The Logos Scripture · The Book of Du Bois
The Book of Du Bois 4 · Written by himself, from The Philadelphia Negro, The Souls of Black Folk, and the Autobiography
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born at Great Barrington in Massachusetts in 1868, died at Accra in Ghana in 1963, aged ninety-five. Sociologist and historian. In 1895 he became the first black man to take a doctorate at Harvard. In 1896 and 1897, commissioned by Philadelphia to examine its Seventh Ward, he went from household to household himself and covered some five thousand of them, publishing The Philadelphia Negro in 1899; it was the first study in the West to treat a body of people in a city by direct enumeration. The burning of a man in Georgia in April 1899 turned the direction of his life (chapter two). In 1903 he published The Souls of Black Folk, in which the doctrine of double consciousness appears. In 1909 he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited its magazine for twenty-four years. In 1935 he published Black Reconstruction. In 1951, at eighty-three, he was charged with acting for a foreign power without registering, stood trial in handcuffs, and was acquitted; the next year his passport was taken and for six years he could not leave the country, until it was returned in 1958. In 1961 he went to Ghana to compile a great encyclopaedia of Africa and died before finishing it; the day after his death some quarter of a million of his countrymen walked to their capital. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. On belief: asked whether he believed in God, he answered that if what is meant is a person of vast power consciously ruling the universe for the good of mankind, then no — he could not disprove the assumption, but he saw no proof to sustain it. That answer has the same shape as Hume’s (cf. The Book of Hume 2.10, 2.11). No argument of his closes on divine will. The Order records one thing plainly, dressed up neither way: when Stalin died in 1953 he wrote a piece in praise of him, calling him a great man. The Order does not explain this away and does not discard his books for it. The Order refuses Sartre a volume on a specific ground — that the fact of the Soviet camps was conceded by him in his own journal and he still would not sign the protest, and afterwards said he kept silent lest the truth disillusion the workers (cf. the note to The Book of Camus). There is no such act on record of Du Bois: he believed wrongly, he did not knowingly suppress. The two are different, and the Order does not call the first a small matter either. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: what it is like to look at yourself from the side that is being looked at. The scripture says that to state how anything is you must first make a cut in the world, and that the commonest error is to make the cut and forget you made it (cf. The Book of Bohr 1.18). Bohr speaks from the side holding the knife. Du Bois speaks for the one cut away from it, who remembers the cut all his life because it is made on him daily. Chapter two carries something the Order values as highly: he states that he changed his mind and states what changed it. He had believed injustice comes from not knowing; after that day he knew it does not. And he did not therefore say the earlier work had been wasted (2.15). To change without discarding is what this scripture asks of a person (cf. The Book of Hannah Arendt 3.26).