WEB Du Bois, columnist and analyst of segregationist America
Audio 03:54
WEB Du Bois in 1904 © Wikimedia Commons.
Photo taken by JE Purdy in 1904
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
12 mins
Forerunner of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the negritude movement, the American WEB Du Bois has dedicated his life to the fight against racism and the defense of black culture.
Her monumental work, composed of sociological and historical essays, but also of fictions and autobiographical narratives close to prose poetry, strikes by the astonishing modernity of the analyzes of the balance of power between races in the United States that she gives to read.
On the occasion of the publication in French of an autobiographical work by Du Bois, the literary chronicle of this Saturday paints the portrait of this great African-American intellectual.
Publicity
"
What is life, if not men and women who seek happiness, ignoring the evil that reigns in the world and being satisfied with what life offers them in abundance: the sun, the rivers, the trees, the flowers and the inexhaustible love of theirs.
We want to unravel the riddle of the universe and understand how the laws that so beautifully govern our lives work.
Who are we really?
What are we thinking about?
What prompts us to act?
May we follow in the footsteps of those who have gone before us in centuries past and be inspired by their accomplishments today to move forward.
So spoke William Du Bois or Du Boyce, as the author of these words wanted to be called.
This man was during the first half of the XXth century one of the major intellectual figures of black America, of America itself.
Who was Du Bois really?
He was a writer, political thinker, sociologist, anti-racist activist, founding father of the NAACP, a powerful American association for the promotion of people of color, and
last but not least the
inventor of Pan-Africanism.
He was educated at Harvard University where he was the first African-American to earn a doctorate (1895).
Author of some fifty books, including essays, novels, autobiographical accounts, manifestos, and articles, Du Bois has profoundly influenced the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
Black dignity
Thinker of black dignity, Du Bois was, according to Africanists, the true father of negritude.
His works, especially his opus
Souls of the Black People
published in 1903, which denounced the scandalous situation faced by blacks in the United States, were the bedside books of Senghor and his friends in the Latin Quarter in the 1930s. is, it seems, in the pages of the journal
The Crisis
, the organ of the NAACP, that the black students of Paris heard for the first time about the
negro-renaissance
, a social and cultural movement which manifested the awareness by the American black of his identity.
This movement also reflected the desire of African Americans to take back control of their history of which they had been dispossessed by the slave ideology and the dominant culture.
It was both a political and a spiritual quest.
This quest had begun in the nineteenth century with the first writers and activists of the black cause, but to which the talent of thinker and writer of Du Bois knew how to give an unusual form and force, transforming the "
black problem
" into a identity claim dynamic, which has since become the model for black diasporas around the world.
Métis, born in 1868, to a black mother and a French Huguenot father, hence his French-sounding name, Du Bois grew up in the village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the United States.
He was born three years after the end of the American Civil War that ended slavery in the North American continent.
In his nineties, he died in 1963 in Accra, Ghana, a country of which he had acquired nationality.
He must have gone into exile there in the last years of his life because of his Communist sympathies, which were rather frowned upon, as one might imagine, in Cold War America.
The writer also complained of the vexations to which he was the object throughout his life in his country: "
In my own country, for almost a century, I was nothing but a negro
".
Du Bois died on the eve of the March on Washington led on August 28, 1963 by Martin Luther King, during which the black pastor delivered his famous
I have a dream
speech
.
In July 1964, less than a year after Du Bois's death, America passed its first major equal civil rights law.
These temporal landmarks give an idea of the conditions in which this man lived, militated and wrote, imposing himself in the black and pan-African world by his stature as an intellectual and activist.
"
Dawn of Dawn
"
Nothing testifies better to the great intellectual quality of this extraordinary thinker than his readings of the balance of power between the races in American society.
They are astonishingly modern, as we can see when browsing his book “
Dawn of the dawn
” which has just appeared in French translation.
It is a collection of autobiographical essays, but which immediately sits at the confluence of several genres: testimonies, travelogue, analysis and reflection, with racism as a central theme, as suggested by the subtitle of the work: "
Autobiography of a concept of race
".
The author deciphers here the concept of racism by basing himself on the events which marked his own journey in segregationist America, as the translator of the work Jean Pavans explains: "
he wanted to mix an essay on concept of race with his own experience, saying that he was the partial illustration of a racial situation which is the foundation of America.
Finally, it is one of the foundations of America.
"
Racism and the quest for equality are the major themes in most of Du Bois's works.
The latter approaches the question of "
racial prejudice
" as a social and historical construction and reformulates what was then called the "
black problem
" as above all a "
white problem
", the product of a "
bundle of realities, forces and of trends
”, as he wrote in the pages of“
Dawn of Dawn
”.
This modernity of thought, based on empirical methods of inquiry, in particular in the university monographs that Du Bois published when he was still a researcher, explains why American universities have been rediscovering his sociological work for several years, such as
Les Blacks of Philadelphia
, published in 1899 and considered a classic of the genre.
These works were reduced during the author's lifetime, no doubt because he was black.
However, the interest of
Dawn of the Dawn,
which made racism the reading grid of the author's intellectual and sentimental itinerary, is not only documentary, it is also literary.
As in
The Souls of the Black People
, Du Bois expresses himself here as both a theorist, a historian and a storyteller, punctuating his essays with metaphors, stories and poetic prose, as in this nostalgic passage from a journey to the Liberia: "
Can I ever forget the night I first set foot on African soil?"
I belong to the sixth generation from the ancestors who leave this land.
It was a full moon, and the waters of the Atlantic were flat like that of a lake.
Throughout the slow afternoon, as the sun shrouded the scarlet veils of misty clouds to the west, I had gazed into Africa in the distance.
The Grand Cape Mount, this mighty promontory with its twin curves, the northern sentinel of the kingdom of Liberia, took shape in the mist at half past three, darkened and became clear…
”
This colorful, incisive and poetic narration is the hallmark of William Du Bois's prose, divided between scholarly discourse and literary flashes.
How can we be surprised then that its author is considered as the essential precursor of great black American literature?
Dawn
, by WEB Du Bois.
Translated from the English by Jean Pavans.
Vendemiaire, 420 pages, 22 euros.
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Literature
Africa
On the same subject
By voice (s)
Literature: Hemley Boum recounts three generations of women in Cameroon
By voice (s)
William Marx compares literatures at the Collège de France (Rediffusion)
Nobel Prize 2020
Pending the announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature: prognosis, controversy and context