery in church and state. It could not well have been otherwise.
No man liveth unto himself.
What is true in this respect of individual men, is equally true of
nations. Both impart good or ill to their age and generation. But
putting aside this consideration, so worthy of thought, we have
special reasons for claiming the First of August as the birthday of
negro emancipation, not only in the West Indies, but in the United
States. Spite of our national Independence, a common language, a
common literature, a common history, and a common civilization
makes us and keeps us still a part of the British nation, if not a part
of the British Empire. England can take no step forward in the
pathway of a higher civilization without drawing us in the same
direction. She is still the mother country, and the mother, too, of our
abolition movement. Though her emancipation came in peace, and
ours in war; though hers cost treasure, and ours blood; though hers
was the result of a sacred preference, and ours resulted in part from
necessity, the motive and mainspring of the respective measures
were the same in both.
The abolitionists of this country have been charged with bringing
on the war between the North and South, and in one sense this is
true. Had there been no anti-slavery agitation at the North, there
would have been no active anti-slavery anywhere to resist the
demands of the slave-power at the South, and where there is no
resistance there can be no war. Slavery would then have been
nationalized, and the whole country would then have been subjected
to its power. Resistance to slavery and the extension of slavery
invited and provoked secession and war to perpetuate and extend
the slave system. Thus in the same sense, England is responsible
for our civil war. The abolition of slavery in the West Indies gave life
and vigor to the abolition movement in America. Clarkson of England
gave us Garrison of America; Granville Sharpe of England gave us
our Wendell Phillips; and Wilberforce of England gave us our
peerless Charles Sumner.
These grand men and their brave co-workers here, took up the
moral thunder-bolts which had struck down slavery in the West
Indies, and hurled them with increased zeal and power against the
gigantic system of slavery here, till, goaded to madness, the
trafficers in the souls and bodies of men flew to arms, rent asunder
the Union at the center, and filled the land with hostile armies and
the ten thousand horrors of war. Out of this tempest, out of this
whirlwind and earthquake of war, came the abolition of slavery, came
the employment of colored troops, came colored citizens, came
colored jurymen, came colored congressmen, came colored schools
in the South, and came the great amendments of our national
constitution.
We celebrate this day, too, for the very good reason that we
have no other to celebrate. English emancipation has one advantage
over American emancipation. Hers has a definite anniversary. Ours
has none. Like our slaves, the freedom of the negro has no birthday.
No man can tell the day of the month, or the month of the year, upon
which slavery was abolished in the United States. We cannot even
tell when it began to be abolished. Like the movement of the sea, no
man can tell where one wave begins and another ends. The chains
of slavery with us were loosened by degrees. First, we had the
struggle in Kansas with border ruffians; next, we had John Brown at
Harper’s Ferry; next, the firing upon Fort Sumter; a little while after,
we had Fremont’s order, freeing the slaves of the rebels in Missouri.
Then we had General Butler declaring and treating the slaves of
rebels as contraband of war; next we had the proposition to arm
colored men and make them soldiers for the Union. In 1862 we had
the conditional promise of a proclamation of emancipation from
President Lincoln, and, finally, on the 1st of January, 1863, we had
the proclamation itself—and still the end was not yet. Slavery was
bleeding and dying, but it was not dead, and no man can tell just
when its foul spirit departed from our land, if, indeed, it has yet
departed, and hence we do not know what day we may properly
celebrate as coupled with this great American event.
 When England behaved so badly during our late civil war, I, for
one, felt like giving up these 1st of August celebrations. But I
remembered that during that war, there were two Englands, as there
were two Americas, and that one was true to liberty while the other
was true to slavery. It was not the England which gave us West India
emancipation that took sides with the slaveholder’s rebellion. It was
not the England of John Bright and William Edward Forster, that
permitted Alabamas to escape from British ports, and prey upon our
commerce, or that otherwise favored slaveholding in the South, but it
was the England which had done what it could to prevent West India
emancipation.
It was the tory party in England that fought the abolition party at
home, and the same party it was, that favored our slaveholding
rebellion.
Under a different name, we had the same, or a similar party,
here; a party which despised the negro and consigned him to
perpetual slavery; a party which was willing to allow the American
Union to be shivered into fragments, rather than that one hair of the
head of slavery should be injured.
But, fellow-citizens, I should but very imperfectly fulfil the duty of
this hour if I confined myself to a merely historical or philosophical
discussion of West India emancipation. The story of the 1st of
August has been told a thousand times over, and may be told a
thousand times more. The cause of freedom and humanity has a
history and destiny nearer home.
How stands the case with the recently emancipated millions of
colored people in our own country? What is their condition to-day?
What is their relation to the people who formerly held them as
slaves? These are important questions, and they are such as trouble
the minds of thoughtful men of all colors, at home and abroad. By
law, by the constitution of the United States, slavery has no
existence in our country. The legal form has been abolished. By the
law and the constitution, the negro is a man and a citizen, and has
all the rights and liberties guaranteed to any other variety of the
human family, residing in the United States.
 He has a country, a flag, and a government, and may legally
claim full and complete protection under the laws. It was the ruling
wish, intention, and purpose of the loyal people after rebellion was
suppressed, to have an end to the entire cause of that calamity by
forever putting away the system of slavery and all its incidents. In
pursuance of this idea, the negro was made free, made a citizen,
made eligible to hold office, to be a juryman, a legislator, and a
magistrate. To this end, several amendments to the constitution were
proposed, recommended, and adopted. They are now a part of the
supreme law of the land, binding alike upon every State and Territory
of the United States, North and South. Briefly, this is our legal and
theoretical condition. This is our condition on paper and parchment.
If only from the national statute book we were left to learn the true
condition of the colored race, the result would be altogether
creditable to the American people. It would give them a clear title to a
place among the most enlightened and liberal nations of the world.
We could say of our country, as Curran once said of England, “The
spirit of British law makes liberty commensurate with and
inseparable from the British soil.” Now I say that this eloquent tribute
to England, if only we looked into our constitution, might apply to us.
In that instrument we have laid down the law, now and forever, that
there shall be no slavery or involuntary servitude in this republic,
except for crime.
We have gone still further. We have laid the heavy hand of the
constitution upon the matchless meanness of caste, as well as the
hell-black crime of slavery. We have declared before all the world
that there shall be no denial of rights on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude. The advantage gained in this respect
is immense.
It is a great thing to have the supreme law of the land on the side
of justice and liberty. It is the line up to which the nation is destined
to march—the law to which the nation’s life must ultimately conform.
It is a great principle, up to which we may educate the people, and to
this extent its value exceeds all speech.
But to-day, in most of the Southern States, the fourteenth and
fifteenth amendments are virtually nullified.
 The rights which they were intended to guarantee are denied
and held in contempt. The citizenship granted in the fourteenth
amendment is practically a mockery, and the right to vote, provided
for in the fifteenth amendment, is literally stamped out in face of
government. The old master class is to-day triumphant, and the
newly enfranchised class in a condition but little above that in which
they were found before the rebellion.
Do you ask me how, after all that has been done, this state of
things has been made possible? I will tell you. Our reconstruction
measures were radically defective. They left the former slave
completely in the power of the old master, the loyal citizen in the
hands of the disloyal rebel against the government. Wise, grand, and
comprehensive in scope and design, as were the reconstruction
measures, high and honorable as were the intentions of the
statesmen by whom they were framed and adopted, time and
experience, which try all things, have demonstrated that they did not
successfully meet the case.
In the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eager desire to
have the Union restored, there was more care for sublime
superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon
which it could alone be upheld. They gave freedmen the machinery
of liberty, but denied them the steam to put it in motion. They gave
them the uniform of soldiers, but no arms; they called them citizens,
and left them subjects; they called them free, and almost left them
slaves. They did not deprive the old master class of the power of life
and death which was the soul of the relation of master and slave.
They could not of course sell them, but they retained the power to
starve them to death, and wherever this power is held, there is the
power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow-man, “You shall serve
me or starve,” is a master, and his subject is a slave. This was seen
and felt by Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and leading stalwart
Republicans, and had their counsels prevailed the terrible evils from
which we now suffer would have been averted. The negro to-day
would not be on his knees, as he is, abjectly supplicating the old
master class to give him leave to toil. Nor would he now be leaving
the South as from a doomed city and seeking a home in the
uncongenial North, but tilling his native soil in comparative
independence. Though no longer a slave, he is in a thraldom
grievous and intolerable, compelled to work for whatever his
employer is pleased to pay him, swindled out of his hard earnings by
money orders redeemed in stores, compelled to pay the price of an
acre of ground for its use during a single year, to pay four times more
than a fair price for a pound of bacon, and be kept upon the
narrowest margin between life and starvation. Much complaint has
been made that the freedmen have shown so little ability to take care
of themselves since their emancipation. Men have marvelled that
they have made so little progress. I question the justice of this
complaint. It is neither reasonable, nor in any sense just. To me, the
wonder is, not that the freedmen have made so little progress, but,
rather, that they have made so much; not that they have been
standing still, but that they have been able to stand at all.
We have only to reflect for a moment upon the situation in which
these people found themselves when liberated: consider their
ignorance, their poverty, their destitution, and their absolute
dependence upon the very class by which they had been held in
bondage for centuries, a class whose every sentiment was averse to
their freedom, and we shall be prepared to marvel that they have
under the circumstances done so well.
History does not furnish an example of emancipation under
conditions less friendly to the emancipated class, than this American
example. Liberty came to the freedmen of the United States, not in
mercy but in wrath; not by moral choice but by military necessity; not
by the generous action of the people among whom they were to live,
and whose good will was essential to the success of the measure,
but by strangers, foreigners, invaders, trespassers, aliens, and
enemies. The very manner of their emancipation invited to the heads
of the freedmen the bitterest hostility of race and class. They were
hated because they had been slaves, hated because they were now
free, and hated because of those who had freed them. Nothing was
to have been expected other than what has happened, and he is a
poor student of the human heart who does not see that the old
master class would naturally employ every power and means in their
reach to make the great measure of emancipation unsuccessful and
utterly odious. It was born in the tempest and whirlwind of war, and
has lived in a storm of violence and blood. When the Hebrews were
emancipated, they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians. When
the serfs of Russia were emancipated, they were given three acres
of ground upon which they could live and make a living. But not so
when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty-
handed, without money, without friends, and without a foot of land to
stand upon. Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the
open sky, naked to their enemies. The old slave quarter that had
before sheltered them, and the fields that had yielded them corn,
were now denied them. The old master class in its wrath said, “Clear
out! The Yankees have freed you, now let them feed and shelter
you!”
Inhuman as was this treatment, it was the natural result of the
bitter resentment felt by the old master class, and in view of it, the
wonder is, not that the colored people of the South have done so
little in the way of acquiring a comfortable living, but that they live at
all.
Taking all the circumstances into consideration, the colored
people have no reason to despair. We still live, and while there is life
there is hope. The fact that we have endured wrongs and hardships,
which would have destroyed any other race, and have increased in
numbers and public consideration, ought to strengthen our faith in
ourselves and our future. Let us then, wherever we are, whether at
the North or at the South, resolutely struggle on in the belief that
there is a better day coming, and that we by patience, industry,
uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day. I will not
listen, myself, and I would not have you listen to the nonsense, that
no people can succeed in life among a people by whom they have
been despised and oppressed.
The statement is erroneous and contradicted by the whole
history of human progress. A few centuries ago, all Europe was
cursed with serfdom, or slavery. Traces of this bondage still remain
but are not easily visible.
 The Jews, only a century ago were despised, hated, and
oppressed, but they have defied, met, and vanquished the hard
conditions imposed upon them, and are now opulent and powerful,
and compel respect in all countries.
Take courage from the example of all religious denominations
that have sprung up since Martin Luther. Each in its turn, has been
oppressed and persecuted.
Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers, have all been compelled to
feel the lash and sting of popular disfavor—yet all in turn have
conquered the prejudice and hate of their surroundings.
Greatness does not come to any people on flowery beds of
ease. We must fight to win the prize. No people to whom liberty is
given, can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who
wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant. The hardships
and dangers involved in the struggle give strength and toughness to
the character, and enable it to stand firm in storm as well as in
sunshine.
One thought more before I leave this subject, and it is a thought I
wish you all to lay to heart. Practice it yourselves and teach it to your
children. It is this, neither we, nor any other people, will ever be
respected till we respect ourselves, and we will never respect
ourselves till we have the means to live respectably. An exceptionally
poor and dependent people will be despised by the opulent and
despise themselves.
You cannot make an empty sack stand on end. A race which
cannot save its earnings, which spends all it makes and goes in debt
when it is sick, can never rise in the scale of civilization, no matter
under what laws it may chance to be. Put us in Kansas or in Africa,
and until we learn to save more than we spend, we are sure to sink
and perish. It is not in the nature of things that we should be equally
rich in this world’s goods. Some will be more successful than others,
and poverty, in many cases, is the result of misfortune rather than of
crime; but no race can afford to have all its members the victims of
this misfortune, without being considered a worthless race. Pardon
me, therefore, for urging upon you, my people, the importance of
saving your earnings; of denying yourselves in the present, that you
may have something in the future, of consuming less for yourselves
that your children may have a start in life when you are gone.
With money and property comes the means of knowledge and
power. A poverty-stricken class will be an ignorant and despised
class, and no amount of sentiment can make it otherwise. This part
of our destiny is in our own hands. Every dollar you lay up,
represents one day’s independence, one day of rest and security in
the future. If the time shall ever come when we shall possess in the
colored people of the United States, a class of men noted for
enterprise, industry, economy, and success, we shall no longer have
any trouble in the matter of civil and political rights. The battle
against popular prejudice will have been fought and won, and in
common with all other races and colors, we shall have an equal
chance in the race of life.
Do I hear you ask in a tone of despair if this time will ever come
to our people in America? The question is not new to me. I have tried
to answer it many times and in many places, when the outlook was
less encouraging than now. There was a time when we were
compelled to walk by faith in this matter, but now, I think, we may
walk by sight. Notwithstanding the great and all-abounding darkness
of our past, the clouds that still overhang us in the moral and social
sky, the defects inherited from a bygone condition of servitude, it is
the faith of my soul that this brighter and better day will yet come.
But whether it shall come late or come soon will depend mainly upon
ourselves.
The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and
nations are impartial and eternal. We shall reap as we sow. There is
no escape. The conditions of success are universal and
unchangeable. The nation or people which shall comply with them
will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will
disappear altogether. No power beneath the sky can make an
ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people
happy.
 One ground of hope for my people is founded upon the returns
of the last census. One of the most disheartening ethnological
speculations concerning us has been that we shall die out; that, like
the Indian, we shall perish in the blaze of Caucasian civilization. The
census sets that heresy concerning us to rest. We are more than
holding our own in all the southern states. We are no longer four
millions of slaves, but six millions of freemen.
Another ground of hope for our race is in the progress of
education. Everywhere in the south the colored man is learning to
read. None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire
knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human
understanding by letters. Our colored schools in the city of
Washington compare favorably with the white schools, and what is
true of Washington is equally true of other cities and towns of the
south. Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men
are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political
convictions. They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their
enemies against their friends.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them
from voting their convictions. Then another ground of hope is that as
a general rule we are an industrious people. I have traveled
extensively over the south, and almost the only people I saw at work
there were the colored people. In any fair condition of things the men
who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil. Only arbitrary
conditions can prevent this. To-day the negro, starting from nothing,
pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in
Louisiana. Not less encouraging than this is the political situation at
the south.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped
out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by
powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment,
but from the permanent laws controlling the action of political parties.
 Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made
consistent when a predominant preference was found in the
original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was
obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
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Pages 410 and 413: “See Note” was printed at the bottom
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page 413 was not referenced on that page. Both of these
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edition of this book, and Transcriber has adjusted both notes
to be consistent with those corrections.
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