#4- The Vagaries of the Edited Volume
I have either co-edited or contributed to several edited volumes that have come out in recent years or that will drop in the near future. These include Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University (2018), Black Political Thought: From David Walker to the Present (2020), Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History (2022), Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State (forthcoming), and Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing (forthcoming). This genre often takes a very long time to be published not least because it involves gathering multiple chapters or sources, protracted peer review, multiple rounds of edits, and other complications that arise in the relationship with the publisher. Sometimes, the issues with an edited volume prove to be so intractable that it simply doesn’t come into fruition.
I had the latter experience with a collection that was supposed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s life. I was invited to contribute to the volume in 2017 by Dr. Gerald Horne, who had been asked to write a chapter on the “radical” Du Bois. I had just finished a fellowship at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst during which I spent the summer scouring the Du Bois papers, combing through the Bernard Jaffe papers, and examining interviews in the David Levering Lewis papers that he had conducted for his Pulitzer-winning Du Bois biography. Because this information was fresh in my mind, I ended up writing the entire chapter, “From Black Reconstruction to Black Liberation: The Radicalism of W.E.B. DuBois,” with minor input and feedback from Dr Horne.
I wrote and submitted the chapter during the first few months of my Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By summer 2018, I hadn’t heard anything from the editor, so I emailed him inquiring about the volume’s progress. He informed me that several other contributors had submitted their chapters quite late and that he had switched publishers, but the entire book would be submitted by September 15 of that year. The year came and went without any updates, so in the summer of 2019 I emailed the editor again. At this point, he invited me to become a co-editor since to help proofread chapters and shepherd the project along. I agreed, and by August 2019 we had all of the chapters edited, sent them back to the authors for revision, and signed a new contract with the press. Fast forward to 2021. We received an email from the editor at the press asking when she could expect to receive the manuscript; much to my surprise it had not been submitted because revisions were still outstanding. It wasn’t until August 2021 that we turned in the full draft of the volume for external review.
Then we waited. In May of 2022, the lead editor emailed the press asking about the status of our volume; it had been nearly nine months and we hadn’t received any reader’s reports or updates. Apparently, one of the external reviewers was delinquent with their report, so an in-house reviewer was selected to complete the process. Soon after this exchange we received the reviewer feedback. To our dismay, there were more than four pages of comments and suggested revisions that amounted to extensive re-writes of virtually every chapter. Given that five years had passed, one of our contributors had passed away, and by now I had other projects that were more pressing, I was not keen to move forward with the project. I was not convinced that the contributors would be willing to dramatically revise chapters that they had written half a decade ago; I, for one, had already published aspects of my chapter in other outlets. So, the other editor and I agreed to let the project go.
I share this story for two reasons. First, sometimes projects fail, and that’s okay. However, it’s important for editors—of the project and at the press—to be diligent, responsive, and sensitive to the needs of contributors. Sometimes people rely on these publications for tenure and promotion, and miss opportunities to submit them elsewhere if editors are not communicative and forthright about the status of the project. This is especially important to keep in mind for graduate students, junior scholars, and contingent faculty (even as these volumes don’t typically count for tenure and promotion despite all the work that goes into them). Second, a long time ago Dr. Horne gave me writing advice to “use every part of the animal.” As such, I submit virtually everything that I write somewhere for publication, from peer-reviewed journals to outward facing publications. Any writing that doesn’t make the cut for a book, that went into a talk or lecture, or that I produced just because, becomes part of a publishable project.
To this end, I share “From Black Reconstruction to Black Liberation” below.
***
From Black Reconstruction to Black Liberation: The Radicalization of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, 1931-1961
Charisse Burden-Stelly (with Gerald Horne)
“But of one thing I am certain: I believe in the dictum of Karl Marx, that the economic foundation of a nation is widely decisive for its politics, its art and its culture.”
-W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 290
“Your years of struggle for enlightenment against darkness and for Negro rights and democracy and peace calls forth the warm and affectionate greetings from the hearts of all fighters for justice against injustice.”
-James W. Ford to W.E.B. Du Bois, February 23, 1956
Introduction: The “Long and Slow” Radicalization of W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1961, at the age of ninety-three, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois applied to join the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). It was the culminating event in a process of radicalization that spanned three decades.[1] James E. Jackson, who was integral to Du Bois joining the CPUSA, offered that the latter became a card-carrying Red only after serious study, contemplation, and experimentation. Thus, it “was the consummated act of commitment to the social forces which the people can command to forge and fashion for all mankind a bright and joyous future.”[2] Doxey Wilkerson (1986) agreed that Du Bois knew “this system had to go, had to be changed, and so there was no other course” than to fully commit to communism.[3] In Herbert Aptheker’s opinion, Du Bois understood that the CPUSA “embod[ied] the best in the radical and liberating tradition of this country and the best in the egalitarian and militant traditions in humanity”; as such, “joining the party symbolized his convictions as to what was true and what was necessary.”[4]
This chapter offers a portrait of Du Bois’s radicalization, starting in the “Black Reconstruction era,” which included teaching Marxist courses at Atlanta University, organizing the Amenia Conference, debating the merits of a separate Black cooperative economy, and of course, writing and publishing the magisterial Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880.[5] Next, attention is given to Du Bois’s peace activism after World War II, and its articulation to other forms of radicalism including socialism, Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, anti-imperialism, and anticolonialism. The discussion then shifts to the relationship between Du Bois and Shirley Graham—a coupling that significantly impacted his move leftward—and the ways in which her dedication and defense fortified him against antiradical repression. The chapter concludes by considering government and social backlash to Du Bois’s radicalization, including his arrest, indictment, and abandonment by the Black bourgeoisie he had championed for much of his life.
The Ascent of Black Radicalism in the Black Reconstruction Era
During the Great Depression, Du Bois underwent a gradual but enduring transformation into a radical Black activist-intellectual. His militancy on issues including the role of Black workers in the production of history, separate economic development, racial solidarity, and Black self-determination were influenced not only by the ravaging of African Americans by the catastrophic failure of capitalism in 1929, but also by his study of Marxism and his regular exchanges with a cadre of leftwing scholars and activists, including Doxey Wilkerson, James W. Ford, and Eslanda Robeson. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment of that decade was the drafting and publication of his magnum opus, which consolidated his move to the left.
By December 1933 Du Bois had completed the first draft of Black Reconstruction; that year he was also engaged in intensive study of Marxism, “as everyone must these days,” and had conceptualized two leftist courses to be taught at Atlanta University: “Karl Marx and the Negro Problem” and “The Economic History of the Negro”. The Marx course, which was to include a study of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, and assignments that applied Marxism to the Negro problem in the United States, was the first of its kind at Atlanta University, and one of the first to be taught in the U.S. academy. He insisted that the radical economist Abram Harris (who himself had just completed a new interpretation of Marx) rush him a list of works “which the perfect Marxian must know.” Most of Harris’s recommendations, including History of Economic Doctrines by Charles Gide and Charles Rist and The Essentials of Marx by Algernon Lee, ended up as required readings for the Marx course or in the classroom library on socialism and communism, which was “probably at the time the best in the South.” For “The Economic History of the Negro,” Du Bois used The Black Worker, co-authored by Harris and Sterling D. Spero, as the primary textbook.[6] Upon reflection, Du Bois suspected that these courses, especially the Marx course, “eventually stirred up opposition” against him. Indeed, the mild version of antiradicalism to which he was subjected, in the form of Spelman President Florence Read attempting to keep out his “radical influence” by delaying his full appointment to Atlanta University’s faculty and stymieing his attempts to start Phylon,[7] was a primer for the much more virulent and extreme forms of red-baiting that would plague him later.
To complete Black Reconstruction, Du Bois enlisted the help of several Black leftists, including the Howard radicals[8] Emmett Dorsey, E. Franklin Frazier, and of course, Abram Harris[9]—all of who participated in the second Amenia Conference on a New Programme for the Negro, held August 18-21, 1933. Under the auspices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Du Bois aimed to bring together twenty-five thought leaders (who were old enough to have been out of school for a few years but young enough to not be “fixed in their ideas”) to have a frank discussion about the status of the American Negro, and to innovate a plan suited to the improvement of the Black condition in the 1930s. He acknowledged that differences in ideology, perspective, and policy were real; thus, leaders must be acquainted with and understand each other in order to engage in clear discussion, careful study, and earnest investigation. Such collaboration, he argued, would discourage open contradiction, opposition, and misunderstanding. Du Bois proposed discussion topics that reflected where he was in his own ideological development, including the weakness and accomplishments of old programs; the possibilities and pitfalls of organized business, liberal reform, socialism, and communism; voluntary and involuntary segregation and nationalism; the relation of American Negroes to those in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America; and the possibilities of revolt and revolution.[10] Thirty-three students, writers, and teachers, whose average age was thirty-two, attended the conference and critically examined and evaluated “the Negro’s existing situation in the changing and world scene” and considered “underlying principles for future actions.” They suggested that Negro progress was predicated upon an interracial partnership of labor unionists taking the lead in political and economic life. They also urged Blacks to unite across “seeming class differences” to ameliorate conditions of economic dispossession that pervaded Black existence.[11] The centering of workers, the emphasis on resolving economic conditions, and the critique of extant welfare organizations was a sign of the times, as the ravages of the Great Depression had resulted in a world-wide political shift to the left.
The criticism of the extant labor movement’s antiblack and elitist methods of organizing, particularly its policy of securing employment and wage increases primarily for highly skilled whites, was consonant with Du Bois’s criticism of the failure of integrationist efforts, and his promotion of all-black cooperatives to secure Black economic betterment. The indifference and violence of white workers toward their Black counterparts—from the socialist movements of the 1890s to the American Federation of Labor—was endemic in the U.S. labor movement; thus, Du Bois saw no salvation in it, not least because it was “just as petty bourgeois and capitalistic as the capitalist themselves.” Rather, he put all of his hope and faith in “co-operation, chiefly consumers’, partly producers’, carried on within the Negro race through segregated activities, partly forced and partly voluntary, and calculated to train the Negros as socialistic citizens of whatever new state comes out of this depression.” He believed that consumer cooperatives could be successful under the careful planning and intense scientific economic study of trained leaders; that if Black farmers worked together they could produce food for large segments of the Black population; that artists and artisans could organize their services to produce clothing, shelter, and goods; and that Black people could harness “cheap power” in the southeast to form manufacturing cooperatives. Such a program would also require socialized medicine and hospitalization. This economic “protective separatism” demanded the leadership of young educated men and women who were not “selfish and stupid exploiters,” and Black business leaders retrained along socialist lines to strive for industrial democracy and not the profit motive.[12]
Moreover, the conference’s choice of “reformed democracy” over fascism and communism was an articulation of Du Bois’s position in the 1930s. Conference participants argued:
“The conference is opposed to fascism because it would crystalize the Negro’s position at the bottom of the social structure. Communism is impossible without a fundamental transformation in the psychology and attitude of white workers on the race question and a change in the Negro’s conception of himself as a worker… The interest of the Negro cannot be adequately safeguarded by white paternalism in government. It is absolutely indispensable that in this attempt of the government to control agriculture and industry there be adequate Negro representation…”[13]
In 1933, Du Bois likewise held that each race was entitled to “find a national centre for [its] highest hopes”; that Black folk had the right to earn a living and to develop themselves to their “highest capabilities”; and that African Americans should have equal representation in the government and equal share in New Deal appropriations.[14] He had reached this conclusion as early as 1926 after his trip to the Soviet Union. Reflecting on that visit he wrote, “I saw clearly, when I left Russia, that our American Negro belief that the right to vote would give us work and decent wage… and that our poverty was not our fault but our misfortune, the result and aim of our segregation and color caste; that the solution of letting a few of our capitalists share with whites in the exploitation of our masses, would never be a solution of our problem…”[15] However, he did not believe that communism of the Soviet or the CPUSA variety was adequate to address the unique plight of African Americans. He did believe, though, that intelligent leaders could guide the race to consume consciously and to produce for use and not for profit, and that a slow and orderly redistribution of wealth was possible and necessary. Given Black folks’ state of development, Du Bois disagreed with “extreme communism” on two points. The first was the role of the masses in leadership: he did not believe that the masses could drive structural change. Instead, it was the responsibility of exceptional leaders—the Black vanguard—to direct the race. His second point of contention was with violent revolution. Du Bois found the latter dictum particularly odious because he believed it was suicidal at best for African descendants. Like the enslaved who took up arms during the Civil War in Black Reconstruction, Du Bois implored that the best course of action for his people was not to lead any armed insurgency, but to wait watchfully, assess the situation, and carefully prepare for struggle.[16]
In 1934, Du Bois’s increasing inclination toward autonomous cooperative economic development, and his demand for autonomy as editor of the Crisis, caused him to part ways with the NAACP for the first time. Since its inception, the Crisis had been financially independent from its parent organization, which allowed it to function as a periodical dedicated to militant reform, despite the conservative and capitalist bent of the NAACP executive board. However, when the depression hit the Crisis was unable to sustain itself, so in 1932 it became a “traditional organ” of the NAACP to stay afloat financially. This increased scrutiny, along with Du Bois’s argument that pervasive antiblackness in the United States required Black folks in the U.S and beyond to organize and work in unison to build and sustain their own institutions, inaugurated an untenable dispute between Du Bois and Walter White, who had become executive secretary after James Weldon Johnson resigned in 1931.[17] In a letter to Harry E. Davis, Du Bois explained that after the Crisis had been put under the sole management of George Streator and Roy Wilkins at the behest of “the Spingarns,” he offered his resignation. Though the matter was briefly resolved, there were ill feelings on both sides. Du Bois opined that the board had resented him for “two or three years” because he felt that Walter White was a poor leader—and had said as much to him and to the board. Additionally, in writings including the “The Right to Work,” “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” and “Social Planning for the Negro, Past and Present,” Du Bois urged African Americans to plan a separate economy in the spirit of survival, self-preservation, and sustainable struggle.[18] Such espousal of “socialism as a racial program” and self-determination through pragmatic segregation was out of step with the program of Walter White and the executive board of the NAACP. Du Bois’s criticism of White’s tepid and uniformed explanation of the NAACP’s stance on segregation resulted in the board voting on May 21, 1934 that no salaried officer could criticize “the policy, work, or officers” in the Crisis. Given this curtailment of intellectual freedom, Du Bois felt his only option was to resign, which he did officially on June 26, 1934.[19] This dispute foreshadowed Du Bois’s ouster from the NAACP in 1948 due to his criticism of White’s capitulation to the Truman administration, and his own support for Henry A. Wallace’s presidential bid.
The May 1935 publication of the carefully researched and copiously revised Black Reconstruction—on which Du Bois had been laboring diligently since 1931—was the crowning achievement of this era.[20] In it, he offered up the following radical thesis:
“…Under extraordinary difficulties, a group of black men, trained in slavery and ignorance, emancipated without land or capital, misled, cheated and despised by thousands of their white fellows, became by the help of other whites and by their own efforts, 12,000,000 Americans with a degree of intelligence and efficiency that gives them the right to stand as average working people comparable with those of any modern white nation; and that thus they are forerunners of the uplift of the majority of mankind; and their complete emancipation means the complete emancipation of the working classes of the world. Unless, moreover, American Negroes succeed in the United States, the masses of the modern world cannot succeed in their effort to emerge into real manhood.”[21]
The tome aimed not only to craft a comprehensive, critical, and truthful study of the Civil War and Reconstruction, but also to develop a science of history that “arraigned” extant U.S. historical practice. Such scientific study would combat white historians’ tendency to document only what they wished to remember, to defend the racism of the South, and to erase slavery from the history of the United States. It would also refute popular academic myths, including that the South did not really support slavery and was actually moving toward emancipation at the time of the Civil War, and that slavery was an insignificant period in U.S. history that could be omitted and forgotten. Rather than emphasize the indolence, criminality, shiftlessness, sickness, and dependence of the formerly enslaved, Du Bois’s narrative illuminated that, against all odds, this group raised crops, cultivated land, accumulated property, voted, made laws, helped to bring democracy to white and Black folk alike, and helped to establish a robust public school system. In this way, his analysis of the effects of the war and emancipation on the nation decentered whiteness and vivified the struggles and efforts of freedmen. As such, it denuded the “fairy tales” parading as histories of Reconstruction.[22]
Some speculate that this leftist exegesis and investigation got Du Bois blacklisted from subsequent race projects, namely An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.[23] Doxey Wilkerson, who first met Du Bois when he was working on the Carnegie Corporation funded study, explains: “Myrdal and I broke ideologically largely on an idealist versus a materialist approach to interpretation of history. Black Reconstruction is not the kind of interpretation Myrdal was writing.” Myrdal attributed Southern racism to “the attitudes of people” even though, as a socialist, he “knew better.”[24] Du Bois, by contrast, employed a materialist analysis to explicate the unfolding of Reconstruction and to elucidate the economic imperatives of its racist rollback. As such, Black Reconstruction made numerous contributions to radical scholarship. It paradigmatically transformed enslaved laborers into historical subjects whose participation was instrumental to the success of the Civil War and to the attempt at democratization thereafter. It excoriated the betrayal of Reconstruction, arguing that counterrevolutionary forces aimed to stymie the economic and social development of the freedman, and that in supporting the suppression of the Black folk, white workers undercut their own political and economic power. It centered the formerly enslaved in the history of the era spanning 1860-1880, thereby directly challenging antiblack historiography predicated on the idea that descendants of slaves were inferior and insignificant.[25] Though Du Bois’s Blackness precluded him from accessing vital documents that would have strengthened his analysis,[26] his original insights nonetheless inaugurated an epistemologically revolutionary narrative that would animate his own politics and activism for years to come: that ordinary Black toilers were in fact the agents of freedom and progress.
Radical Black Peace Activism: The Evolution of Du Bois
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Du Bois’s presence in radical circles was ubiquitous. He was involved in and collaborated with numerous leftwing organizations, including the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the American Labor Party, the Civil Rights Congress, the Council on African Affairs, the Jefferson School of Social Sciences, the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the Peace Information Center, the Southern Negro Youth Conference, and the World Peace Congress. Given his prominence, politics, and increasing persecution, he was incessantly called upon to participate on committees, to lend his name to causes, and to write letters in defense of victims of antiradical repression. That he had to decline James W. Ford’s request to write a letter on behalf of a St. Louis Smith Act defendant because it was “going a bit too far” to ask him to vouch for a complete stranger, underscores Du Bois’s considerable clout in progressive circles.[27]
Du Bois dedicated himself to an array of leftwing causes, especially civil rights for Jews, Communists, African descendants, and the foreign born; socialism and an end to labor exploitation; the liberation of Africa from the colonial and imperial yoke; the defense of Communists and other radicals who were political victims and prisoners of the U.S. Cold War state; and the eradication of anticommunist hysteria wrought by the Smith and McCarran Acts. Radical Black peace activism was the broad umbrella that brought all of these concerns together because, in Du Bois’s conception, peace meant the end of imperialism, the achievement of self-determination, the eradication of apartheid and Jim Crow segregation, and “decent and humane” material and social conditions for all. His radicalism intensified as he escalated his peace activism, which “was fully consonant with [his] entire life interest in the cause of promoting peace through understanding among the peoples of the world.”[28]
In 1915, Du Bois’s critique of the mainstream peace movement’s vitriolic racism expounded the inexorable interconnectedness of racism, war, and imperialism,[29] and in 1923 he made a similar connection between military aggression, corporate profit, and the belief that “it pays to kill niggers.”[30] A 1926 Crisis article reiterated his position that wars would not fully disappear unless racism, capitalist imperialism, and direct colonial administration came to an end.[31] He again linked war with economic exploitation and the material dispossession of the oppressed peoples of the world in 1931.[32] Importantly, in “Social Planning and the Negro, Past and Present,” published in 1936, Du Bois criticized both radical and liberal programs that promoted war and violence:
“The most baffling paradox today is the attitude of men toward war. On the one hand, we have the advocates of radical reform… insisting that the only path to this era of peace and justice is through violent revolution. On the other hand, we have advocates of the present system insisting that they can only insure peace by worldwide preparation for the same kind of war which recently took the lives of ten million men.”[33]
Both scenarios, he maintained, were catastrophic for African Americans living under racial subjection because they would become little more than pawns, peons, and victims. Further, a proletariat that preached violence and force ultimately became a tool of capitalism by neglecting its historic duty to organize and unite as a class against the owners of capital.[34] In this way, his admonishment of warmongering was constituted by a larger critique of capitalist accumulation and antiradicalism; according to his logic, it was not communism, but rather greed and reaction in the guise of patriotism, that was the violent threat. This murderous masquerade aimed to eliminate not only purported enemies, but also those who expressed any opposition to racist exploitation. Thus, when Du Bois proclaimed in 1947 that “the emancipation of the black masses of the world is one guarantee of a firm foundation in world peace,” he had already convincingly established the rootedness of peace in a larger program of human emancipation.[35]
As the United States increased war expenditures, trained young men “for murder,” jailed peace proponents, and barred foreign peace advocates from entering the country, Du Bois doubled down on his peace efforts.[36] Peace conferences held in Paris, Rome, Bombay, and Prague were overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war. In response, Du Bois and a small cadre of progressives founded the Peace Information Center (PIC) in April 1950 to spread knowledge about the peace movement that was spreading across the world, and to promote friendship and cooperation between nations. Their peace activism included opposition to foreign intervention in the Korean War, the exclusion of China from the United Nations, the denial of human rights to African Americans and all oppressed people of the world, antiblack incarceration practices, occupation of the Philippines, and the blaming of the Soviet Union and communism for all of the problems of the world.[37] Members of the PIC went on speaking tours to raise funds and to cultivate a progressive network of support. They spoke for meetings and organizations including the American Labor Party, the Furriers Union, the Progressive Party of Los Angeles, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and the Civil Rights Congress.[38] The Center distributed a bi-weekly periodical called Peacegram to furnish facts about councils, activities, demonstrations, and petitions that were being organized against the threat of war. They also published leaflets including The People of the World Want Peace and The Negro People Speak of Peace to provide an alternative narrative to the rampant war propaganda of the U.S. government. Most importantly, they helped to circulate the Stockholm Peace Appeal, also known as the “ban the bomb petition.” The document emerged in March 1950 out of a worldwide call for the outlawing of atomic weapons, international controls to enforce the measures, and the treatment of any country that used atomic bombs as war criminals that had committed crimes against humanity.[39] Doxey Wilkerson noted, “The Peace petitions and declarations circulated by the Peace Information Center ‘caught on’ in a big way among the people of our country. They helped give rise here to a powerful upsurge for peace… Dr. Du Bois and his associates are bright symbols of the widespread opposition of the U.S. people to the war drive of the Truman administration.”[40]
In the same year that the PIC was founded, Du Bois ran for the New York seat of the United States Senate. Significantly, he was the first Black person from New York to run for this office. With the motto “peace and civil rights,” he became the candidate of the American Labor Party because they were “the only recognized political party in New York that st[ood] unequivocally for Peace and world conference to end war; [and] for the overthrow of McCarthyism, the witch hunts, and race prejudice.”[41] Though he did not expect to win, he seized the opportunity to “talk freely,” and without the threat of imprisonment, about peace. He also took the opportunity to condemn the transformation of the United States into a land of “universal military service,” an empire bent on dominating every continent, and a society that spent more money on conquering nations than on education and social welfare. A political campaign was necessary to speak out in this way because in the age of McCarthyism, ordinary citizens on the side of truth were subjected to “secret police, organized spies and hired informers,” “deliberate subversion of the fundamental principles of law,” imprisonment, slander, and foreclosure from earning a living.[42]
In his platform, Du Bois railed against war, “McCarthyist slavery,” and the influence of finance capital on governance. He also demanded civil liberties for the masses of workers and for Black people.[43] During his campaign, he engaged in a rigorous speaking tour, including speeches at numerous college campuses at the invitation of Young Progressives of America chapters. He castigated the repressive Cold War climate, the McCarran Bill—what he called the “Fugitive Slave Law of 1950,”—big business, the military state, the Korean War, and continued colonialism in Africa and Asia. Additionally, he linked the threat of World War III to the continued subjection of radicals to red-baiting, “witch-hunts, loyalty purges, contempt frame-ups and inquisitions.” In other words, he argued that antiradicalism was antithetical to a durable peace.[44] Du Bois’s peace offensive in the PIC and during his Senate campaign secured his position as a Black radical; no longer looking to the “Talented Tenth” to ensure progress, he put his faith and efforts in the masses of workers—especially the racialized, colonized, and otherwise oppressed—who were dedicated to a peaceful, free, equitable, and just world.
A “Two Person United Front”: Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois
The progressive who carefully nurtured Du Bois’s radicalization was Shirley Graham, a powerful activist, organizer, and leader in her own right.[45] Persons who were well acquainted with her, like John Henrik Clarke, and persons who had protracted relationships with her future husband, like Ethel Ray Nance, not only charged Graham with Du Bois’s radicalization, but also “blamed” her for his membership in the CPUSA. It was she, they contended, who surrounded him with radicals, leftists, and Reds.[46] The enduring commitment of this dynamic duo to socialism, peace, and other left-wing causes resulted in brazen surveillance, curtailment of civil rights, and the confiscation of their passports.[47]
While it is unclear whether Graham formally joined the CPUSA, her devotion to radicalism is unmistakable.[48] She had been accused of promoting “communist propaganda” since the early 1930s, and she was thinking about revolution of the Soviet variety in the United States by 1943.[49] Based on information provided by career-informants, including Louis Budenz and Julia Clarice Brown, Graham was subjected to relentless Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance as early as 1948.[50] The FBI thoroughly documented her affiliation with a multitude of “communist fronts,”—many in which Du Bois was also active—including the Jefferson School of Social Science, the Council on African Affairs, the American Labor Party, the Progressive Party, the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, and the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions. She was also scrutinized for her association with purported subversives, fellow travelers, and card-carrying Reds, such as Paul and Eslanda Robeson, Benjamin J. Davis, and Esther V. Cooper, all of who suffered the wrath of U.S. anticommunism to varying degrees.[51] By July 1950, Graham was the subject of an Internal Security investigation that resulted in the preparation of a security index card for her in 1951.[52]
Starting in the Black Reconstruction era, Graham was in constant contact with Du Bois, sending him her writings, seeking his advice, soliciting his approval, and securing his aid.[53] Du Bois regularly advised her on employment; recommended her for prestigious positions; loaned her money; utilized his extensive networks to obtain information for her; helped her get published; took her to important events; and served as her mentor and confidant.[54] By April 1936, he had upgraded her from the formal “Ms. Graham” to the more intimate “Shirley,”[55] lending credence to speculation that they were engaged in an “illicit affair” at that point.[56] The two had developed a deep and enduring relationship, though Du Bois was married to Nina Gomer and Graham had multiple suitors.[57] Less than a year after Gomer’s death, the couple married on Valentine’s Day 1951, just as the octogenarian became a co-defendant in United States v. Peace Information Center, et al.[58] Which of these luminaries was the true beneficiary of the “May-December” marriage was up for debate. The eminent freedom-fighter Louise Thompson Patterson asserted that the “very ambitious” Graham “hung in all that time” to “get” Du Bois (much to the chagrin of his many admirers), and communist journalist Marvel Cooke claimed that Graham had “always wanted to marry Dr. Du Bois,” and “had set her cap” for him.[59] On the other hand, comrades including Alice Childress, Ana Livia Cordero and Esther V. Cooper contended that it was Graham who “mothered” him, protected him, and assured that he still earned income and lived comfortably despite the backlash that accompanied his radicalism and ultimate CPUSA membership.[60]
While Du Bois afforded Graham unstinting assistance, advancement, and appeasement in the early phase of their relationship, the efforts were returned manifold in later years, during which she became her husband’s most ardent advocate. In 1948, she headed the Emergency Committee for Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP, which was organized to challenge Du Bois’s ouster at the end of his contract on December 31. He was ostensibly fired for political activity, although the likely reason was his criticism of White’s obsequiousness to the Truman administration, which, for Du Bois, affiliated the NAACP with “the reactionary war mongering colonial imperialism of the present administration.” According to an FBI confidential informant, he was terminated “for urging the Wallace line too strongly.”[61] In an article for Masses & Mainstream,[62] Graham fumed that the NAACP had been hostile to Du Bois since he returned in 1944, giving him a tiny office, reprimanding him for petty offenses, delaying the printing of An Appeal to the World[63] to appease Eleanor Roosevelt, and attempting to forbid his support for Wallace. She upbraided the NAACP for insulting “Negroes all over the world by treating so contemptuously the one man who has been our foremost spokesman, our most immanent statesman for half a century.”[64] Unsurprisingly, she attributed Du Bois’s firing to the intransigence and backwardness of Walter White and ended the article in support of her life partner’s fight to “democratize the NAACP.”[65] By 1951, she had set her career aside to immerse herself in yet another defense of her husband. This time it also included his comrades in the PIC—an organization for which she was a member of the advisory council. She helped to organize the Committee to Defend W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates in the Peace Information Center, was an initiating member of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and was active in the Civil Rights Council—all of which agitated extensively for Du Bois’s exoneration.[66]
After Du Bois’s death on August 27, 1963, his widow committed herself to the perpetuation and protection of his life and legacy against anticommunist attack and revisionist representations.[67] His Day is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. Du Bois, Graham’s biography of her late companion published in 1971, conveys this effort. According to reviewers, the global impact of Du Bois became more “fully understood” and “illuminated” through “the efforts of Shirley Graham Du Bois…” whose work rendered him “more alive, more comprehendable, more relevant to the issues and style of our struggle…”[68] Another example of her dedication and loyalty came in 1964 when she castigated her comrade Esther V. Cooper and the Du Bois Memorial Committee for neglecting to read a message Du Bois had prepared shortly before his death specifically for his service in the United States. She insisted that cowardice was the reason for the omission of “HIS VOICE FROM THE GRAVE once more calling on the America which he loved and had served to rise up in its strength and beauty to meet the challenge and go forward.” She ferociously condemned those who “dare[d] to whittle THIS GIANT down to their puny proportions,” and insisted that Du Bois’s own words “said far more eloquently, far more powerfully, far more clearly and far more authoritatively” anything that they attempted to say on his behalf. Furthermore, she fiercely contested the contents of the memorial issue the Freedomways editors were planning in tribute to her late husband, charging that they were attempting to “rehabilitate” his image to conform with American respectability politics. She rejected the suggestion that Roy Wilkins write about Du Bois as the founder of the Crisis, chastising that “THERE IS [NO] PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO WANTS TO READ ROY WILKINS ON ANY PHASE OF W.E.B. DU BOIS.” She detested the inclusion of Rufus Clement, who she accused of attempting to destroy Du Bois’s work by retiring him from Atlanta University for old age. She repudiated any contribution from Hugh Smythe, who was “known throughout Africa as a clever CIA agent,” and Langston Hughes, who she claimed had omitted Du Bois from every book he wrote for young people. She was equally dismissive of Rayford Logan, Sterling Brown, and Peter Abrahams. Graham enjoined, “W.E.B Du Bois belongs to the ages! If this generation of Americans cannot accept him as he is—do not try to gild his image for them. He doesn’t need articles written about him by pigmies.” Given these strong objections, she refused to be involved with the issue.[69]
The coupling of Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois was the epitome of reciprocal care and consideration that provided a durable scaffolding for their radicalism and resistance to repression. It was this mutual comradeship that made possible their protracted struggles on behalf of the racialized, colonized, exploited, and otherwise abjected.
Conclusion: Repression, Repudiation and the Legacy of the “Radical Du Bois”
In the period spanning the drafting of Black Reconstruction and his petition to join the CPUSA, Du Bois had been active in scores of entities that the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) deemed “communist fronts” or “outright communist”.[70] This radicalism elicited a profusion of penalty and punishment: in the midst of anticommunist hysteria, Du Bois was arrested and indicted in 1951, and abandoned and admonished by the “Talented Tenth” in which he had placed so much faith during the early twentieth century.
For U.S. authorities and capitalists alike, peace was a foreign—and therefore dangerous—concept. U.S. News and World Report, for example, asserted that, “A peace offensive can break out. Peace is Russia’s propaganda game.”[71] Given this disinformation, Du Bois’s radical Black peace activism, and that of numerous other Black radicals including Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones, was construed as siding with the enemy of the United States. The fact that Du Bois defended peace over the “American way of life” effectively equated his him with subversion. Though the PIC was only in existence from April 3 to October 12, 1950 because of unrelenting pressure from the government, the Justice Department filed charges against Du Bois, Elizabeth Moos, Kyrle Elkin, Sylvia Soloff, and Abbott Simon on February 9, 1951.They sought to determine “whether or not this organization acted as an agent or in a capacity similar to that of a foreign organization or a foreign political power.” The PIC and Du Bois were alleged to be acting on behalf of the World Congress of the Defenders of Peace and the World Peace Council and were thereby accused of being agents of a “foreign principal”: the Soviet Union.[72] In reality, the wrath of the State Department was aimed at the PIC’s circulation of the Stockholm Peace Petition. In the New York Times, Secretary of State Dean Acheson called it a “propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union”[73] and HUAC accused it of proposing national suicide for the United States and attempting to confuse and divide Americans.[74] The State Department held conferences to halt the collection of signatures for the petition because they were fearful that it would “make any use of the atom bomb seem morally indefensible.” They also sent out memos that warned of the “Moscow peace offensive” to congressmen, government agencies, editors, Black leaders, and other persons of influence and stature.[75] The government’s counteroffensive essentially equated the circulation of the petition with anti-Americanism. By labeling it communist-inspired, the United States attempted to discredit the document in order to legitimate its use of nuclear weapons and aggression; to prevent dissent; and to justify the curtailment of civil liberties.
U.S. v. Peace Information Center, et al. proceeded in November 1951 even though the Center had disbanded before the indictment was handed down.[76] The government used anticommunist rhetoric in its attempt to discredit radical peace activism. It called as its star witness John Rogge, a former Assistant Attorney General and organizer of the Peace Information Center. In his testimony, he claimed that the PIC’s objective was not peace, but rather to act on behalf of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. He also argued that the purpose of the World Congress of the Defenders of Peace, for which the PIC was ostensibly an agent, was to focus international attention on the U.S. use of the atom bomb to distract the world from U.S.S.R. aggression in Korea. The government intended to use this testimony to paint the PIC with the taint of a “Russian and Communist controversy” so that “current popular hysteria could be aroused against [Du Bois and the Center].”[77] Though the PIC was ultimately “vindicated” on November 20, 1951, the defendants lost nine months of their lives, peace of mind, and over $35,000.[78] Furthermore, given the dragnet of violence and repression that accompanied the charge of communism, a number of Black leaders with who Du Bois had been associated and acquainted either denounced him or distanced themselves. Persons including Mordecai Johnson and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who had been scheduled to speak at a testimonial dinner for Du Bois’s eighty-third birthday, succumbed to anticommunist pressure and backed out when he was indicted. Ralph Bunche declined to serve as a sponsor for the dinner, and Du Bois’s longtime friend and NAACP colleague Arthur Spingarn refused to serve as honorary chairman.[79] As well, when Du Bois’s lawyers were searching for character witnesses to testify on his behalf, they were able to find so few volunteers that they abandoned that approach.[80] Only “a few prominent Negroes” were willing to sign a public statement in support of Du Bois, and, even more insulting, Black institutions donated very little to his defense fund. In effect, “The intelligentsia… the successful business and professional men, were not for the most part, outspoken in [his] defense… as a group this class was either silent or actually antagonistic.”[81] Though Du Bois had concluded in 1948 that the Talented Tenth was not the solution to economic betterment for African Americans because they had failed to fulfill their duty, he was nonetheless surprised and saddened that this class of persons gave him the cold shoulder.[82]
On August 8, 1949, Du Bois stated to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations:
“…We invent witchwords. If in 1850 an American disliked slavery, the word of exorcism was ‘abolitionist’. He was a ‘nigger love’. He believed in free love and murder of kind slave masters. He ought to be lynched and mobbed. Today the word is ‘communist’… If anybody questions the power of wealth, wants to build more TVA’s, advocates civil rights for Negroes, he is a communist, a revolutionist, a scoundrel, and is liable to lose his job or land in jail.”[83]
These words proved to be autobiographical. Starting in the Black Reconstruction era, Du Bois underwent a steady process of radicalization, becoming ever more dedicated to the liberation of all persons subjected to racism, class exploitation, colonialism, imperialism, and the threat of nuclear war. In response, counterrevolutionary forces in the government and in conservative and liberal circles attempted to defame, undercut, erase, and criminalize his efforts. Through continued struggle and the comradely love of Shirley Graham and countless other radicals and progressives, Du Bois weathered this repression and reaction, and remained a committed freedom fighter until his death in Accra Ghana on August 27, 1963.
[1] Lester Abelman, “DuBois, Long Red Pal, Goes Whole Hog at 93,” New York News, November 19, 1961; Peter Kihss, “Dr. DuBois joins Communist party at 93,” New York Times, November 23, 1961; “Dr. DuBois joins the Communist party,” People’s World, November 25, 1961; James E. Jackson, “W.E.B. DuBois to Gus Hall: ‘Communism Will Triumph. I want to Help Bring that Day.’” The Worker, November 26, 1961; “Du Bois announces his great decision,” People’ World, December 2, 1961; “‘My Mind’s Settled,’ Says DuBois,” Pittsburg Courier, December 2, 1961.
[2] James Jackson, “Tributes,” in Black Titan, W.E.B. Du Bois: An Anthology by the Editors of Freedomways, eds. John Henrik Clarke et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 19.
[3] Doxey Wilkerson, interview by David Levering Lewis, October 1986, interview 19, transcript, David Levering Lewis Papers (MS 827), W.E.B. Du Bois Library, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. (Subsequently, DLL Papers). Interviews by David Levering Lewis accessed in July and August 2017 before they were formally organized and processed.
[4] Herbert Aptheker, “Du Bois Joined CP at 94,” National Guardian, February 20, 1964.
[5] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935).
[6] Alfred Harcourt to W.E.B. DuBois, December 2, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/search?q=Alfred%20Harcourt&page=4&facets=&sort=3a; W.E.B. DuBois to Abram Harris, January 6, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i532; W.E.B. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois courses in Atlanta University second semester, memorandum, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i514; W.E.B. Du Bois, Summer school of Atlanta University, memorandum, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i515; W.E.B. DuBois to Joel Spingarn, February 22, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b068-i025; W.E.B. DuBois to James Whittaker, September 14, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b068-i170; Abram Harris to W.E.B. DuBois, January 7, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i533; W.E.B. Du Bois to John Hope, memorandum, March 9, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i378, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums312 (subsequently, Du Bois Papers). Also see W.E.B DuBois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (International Publishers, 1968), 308 and Shawn Leigh Alexander, W.E.B. DuBois: An American Intellectual and Activist (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 92-5.
[7] DuBois, Autobiography, 308, 301.
[8] According to Doxey Wilkerson, the “Marxist coterie” at Howard in the 1930s included himself, Abram Harris, Dorothy and Ralph Bunche, Sterling Brown, and Eugene Holmes. James Jackson referred to this group as the “Red Top Roundtable,” and states that this group included those mentioned by Wilkerson, as well Emmett Dorsey (known as “Sam”) and E. Franklin Frazier. These leftists were involved in the organization of the Joint Committee on National Recovery Conference at Howard, May 18-20, 1935. (Wilkerson, interview; Esther and James Jackson, interview with David Levering Lewis, October 1986, interview 7, transcript, DLL Papers; Joint Committee on National Recovery National Conference, Program, May 1935, Du Bois Papers; Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
[9] W.E.B. DuBois to E. Franklin Frazier, October 16, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i401; W.E.B. DuBois to E. Franklin Frazier, October 19, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i402; W.E.B. DuBois to Abram Harris, December 4, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i554; Emmett E. Dorsey to W.E.B. DuBois, December 6, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i198; W.E.B. DuBois to Harold O. Lewis, December 7, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b066-i175; Emmett Dorsey, Reconstruction Bibliography, Bibliography, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b219-i336, DuBois Papers.
[10] W.E.B. Du Bois, Members of the Amenia Conference, list, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i330; W.E.B. Du Bois, Second Amenia Conference on a New Programme for the Negro, announcement, January 9, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i302; W.E.B. DuBois to My Dear, March 4, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i305; W.E.B. Du Bois, Notes on Amenia Conference, Notes 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i327; W.E.B. Du Bois, Proposed Program of the Amenia Conference, program, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i320. Also see Beth Tompkin Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933-1941,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (April 1997): 340-77; Eben Miller, Born Along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Holloway, Confronting the Veil, 1-34.
[11] Conference, Press release from the publicity committee of the Second Amenia Conference, press release, September 1, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i313.
[12] W.E.B. DuBois to Clarence Senior, September 15, 1932, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b193-i015; W.E.B. DuBois, “The American Federation of Labor and the Negro,” Crisis, July 1929; W.E.B. DuBois, “Color Caste in the United States,” Crisis, March 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois, A Tentative Plan Looking Toward Consumers’ and Producers’ Co-Operation Among American Negroes and Negroes the World Over, proposal February 27, 1936, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b158-i467; W.E.B. DuBois to Edwin R. Embree, February 27, 1936, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b080-i200, DuBois Papers.
[13] Amenia Conference, Press release.
[14] W.E.B. Du Bois, Statement of the Negro Problem, proclamation, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b064-i311, Du Bois Papers.
[15] Du Bois, Autobiography, 290-91.
[16] W.E.B. Du Bois DuBois to George Streator, April 17, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b076-i210, Du Bois Papers.
[17] Du Bois, Autobiography, 294-96.
[18] W.E.B. DuBois, “The Right to Work,” Crisis, April 1933; W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” Current History 42, no. 3 (June 1935): 265-70; W.E.B. Du Boois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Journal of Negro Education 4, no. 3 (July 1935): 328-35; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Social Planning for the Negro, Past and Present,” Journal of Negro Education 5, no. 1 (January 1936): 110-125.
[19] W.E.B. DuBois to Harry E. Davis, January 16, 1934, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b069-i361, DuBois Papers.
[20] W.E.B. DuBois to Rachel Davis DuBois, March 27, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i280; W.E.B. DuBois to Ruthanna Fisher, September 26, 1933, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b065-i362; Harcourt Brace & Company to W.E.B. DuBois, April 17, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b074-i242; W.E.B. DuBois to Walter White, April 23, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b075-i180; W.E.B DuBois to Harcourt Press, telegram, May 28, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b074-i251; W.E.B. DuBois to Rachel Davis DuBois, May 29, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b073-i493, DuBois Papers.
[21] W.E.B. Du Bois, Outline of Black Reconstruction, outline, October 21, 1931, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b058-i340, Du Bois Papers.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harpert & Brothers Publishers, 1944).
[24] Wilkerson, interview; Doxey Wilkerson, interview by David Levering Lewis, September 1988, interview 22, transcript, DLL Papers.
[25] Alexander, W.E.B. Du Bois, 95-7.
[26] Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2019), 145.
[27] James Ford W.E.B. DuBois, October 14, 1953, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b140-i333; W.E.B. DuBois to James Ford, October 20, 1953, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b140-i334, DuBois Papers.
[28] “Du Bois Gives the Record of His Peace Advocacy,” Daily Worker, February 19, 1951.
[29] W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1915): 707-14.
[30] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis, October 1923.
[31] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Peace on Earth,” Crisis, March 1926.
[32] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Economics of War, speech (draft), October 26, 1931, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b197-i029.
[33] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Social Planning and the Negro,” 124-25.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Manning Marable, “Peace and Black Liberation: The Contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Science and Society 47, no. 4 (Winter 1983/1984): 389-92.
[36] W.E.B. Du Bois, Speech by Dr. William E.B. Du Bois, press release, October 5, 1950, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b127-i092, Du Bois Papers.
[37] W.E.B. Du Bois, Statement by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, press release, July 12, 1950, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b129-i212.
[38] Peace Information Center, Minutes of Peace Information Center Executive Committee Meeting, minutes, April 18, 1950, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b129-i382.
[39] Robbie Lieberman, “‘Another Side of the Story’: African American Intellectuals Speak Out for Peace and Freedom During the Early Cold War Years,” in Anti-Communism and the African American Freedom Movement, eds. Robbie Liberman and Clarence Lang (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 21; Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 126.
[40] Doxey Wilkerson, “They Are Trying to Sentence Dr. DuBois to Death,” New York Times, October19, 1951.
[41] W.E.B. DuBois, The American Labor Party, press release, October 8, 1953, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b127-i095, DuBois Papers.
[42] Ibid.
[43] W.E.B. Du Bois, My Platform, speech (draft), ca. 1950, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b200-i072, Du Bois Papers.
[44] Horne Black and red 136-46.
[45] Vicki Garvin, interview with David Levering Lewis, April 1988, interview 15, transcript, DLL Papers; Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 115-51; Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens, “Shirley Graham DuBois: Portrait of the Black Woman Artist as Revolutionary,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, eds. Dayo F. Gore et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 31-2, 115-16.
[46] John Henrik Clarke, interview with David Levering Lewis, June 1988, interview 7, transcript; Ethel Ray Nance, interview with David Levering Lewis, March 1986, interview 25, transcript, DLL Papers.
[47] Horne and Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois,” 104; Shirley Graham DuBois, His Day is Marching On, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), 104-5.
[48] Louise Thompson Patterson claimed that Graham was brought into the Party by Howard Fast, while Bernard Jaffe suggested that she never formally joined the Party, though she was supportive of Du Bois’ choice to do so. A confidential informant told the FBI that she had been a “staunch member of the CP” at least since 1944 or 1945. It has also been posited that Iterview with na Livia Cordero" atterson, n Patterson, p.rown and Cooke that Graham had intentions to marry DuBois for quite somshe joined the Party after the death of her son Robert, though she was not "forthcoming or expansive” about her membership. Her son David was not certain about her CPUSA membership: “I do not know for certain whether my mother was a member of the Party or not… if she was, it was Howard [Fast] who recruited her.” (Louise Thompson Patterson, interview with David Levering Lewis, June 1987, interview 17A, transcript, DLL Papers; Horne, Race Woman, 280 ft. 79; Horne and Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois,” 103.
[49] Horne and Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois,” 100, 102.
[50] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “W.E.B. Du Bois in the Tradition of Radical Blackness: Radicalism, Repression, and Mutual Comradeship, 1930-1960,” Socialism and Democracy 32, no. 3 (November 2018): 181-206.
[51] National Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs, The facts in the Rosenberg case, leaflet, 1953, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b140-i336; James W. Ford to W.E.B. DuBois, December 7, 1954, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b142-i249, DuBois Papers.
[52] Horne, Race Woman, 115-16.
[53] Kathy A. Perkins, “The Unknown Career of Shirley Graham,” Freedomways 25, no. 1 (1985): 12; Horne, Race Woman, 123; Andrew Paschal, “The Spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Black Scholar 2, no. 2 (October 1970): 27; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. DuBois, May 16, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b074-i168; Shirley Graham to W.E.B DuBois, September 9, 1935, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b074-i170, DuBois Papers.
[54] Paschal, “The Spirit,” 28; DuBois to Julius Rosenwald fund, December 10, 1937, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b083-i436; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. Dubois, September 20, 1939, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b088-i174; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. DuBois, November 30, 1942, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b098-i026; W.E.B. DuBois to Rayford Logan, January 4, 1945, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b104-i521; W.E.B. Du Bois to Shirley Graham, October 20, 1947, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b113-i474; W.E.B. DuBois to Walter White, memorandum, October 20, 1937, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b115-i127; Shirley Graham to W.E.B. DuBois, January 20, 1943, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b100-i170, DuBois Papers; Horne, Race Woman, 124-33.
[55] On January 17 of that year, Du Bois was still using the more formal “My Dear Miss Graham.”
[56] W.E.B. DuBois to Shirley Graham, April 8, 1936, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b078-i293, DuBois Papers; Gerald Horne, Race Woman, 125.
[57] Horne, Race Woman, 128.
[58] Du Bois was arrested for being an “unregistered foreign agent” and indicted on February 9, 1951 under the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 for failing to register the Peace Information Center. The Case was ultimately dismissed on November 20, 1951.
[59] Marvel Cooke, interview with David Levering Lewis, October 1986, interview 21, transcript, DLL Papers; Patterson, interview.
[60] Alice Childress, interview with David Levering Lewis, February 1987, interview 6, transcript; Ana Livia Cordero, interview with David Levering Lewis, May 1988, interview 3.2, transcript; Jackson, interview, DLL Papers.
[61] “Committee is Set up to Defend Dr. DuBois,” New York Times, September 29, 1948; John Hudson Jones, “DuBois Ousted by NAACP Board as Research Head,” Daily Worker, September 15, 1948; Horne, Race Woman, 111-12; Horne and Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois,” 103-4; Burden-Stelly, “W.E.B. Du Bois,” 204; Horne, Black & Red, 93-7.
[62] Shirley Graham, “Why was Du Bois fired?,” Masses & Mainstream 1, no. 9 (November 1948): 15-26.
[63] W.E.B. Du Bois, Ed., An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress (New York: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, 1947).
[64] Graham, “Why Was Du Bois Fired,” 20.
[65] James W. Ford echoed Graham’s sentiments. For him, the dismissal elicited both shock and chagrin, as Du Bois’s critique of the “corrupt” elements of the Association buttressed “the ever growing movement of progress and of the Negro people here and abroad in particular,” James W. Ford to W.E.B. DuBois, September 15, 1948, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b118-i289, Du Bois Papers.
[66] Horne, Race Woman, 136.
[67] DuBois, Autobiography, 378; Perkins, “The Unknown Career,” 16; Horne, Race Woman, 123; Paschal, “The Spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois,” 27-8.
[68] Ronald Walters, “Review: His Day is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. Du Bois by Shirley Graham Du Bois,” The Journal of Negro History 58, no. 1 (January 1973): 107-9.
[69] Shirley Graham DuBois to Esther V. Cooper, May 31, 1964, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers (MC 476), box 18, folder 10, Radcliffe Institute Repository, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; Shirley Graham DuBois to Bernard Jaffe, December 13, 1964, Bernard Jaffe Papers (MS 906), Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
[70] According to HUAC, “a Communist Front [is] an organization or publication created or captured by the Communists to do the party’s work in special fields. Since Communists will not admit their control of a front, it takes them among people who would never willingly act as party agents. It is communism’s greatest weapon in this country today. By ‘outright’ Communist enterprises, the committee refers to organizations such as the Communist Party USA whose domination by the Stalinists is not disguised… organizations of this character are relatively few when compared to the hundreds of fronts that have been set up by the Communist Party,” House Committee on Un-American Activities, Citations by Official Government Agencies of Organizations and Publications found to be Communist or Communist Fronts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Print Office, 1948), 1. Also see House Committee on Un-American Activities, Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (and Appendix) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Print Office, 1957).
[71] Albert Kahn, Agent of Peace (New York: The Hour Publishers, 1951), ix.
[72] Kahn, Agent of Peace, ii; W.E.B. DuBois, “The Trial,” in W.E.B. DuBois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 777-78.
[73] Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 160-61; Horne, Black and Red, 41.
[74] Lieberman, “Communist Peace Offensive,” 212; Horne, Black and Red, 132.
[75] Kahn, Agent of Peace, x.
[76] Horne, Black and Red, 151.
[77] DuBois, “The Trial,” 780; “Rogge testifies for govt. in DuBois trial,” National Guardian, November 21, 1951.
[78] “Peace Information Center VINIDICATED,” National Guardian, December 5, 1951.
[79] “Mordecai Johnson, Charlotte Brown Fail to Attend DuBois Testimonial,” New York Courier, March 3, 1951; James H. Hicks, “Main Speakers Snub DuBois Party,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 3, 1951; Horne, Black & Red, 154-55.
[80] Bernard Jaffe, Sylvia Soloff Steinberg, Abbott Simon (Peace Information Center), interview with David Levering Lewis, October 1994, interview 16B, transcript, DLL Papers.
[81] W.E.B. DuBois, In Battle for Peace, (Millwood: Kraus-Thompson, 1976), 64-5.
[82] Lloyd Brown, interview by David Levering Lewis, October 1986, interview 18, transcript; St. Clair Drake, interview by David Levering Lewis, August 1987, interview 8A, transcript; Childress, interview; Jaffe, interview; Abbott Simon, interview with David Levering Lewis, August 1986, interview 6, transcript, DLL Papers.
[83] W.E.B. Du Bois, Statement to Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, speech (draft), August 3, 1949, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b125-i054, Du Bois Papers.