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Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile

by Black Kos

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Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010 Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010 at 12:00:05pm PST

William Edward Burghardt DuBois
Born February 23, 1868.

Commentary by Deoliver47,Black Kos Editor

While searching for news about Haiti yesterday (since it has disappeared from the headlines) I ran across a website listing "famous Haitians" and was surprised to find W.E.B. DuBois’ name on the list. DuBois was not Haitian actually, though there is a connection in his ancestry. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Mass, where he grew up.

I had forgotten the Haiti ties in his life which he mentions briefly in his autobiography.

DuBois speaks of his white Huguenot great grandfather James, of his grandfather Alexander’s journey to the island, and of his father Alfred who was born in Haiti, though raised in the US:

...young Dr. James Du Bois went to the Bahamas soon after the Revolution and took over several plantations and one lake of salt which still bears his name. He prospered after some vicissitudes, and founded a family.
Whether, as is probable, he took a slave as a concubine, or married a free Negro woman--in either case two sons were born, my grandfather Alexander in 1803 and a younger brother, John. After their mother's death, Dr. James Du Bois brought both boys to New York in 1810. Both were white enough to "pass," and their father entered them in the private Cheshire School in Connecticut. He visited them regularly, but on one visit, about 1820, he suddenly fell dead.

The white New York family removed the boys from school and took charge of their father's property. My grandfather was apprenticed to a shoemaker. Just what happened to John, I do not know. Probably he continued as white, and his descendants, if any, know nothing of their colored ancestry. Alexander was of stern character. His movements between 1820 and 1840 are not clear. As the son of a "gentleman," with the beginnings of a gentleman's education, he refused to become a shoemaker and went to Haiti at the age of perhaps 18. Boyer had become President just after the suicide of Christophe, and held power until 1843, bringing the whole island under his control and making a costly peace with France.

Of grandfather's life in Haiti from about 1821 to 1830, I know few details. From his 18th to his 27th year he formed acquaintanceships, earned a living, married and had a son, my father, Alfred, born in 1825. I do not know what work grandfather did, but probably he ran a plantation and engaged in the growing shipping trade to the United States. Who he married I do not know, nor her relatives. He may have married into the family of Elie Du Bois, the great Haitian educator. Also why he left Haiti in 1830 is not clear. It may have been because of the threat of war with France during the Revolution of 1830 and the fall of Charles X. England soon recognized the independence of Haiti; but the United States while recognizing South American republics which Haiti had helped to free, refused to recognize a Negro nation. Because of this turmoil, grandfather may have lost faith in the possibility of real independence for Haiti.

So though not Haitian, DuBois had ties to Haiti and his musings about his grandfather's thoughts on Haiti's fate seem somehow prophetic.

Since today is his birthday, he will be our "histwa"(history) for this Tuesday's Chile.

A giant among our historical figures – DuBois, whose life spanned 95 years was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. At the end of his life, In 1961, W.E.B. DuBois moved to Ghana, invited there by President Kwame Nkrumah. He became a Ghanaian citizen two years later. Upon his death on August 27, 1963 DuBois was given a state funeral in Accra, where he is buried.

On August 28, the day after his death, a continent away, an historic event took place:

...250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial as part of a great "march on Washington." Martin Luther King gave his passionate "I Have a Dream" speech. Other speakers called for unrelenting protest to demand government action to protect the rights of black people. But Du Bois was not forgotten. NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins announced that Du Bois had died the previous day. He told the gathered throng to remember that "his was the voice that was calling you to gather here today in this cause." The civil right movement, the subsequent gains that have occurred in the present, and those that will occur in the future, are the fruits of the seeds which William Edward Burghardt Du Bois planted.

His life, work and activism was a link between multiple generations of change in the US - and is so prolific that it would be impossible to cover it all here in this commentary. Spanning reconstruction, the birth of civil rights movement, Pan-Africanism, two world wars, he remained an astute observer and participant in both national and international events as a sociologist, anthropologist, social critic and organizer, until his death.

Bill Moyers Journal presented a brief overview of DuBois,and Jim Crow– narrated by Ozzie Davis and Ruby Dee, which covered DuBois, his battle’s with Booker T. Washington and the founding of the Niagara Movement, which later gave birth to the NAACP. Ruby shares her mother's memories of DuBois; her mother was one of his students; and his positions on higher education for blacks.

DuBois had harsh criticisms of other black leaders – and never pulled his punches. Though a leftist, he was also openly critical of the white left and white progressives who turned a blind eye to issues of race, of social democrats and trade unionists who failed to address racism and focused solely on "class" .

Socialism and the Negro Problem

The essence of Social Democracy is that there shall be no excluded or exploited classes in the Socialistic state; that there shall be no man or woman so poor, ignorant or black as not to count one. Is this simply a far-off ideal, or is it a possible program? I have come to believe that the test of any great movement toward social reform is the Excluded Class. Who is it that Reform does not propose to benefit? If you are saving dying babies, whose babies are you going to let die? If you are feeding the hungry, what folk are you (regretfully, perhaps, but nonetheless truly) going to let starve? If you are making a juster division of wealth, what people are you going to permit at present to remain in poverty? If you are giving all men votes (not only in the "political" but also in the economic world), what class of people are you going to allow to remain disfranchised?

DuBois fought for higher education for blacks, in both Negro colleges and universities, and white schools like Harvard and Yale, and spoke loudly and clearly against the hypocrisy of a system that would bar them from obtaining it. His words written in 1902 in Of the Training of Black Men, could have been written today, as we look at the statistics of poverty and incarceration that persist in our community; while naysayers rant against affirmative education and deny the legacy of slavery – in essence saying "Oh that was 150 years ago ...get over it".

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you shriek, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer, that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may wail: the rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in in-effaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar train, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin. abortion; that color and race are not crimes, and yet they it is which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.

He chided those whose solution to "the negro problem" was simply "industrial training". He attacked racism, and privilege.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the temporary and contingent in the Negro problem to the broader question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of the sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.

California Newsreel produced a four part biographical documentary

on his life, narrated by Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka.

Part One: Black Folk and the New Century (1895-1915)
Du Bois' first sociological work, The Philadelphia Negro, and, even more, The Souls of Black Folk, examined the cultural and political psychology of the American African Diaspora. During the same period, racism was institutionalized under the Jim Crow system. Du Bois emerged as the most outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington's advocacy of accommodation to segregation. He co-founded the Niagara Movement and then the NAACP to agitate for full equality between blacks and whites.

Part Two: The Crisis and the New Negro (1919-1929)
Du Bois created the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, which became a vital organ in the burgeoning African American cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois also was a founder of the Pan African movement, organizing the first international congresses of leaders from Africa and the Diaspora.

Part Three: A Second Reconstruction? (1934-1948)
Dismissed from the editorship of The Crisis for his radical views, Du Bois was forced to resume his academic career at age 68. It was now the Depression and he became more open to leftist ideology as reflected in his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction.

Part Four: Color, Democracy, Colonies and Peace (1949-1963)
Du Bois' continuing anti-racist activism and growing leftist sympathies made him a target during the McCarthy years. He was indicted and for a time his passport was revoked. In 1961, Kwame Nkrumah, the president of the newly independent African state of Ghana, invited him to participate in that country's development; Du Bois accepted, living there for the remainder of his life.

As I stated earlier, there is too much on DuBois to cover here. I hope those of you not familiar with his life and work will take time to do more investigation at the links provided below.

Happy Birthday, Dr. DuBois from Black Kos.

DuBois Links:

UMass has an extensive DuBois collection entitled Activist’s Life

Famous Sociologist's has this biography, Du Bois, William Edwards Burghardt

William Edward Burghardt DuBois

A Biographical Sketch

W.E.B. DuBois.org

The Library of Congress has DuBois Online resources

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Todays news by Amazinggrace and dopper0189, Black Kos Editor and Managing Editor
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When the 10.8 million African slaves disembarked from the hell-hole of the slave ships of the Middle Passage, they discovered that they had not sailed alone. In spite of the horrendous conditions onboard ship (15 percent of their countrymen died en route), many aspects of their various African heritages and cultures managed to survive with them: their music, the foods they could recreate out of the plants and animals in the New World, their aesthetic sense; but most of all, their belief systems, their religions, and their gods. And of all the religions that they carried with them, one would prove to be most resilient and useful to them, most universalizing and cosmopolitan. And that would be the Ifa-based religions of the Yoruba and Fon peoples, from western Nigeria and Dahomey. Their orishas or deities would retain their African names, characteristics, and functions, but assumed new forms in the alien and hostile world of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. These manifestations of Ifa would come to be called Candomblé in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Haiti, and Hoodoo in New Orleans, modified from their original forms with influences from other ethnic groups and traditions, especially those of the Bakongo from Kongo-Angola, in the same way that regional variations arose as the Roman Catholic Church spread itself through Europe and the Middle East.

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New York Times: Education Was Also Leveled by Quake in Haiti.
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Christina Julme was scribbling notes in the back of a linguistics class at the State University of Haiti when, in an instant, everything went black.

"You’re in class, your professor is talking, you’re writing notes and then you’re buried alive," said Ms. Julme, 23, recounting how her semester came to a halt on the afternoon of Jan. 12 when the earthquake turned her seven-story university into a towering pile of wreckage, with her deep inside.

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The Nation: Haiti: A Creditor, Not a Debtor.
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If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full "forgiveness" of its foreign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told Al Jazeera English, but "It's time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt." In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor--and it is we, in the West, who are deeply in arrears.

Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor are they merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms and agreements. Here, far too briefly, are highlights of the Haiti case.

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BBC: Archbishop Desmond Tutu in genome health study.

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Mother Jones: Are Checkpoints Police Profit Centers?
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Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments—operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunk drivers. An investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley with California Watch has found that impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated an estimated $40 million in towing fees and police fines—revenue that cities divide with towing firms. In addition, police officers received about $30 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

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In 2007 a Caucasian woman shared a story with me regarding her response to a black man walking in a parking lot. She said she and her kids were in the car getting ready to leave when she saw him coming towards them. Automatically, she told me, she locked her car door. Her kids immediately drew attention to her reaction. They schooled her on why her action was prejudiced. Embarrassed she realized what she had done and drove off. The black man went about his business without a clue.

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Color Lines: Davis and Douglass in Tandem By Brittany Shoot‏.
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Just because a pairing seems natural does not mean it’s been done before. Long overdue, the newly released Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself: A New Critical Edition (City Lights Books) brings together two of the great philosophical writers and racial justice activists of the last two centuries and combines the deeply personal writings of Frederick Douglass with several politically charged lectures given by Angela Y. Davis in the early 1970s.

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New York Times: Lucille Clifton, Poet Who Explored Intricacies of Black Lives, Dies at 73.
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Ms. Clifton received a National Book Award in 2000 for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000," published by BOA Editions. In 2007, she became the first African-American woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award that is one of American poetry’s signal honors.

Her book "Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980" (BOA, 1987) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1988.

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Voices and Soul by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Contributor

Some say that Life is a mystery. Some say if we can just cut into it,
dissect it and see what makes it breathe and speak; we then will have
our questions answered, the mystery will be solved. Will it though?
Won't our fears and prejudices interpret or misinterpret what we see?
Alexander Pope said, "T'is with our lives as our watches. None go just
alike, but each believes his own."

This week's poem by Pablo Neruda, suggests that all of us cast our net
out into the world, but all we may end up finding are our own ideas
and biases reinforced. Rather than count how many grains of sand make
up a beach, Neruda suggests that the beauty of the beach may simply be
enough. Rather than mysteries, Life is a collection and assemblage
of...

Enigmas

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

-- Pablo Neruda

(translated by Robert Bly)

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"Front Porch Blues" portrait of John Jackson - by Kerry Burch

The front porch is now open. Come on up, set a spell, and join us in community and conversation. If you are new, introduce yourself, and Welcome!