Entry date: 19 March 1961
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“Education is a great and serious end. It has to do primarily not with soils and crops, not with stone and iron, but with the souls of your own children and thus with the future of the Negro race in America.” Du Bois |
What a trip. I am exhausted and must unpack. How grateful I am to be invited by President Kwame Nkrumah to direct the Encyclopedia Africana. Ghana is beautiful this time of year. I am so fortunate to have my wife, Shirley here to enjoy this with me. As I sit here in Ghana, I reflect over the past years and what we as a people have become. As I think about it, had it not been for my education, I would not been able to accomplish all that I have. I recall having the opportunity to pass my knowledge on to others in the summers of 1886 and 1887. As a teacher in rural Tennessee, I experienced my first significant encounter with poor blacks in the South. I determined to know something of the Negro in the country districts; to go out and teach during summer vacation. I had heard about the country in the South as the real seat of slavery. I wanted to know it. I walked out into east Tennessee ten or more miles a day until at last in a little valley near Alexandria I found a place where there had been a Negro public school only once since the Civil War; and there for two successive terms during the summer I taught at $28 and $38 a month. I can recall seeing the first graders, ignorant to what was going on but eager to learn. In that moment, it came to me that education is essential to really being a “free” man. I couldn’t allow myself to be bound by any lack of education.
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Class Portrait at Fisk University in 1900 |
Harvard was wonderful for me. I had always dreamed of attending such a university. I was happy at Harvard, but for unusual reasons. One of these unusual circumstances was my acceptance of racial segregation. Because I attended Fisk, I encountered relations with my own race. Had I went straight from Great Barringrton high school directly to Harvard I would have only wanted relations with my white peers. I had not discovered limitations on race at that time. Harvard was a wonderful institute filled with many memories such as trying out for the Glee club (although Harvard couldn’t afford a Negro traveling with them), or pledging Alpha Phi Alpah; how could I forget the many meetings in the Philosophical Club and the Foxcroft dinning club. Had I known at the time that all of these activities where helping to prepare me for what I would experience during the “Harlem Renaissance”.
In the 1920’s, New York experienced an upsurging of Negro creativity. I can recall seeing the tasteful artwork of my dear friend Aaron Douglas, and reading the elegant poetry of Langston Hughes, but through it all, my main focus was education. Finally I had my own column, The Crisis and it was doing well. The incident with Claude McKay still plays in my head. Although Home to Harlem in 1928 was his best-selling novel, I still stand by my opinion of it. It was long, nasty, distasteful, brutish, and simply not a good representation of Negros. With literature being so important to me, I felt it was necessary something be said. My column was meant to enlighten Negro readers and to give opportunity to Negro writers to express their emotions on paper. Facts, taste, and emotion is what makes good literature.
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World Peace Congress, 1949 April 20 |
My fight for education didn’t end with corrections of negative literature but it also meant making wages for Negro teachers acceptable. It is but the logical result of the “white” propaganda which has swept civilization for the last thousand years, and which is now bolstered and defended by brave words, high wages, and monopoly of opportunities. But this state of mind is suicidal and must be fought, and fought doggedly and bitterly: first by giving Negro teachers decent wages, decent schoolhouses and equipment, and reasonable chances for advancement.
The sun is setting, and I must finish unpacking. I am lucky. I see that my work before and during the “Harlem Renaissance” laid a foundation for better opportunity for Negros with their education. My work with the NAACP helped to prevent the establishment of segregated Negro schools. Although I am getting advanced in age, and weak in health, I know that there will be a day when my work will finally pay off.
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Theological Hall at Fisk University |
-W.E.B. Du Bois
While fulfilling a dream of producing, in 1963 W.E.B. Du Bois (and his wife) was denied a new US passport and could not legally get back to the States. On August 27, 1963 Du Bois died, ironically one day before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.
Article written by:
Brittany Quin
Brittany Quin
University of Texas at Arlington
US History 1312
Feb 20 2011
US History 1312
Feb 20 2011
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Works Cited:
Bontemps, Arna Wendell. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Print.
Hutchinson, George, ed. The Cambridge Companion to The Harlem Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Provenzo, Eugene F., ed. Du Bois on Education. Oxford: Altamira, 2002. Print.
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