I hate them, Oh!
I hate them well,
I hate them, Christ!
As I hate hell!
If I were God,
I’d sound their knell
This day! — William Du Bois (pictured right)
by Jared Taylor
I confess that I read this book, not because I thought it would interest AR readers, but because of my admiration for the author, Prof. Raymond Wolters of the University of Delaware. His The Burden of Brown (see “Integration … Disintegration,” AR, July, 1993) and Right Turn (see “The Law is an Ass,” AR, Sept. 1999) are incisive, unsentimental histories of government intrusion into race relations that will never go out of date. But W.E.B. Du Bois? How interesting can he be?
In fact, Du Bois was a fascinating man, who established the black attitude towards whites and “civil rights” that is dominant today. What was essentially his view is now so widespread, it is hard to imagine an era when powerful black institutions and movements represented competing visions. Americans both white and black have hardened into intolerant consensus.
As Prof. Wolters explains, the competing visions Du Bois overcame were those of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, both vivid characters in their own right. Prof. Wolters tells the story of their often bitter and petty rivalries, during what has been called “the forgotten years” of the “civil rights” movement—the period up until the Second World War
Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, and grew up as one of just 50 blacks in the Massachusetts town of Great Barrington. His mother’s family, the Burghardts, had lived in Massachusetts since before the American Revolution, but his father Alfred was born in Haiti and claimed to trace his ancestry back to Geoffroi Du Bois, who sailed with William the Conqueror. Alfred was so light-skinned he could pass for white, and he abandoned the family when William was two. Du Bois later wrote that the Burghardts drove him off because he was too white, too cultured, and refused to work on the family farm.