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Summer 2003

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Around the Pond

A May Day celebration

– Leslie Wolfe




	“We here at this university, at this living institution, are caretakers of Du Bois’ legacy.” – John Edgar Wideman

“Throughout history the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, to die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.”

– W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARTDT DU BOIS' LIFE, from 1868 to 1963, was more than a meteoric flash, yet we still struggle to assess the brilliance of his large body of work. At UMass on the first of May, scholars engaged in studying Du Bois, academicians whose very fields of study he pioneered, and singers who voiced the songs he collected came together with students and admirers of the man to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. Kicked off by Chancellor John Lombardi and sponsored in part by the UMass Library and the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, the event featured writers, our own Michael Thelwell and John Edgar Wideman; a professor of sociology, Phil Zukerman of Pitzer College; a professor of history, David Blight of Yale; and Professors Ernest Allen and Gerald Friedman of our Afro-American Studies and economics departments. Horace Boyer and the Year of Jubilee Four (plus four) introduced each short lecture by singing one of the “Sorrow Songs” featured in Du Bois’ book. Yet as broad as this representation was, missing on the agenda were the experts in women’s rights, in labor and race relations, and in criminology – as well as the psychologist, philosopher and political scientist – who would have done justice to the full scope of Du Bois’ body of work.

Among Du Bois’ many publications, Souls is perhaps the most enduring and certainly most studied work. A curious collection of essays and a short story written in the style of the preceding century, Souls is both poetic and scholarly, while at the same time provocative. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” Du Bois wrote, defining the color-line as “The relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”

This pronouncement, made at the dawn of what came to be called “The American Century,” intentionally included the world outside of the United States. At the time of the publication of those words, race relations were hardly peaceful here at home – African-Americans were being lynched at the rate of one every four days – but we were also warring against people of color elsewhere, imposing “freedom” on Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Drawing justification from such popular works as Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due, President Theodore Roosevelt, supported by the other branches of government, pursued “manifest destiny” beyond our borders – but not without sparking dissent. The people of this country were sharply divided about what our country stood for and what we should become. Were we champions of democracy or was our exported brand of freedom an excuse for imperialism?

Du Bois further defined this question, or, as Chancellor Lombardi put it, he “set the terms of the debate about who we are and who we are to become.” Describing what it is like to be born beyond a dark “veil,” in a place where he could be seen only dimly, if at all, by his fellow Americans with lighter skin, Souls is a series of urgent dispatches from behind the metaphorical veil to his countrymen of all colors and cultures, a call to take a closer look at each other and the consequences of our actions.

The Souls of Black Folk centennial exhibit in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, which features manuscripts, photographs, recordings and correspondence from the archives housed there, ended in early May, but the archives will remain – a treasure trove and a destination of pilgrimages by scholars from around the world. As Wideman said, “We here at this university, at this living institution, are caretakers of Du Bois’ legacy.” This is an important legacy, he added, “Du Bois’ work ‘locates’ us, and the ‘us’ turns out to be all of us in the world.”

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