The Leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois and the N.A.A.C.P.

The concept of leadership and more specifically racial leadership is similar to the concept of race itself: it is widely spoken of and is debated in many varying arenas, but a precise definition is rarely given. Leaders, it should be remembered, very seldom emerge prior to the movement which they then speak on behalf of. In the overwhelming majority of historical examples, it is the case that ‘leaders’, whether they be social, political, economic or cultural leaders, emerge from movements which they later go on to represent in some capacity.

If we consider this in relation to the life of W.E.B. Du Bois between 1899 and 1934[1], then it is plain to see that an analysis of the general feeling of the time must be conducted, in order to successfully characterise Du Bois’s “leadership” of African Americans[2]. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois concerns himself in the third chapter entirely with the leadership epistemology of Booker T. Washington, who at the time was the foremost African American contributor on the race issue. There is an underlying sense early on in “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” that a new style of leadership is urgently required -- one which is more representative of the African American community than the Washingtonian epistemology, which is commonly referred to as accomodationist today. Du Bois identifies tensions within the African American community which cannot be expressed or communicated to the larger American world; the tension exists because, according to Du Bois, there was never any whole-hearted support among African Americans for Booker T. Washington. As Du Bois noted, “it startled to hear a Negro advocating such a programme … it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.[3]” The silence, Du Bois argued, was doing untold damage to the plight of the African in America. One can only speculate as to the personal reasons why Du Bois went on in the coming years to speak on behalf of these people (and in opposition to Washington), but the fact that he did suggests that the development of his leadership grew out of a feeling of contempt for the status quo of the time.

Kilson (2000) outlines the theoretical differences between Washington’s leadership and Du Bois’s leadership: he classifies Washington as favouring a social organisation type leadership model and refers to Du Bois’s leadership as guidance type or mobilisation type leadership[4]. Kilson interprets Booker T.’s address to the 1895 Atlanta Exposition as a clear rejection of the mobilisation type leadership which would later characterise Du Bois’s leadership, and he is certainly right to do so. By insisting that citizens of the South of both races should “cast down [their] buckets where they are[5]” and stating that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential[6]”, Washington devotes himself to the acceptance of the present conditions of the South and is happy to accept gradual progress.

Moore (2003) characterises Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech as being conclusive of Washington’s overall political ideology. Her observation that “Washington stress[ed] conservative themes about how blacks could use the [Atlanta] exposition to showcase their accomplishments rather than push for political rights[7]” underscores the lack of forethought in Washington’s stance. His concern was about showing what the black man had achieved in the past, in the belief that the white man would benevolently bestow full human and civil rights on both black men and women, without explicit political pressure from black America.

The power of the Tuskegee machine made it difficult if not wholly impossible for any other African American to challenge Washington’s accomodationist policy. As a result, without any contest Washington’s epistemology became the white status quo interpretation of the race problem from the African American point of view. In the period building up to the establishment of the Niagara Movement, which would lay the basis for the NAACP, Du Bois touches upon a frustration which marked the first decade of the new century: “usually … criticism has not found open expression.[8]”

What Washington failed to take into account was that by accepting the present social conditions of the South, he was asking the African American to remain a second class citizen for as long as the white race felt it necessary to ‘keep them in their place’, to use a popular phrase of the time. This fact did not escape the notice of Du Bois: “Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.[9]” When we therefore consider this explicit disfranchisement of the African American (especially in the South) in 1895, Washington’s speech to the Atlanta Exposition reads almost as a preface to the ruling in the U.S Supreme Court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson of 1896, which of course made segregation constitutional as long as facilities for both races were ‘separate but equal’.

Kilson neglects to suggest a reason as to why Washington so explicitly abandoned a mobilisation type leadership model, and why he so eagerly embraced a leadership style built around social organisation. His well-publicised involvement with white philanthropists is, I think, only one of the reasons. Another contributing factor can be found in Washington’s upbringing[10].

Booker T. Washington was born a slave, who, once freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, spent his life searching for an education. Naturally, he became principle of a new school at Tuskegee when the opportunity arose, and from there he sought to help people of his own race. He spent his life teaching essentially manual labour skills, believing they were the best skills to help African Americans prove their worth to white America. In short, Washington rose up from the lowest class (what in today’s society would be the working class), and I would suggest that this left him unable to envision a society where pure equality equated to an absolute meritocracy. To offer guidance, it is necessary to be able to see the road ahead and to see where you are going; Washington probably felt himself unable to offer such guidance because the United States at that time was not a classless meritocracy.

In contrast to this, the growth of W.E.B. Du Bois as a leader begins with him being brought up in the heart of New England, and enjoying privileges Washington could have only dreamed of when he was a slave child. His experiences in Massachusetts showed him in essence how good life could be, though not completely void of racial discrimination[11]. When he studied at Fisk University, however, he soon learned that some citizens could not live like he had done when growing up because of the colour of their skin. As a consequence, Du Bois was steered by his life experiences towards a guidance type or mobilisation type leadership model because of his class, and how his better than average upbringing meant little or nothing in the South, where his skin colour was the only thing that mattered to white America.

Nevertheless, the drawback for Du Bois was that he was an exception to most people of his race. As White notes: “Unlike Booker T. Washington, Du Bois always felt himself apart from the mass of Negroes and, for significant periods of his life was definitely out of step with orthodox black responses to such issues as socialism, Marxism, and Pan-Africanism.[12]” While Du Bois’s upbringing meant he had the power to vividly convey to them a distinctly better life, it also distanced him from them on the basis of intra-racial class politics. I would suggest that this is the primary reason for Du Bois holding the power to his leadership in his pen[13], and not in stirring orations, as Martin Luther King would become famous for.

In conjunction with this, it can be said that the ideological differences between Du Bois and Washington reflect the personal differences between the two men, and in particular their contrasting upbringings. Early on in his life, Du Bois erred on the side of protest rather than leaning towards accomodationism. As Moore explains: “[Du Bois] wrote stirring calls to arms against racial discrimination in local politics.[14]” Her observation that “Du Bois’s articles for the [New York] Globe reflected what would be the basis of his own philosophy in years to come.[15]” reinforces the idea that a protest movement against racial injustice had been building from as far back as the time of Du Bois’s birth in the 1860’s.

It is possible to read “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” as a Du Boisian manifesto. The style of the essay and the way it is written contributes to this, as Du Bois lists on three separate lines the three things Washington “distinctly asks that the black people give up, at least for the present[16]”; shortly after this, Du Bois lists, in the same way, three unsatisfactory things which have occurred as direct or indirect results of the Washingtonian policy; a triple paradox of Washington’s career is then listed by Du Bois not long after, and then Du Bois lists three things he demands: “Such men feel bound in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:
1. The right to vote.
2. Civic equality.
3. The education of youth according to ability.[17]”
Du Bois does this so as to polarise himself as the direct opposite to Booker T. Washington. The polarisation is spelt out unmistakably to the reader.

Once Washington had passed away in 1915, the accomodationist leadership of African Americans was usurped as the mainstream ideology, though in truth it had begun to die away once the NAACP was born. With Washington’s death, no one stood up and continued to speak on behalf of black conservatives. The growth of Crisis, the journal of the NAACP under the editorship of Du Bois’ had been phenomenal. In November 1910 it had a circulation of 1,000 copies; less than twelve months later it was selling 16,000 copies a month[18]. The Tuskegee machine was finally breached by Du Bois’s charismatic and elegant editorials which stirred the black men who read them.

The philosophy which Crisis embodied stemmed from the Niagara Movement which came into being in July 1905. As General Secretary, Du Bois strongly insisted direct action was a political necessity if the African American race was going to achieve anything, any time soon. As Moore notes, “the focus of the Niagara Movement was to encourage action and open protest to challenge racism and discrimination.[19]” Five years later, Crisis -- the main organ of the NAACP -- was setting out with the same principles of the former movement, indicating only subtle changes in Du Bois’s leadership between 1905 and 1910.

With Crisis and the NAACP now front and centre with regard to the race problem in the United States, Du Bois was free to practice his mobilisation type leadership which would bridge the gap between Washington’s accomodationist leadership and Martin Luther King’s civil rights leadership. Indeed, many of the sentiments Du Bois expressed so forcefully would have not looked out of place in the 1960’s. His plainly spoken attacks on discrimination, lynchings and social disfranchisement elevated Crisis to new heights, as it grew into the best-known black journal in the United States[20]. It was more successful that the poorly-named The Moon, the journal of the Niagara Movement, for two main reasons: first, it had more substantial financial backing. The main characters of the Niagara Movement (John Hope, William Monroe Trotter, F.H.M. Murray et al) had been joined by people who left the Washington camp between 1905 and 1910 (Kelly Miller, Mary Church Terrell, Archibald Grimké[21]). The combination of the two groups into the amalgamation of the NAACP made for a more viable economic organisation.

The second reason was Du Bois’s editorship. His ability to simplify the racial issues made the journal popular among people of his own race, whilst at the same time it made white America sit up and take notice. As Paul Robeson put it: “We Negro students joined the NAACP which Dr. Du Bois helped to organise and build; we read religiously Crisis of which he was editor for so many years, and in which he wrote clearly, constructively and militantly on the complex problems of the American scene.[22]” Without such innovative militantism, the financial clout would not have been able to achieve as much. But with Du Bois at the helm, the journal practically paid for itself by the time of the Great War[23].

Education remained an important concept for Du Bois, and in 1920’s Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil he once more expressed its civilising qualities: “We would say, "No civilized state should have citizens too ignorant to participate in government," and this statement is but a step to the fact: that no state is civilized which has citizens too ignorant to help rule it.[24]” Du Bois’s emphasis on the importance of education was similar though not the same to Washington’s, as is mentioned in the next chapter. The difference, however, lies in Du Bois speaking of education as a stepping stone to political involvement and political inclusion, in a country where the black man had been hitherto exiled from the political arena.

Ultimately, however, a leader is not a leader unless he had men following him. The great tragedy of Du Bois’s time as editor of Crisis is that is influence failed to spread further than it did. He was almost always at odds with the NAACP executives, and when he very publicly resigned the editorship of the journal in 1934, in the hope that prominent African Americans would rally around him, he realised he had erred in not attempting to influence the organization more directly[25]. The power of his leadership was expressed in the presentation and clarification of issues from a certain point of view, but ultimately he had no direct say over NAACP policy. His intellectual capacity was never transformed into institutionalised social power through the organisation[26].

Notes

[1] These should be considered as rough bookends only
[2] That is not to say, however, that Du Bois spoke solely on behalf of African Americans. While Du Bois was, to a large degree, “muzzled” by white philanthropists (see chapter three), white liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were essential in the founding of the NAACP. Though no study has successfully characterised the role of white men in the formative years of the NAACP, it is sadly beyond the scope of this investigation to do so.
[3] Du Bois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover. [1903] 1994. p 26
[4] Kilson, Martin. “The Washington and Du Bois Paradigms Reconsidered.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 568. (March 2000): p 301-2
[5] Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: Dover [1901] 1995. p 107
[6] Ibid. p 109
[7] Moore, Jacqueline M. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift. London: S.R. Books. 2003. p 32
[8] Du Bois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. p 27
[9] Ibid. p 30
[10] This might be a little exaggerated in Washington’s autobiography Up From Slavery. As Moore notes, he was probably not quite the country bumpkin he later portrayed himself to have been. (p23)
[11] Moore, Jacqueline M. p 40
[12] White, John. Black leadership in America: From Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson. London: Longman. 1990. p 70
[13] Yancy, Dorothy Couser. “William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’ Atlanta Years: The Human Side – A Study Based upon Oral Sources.” The Journal of Negro History. 63:1. (January 1978): p 65
[14] Moore, Jacqueline M. p 40
[15] Ibid. p 40
[16] Du Bois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. p 30
[17] Ibid. p 32
[18] White, John. p 55
[19] Moore, Jacqueline M. p 78
[20] Ibid. p 85
[21] As listed in Moore, Jacqueline M. p 84
[22] Foner, Philip S. Ed. Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-74. New York: Citadel Press [1978] 1987. p 474
[23] Moore, Jacqueline M. p 85
[24] Du Bois, W.E.B. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Prometheus Books. [1920] 2003. p 151
[25] Rudwick, Elliot M. “W.E.B. Du Bois in the Role of Crisis Editor.” The Journal of Negro History. 43:3. (July 1958): p 239
[26] Ibid. p 239

Back To The Future: Living Through The Legacy Of Sir Henry Morton Stanley

July 22, 2005. My sister gets married in glorious sunshine in front of a packed church. After a beautiful service, the two families gather in the church yard, struggling to stay cool under the blazing sun. Those who have come up from Devon have brought flowers to place on the grave of some deceased relatives. The people they plan to honour and spent a few moments remembering are my grandmother and grandfather. But there’s a problem.

They wander around aimlessly. They can’t find the grave. The grave is unmarked. There is no headstone to mark out the dead. When they died, my grandparents were the last to be lowered in the family plot. At the time they died, in the early 1990’s, we could not afford a headstone.

Eventually my dad emerges from the church, one of the last to do so. As he shakes hands with well-wishers who tell him how beautiful his daughter is, he sees the Devon relatives searching uselessly. He hurries over to point them in the right direction. I am stood a good distance away, but I can see the displeasure written across his face as he leads the way to the Wright family plot.

Later, I speak to him about it. He takes it personally. He takes it hard. His mother and father are resting peacefully, but there is no headstone to show where they lie. He feels he has done them a disservice, and vows to buy a headstone to honour the dead if it the last thing he does. But there is another problem.

Edith and Thomas Wright are not they only two people buried there. My dad suspects Walter is in there, and Sarah Ann might be as well -- oh, and Aunt Jen, what about her? Suddenly I am confronted with names I know nothing of. I have never heard them before, but I am curious to learn: who are all these people? How are they related to me?

My sister’s wedding was the spark. Within a few months, genealogy is the buzz word. My dad and Uncle Dave are well into it, sending off for birth certificates, searching censuses, and visiting some place called Mobberley. They talk for hours at a time on Skype about what they have found out, what they need to find out, where they might be wrong, where they are definitely right......

Before long, it is Christmas time, and festivities take over. But by the spring of 2006 the hunt is on again. The original research project to find out who is in the family grave seems to have been swallowed up by something bigger -- something even more important. A family tree is emerging, and there is over 100 names on it. I recognise only a few.

I am curious as to whether there are any semi-famous people in our family. As far as I am aware, no one in my family has ever done anything significant outside of the family sphere. I ask my dad. It turns out there aren’t. But there is one person, my dad says. This man’s son, John Rowlands. The family tree shows the name John Rowlands, with no marriage to anyone and no child. Well, I ask, if this guy had a son, why is he not on the family tree?

My dad informs me very politely he does not deserve to be. He says this in a roundabout way, but I get the message. His name was the same as his father, John Rowlands. Well, it was until he fled to the United States and changed it.

He was born a bastard -- a very serious thing back in 1841. The workhouse is where he spent his early years, before he ran away. Eventually, he landed in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he settled upon the name Henry Morton Stanley. Soon, the American Civil War was well under way, and this brought with it Stanley’s first mistake. He fought for both the confederate states and for the union. As someone who despises the horrors of slavery with unbound utter contempt, I have found it hard to come to terms with the fact that someone I am related to fought for slavery. What is worse, this would not be his final brush with slavery. But at this point in his life, he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to keep the chains of slavery locked.

Once the civil war had finished, he went to work for the New York Herald, a now defunct but formerly very popular newspaper. In under a week now, I go to New York. It is going to be strange walking the streets of New York City, knowing that at one time, Henry M. Stanley lived and worked here. Over 100 years ago, these were his streets. While he went on to commit a great many atrocities during his time in Africa, he has my respect as a journalist. Family folk law has it he murdered more Africans than he helped on his trips through ‘the dark continent’. For a long time, I despised him as much as everyone else did. Tales have also been passed down of how he traded the Wangwana into slavery as well, when passing through the land of troublesome kingdoms. Of course, none of this is recorded in his official books.

I had respect for Henry Morton Stanley only as a journalist. That changed for the better when I read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography ‘Up From Slavery’. This is the greatest book I have ever read. I already held it in the highest regard before I read the following passage: ‘In the House of Commons, which we visited several times, we met Sir Henry M. Stanley. I talked with him about Africa and its relation to the American Negro, and after my interview with him, I became more convinced than ever that there was no hope of the American Negro’s improving his condition by emigrating to Africa.’ Maybe, just maybe, I had got this all wrong.

I still find it hard to believe that my hero met a member of my family. And in such grand settings! If Booker T. Washington could take a shine to Henry M. Stanley, then surely I could as well. I have begun to read more of his work, and I am currently half way through the first volume of Through The Dark Continent.

But for a short time, before being dispatched to ‘find Livingstone’, in the words of Bennett, a member of my family called New York City home. He lived and worked there, in what was slowly becoming the world’s first modern metropolis. I keep thinking about how much New York has changed since then. What would Henry M. Stanley recognise of today’s Manhattan? Would he be surprised by the disappearance of so many mastheads from the newsstands? The American newspaper which financed his search for Dr. Livingstone is gone. I would love to tell him that it merged with its bitter rival the New York Tribune before going out of print. But he probably wouldn’t believe me.

My ultimate goal in life is to be a journalist. It always has been, even before I knew who Henry M. Stanley was. Stanley was a true English gentleman in New York, but I feel his character was tainted by inherited racism, as so many other people of his generation were. His crimes against humanity on his travels through Africa are shameful. For example: as his caravan sailed down a river through Central Africa, the locals organised a welcome party on the river bank. They had never seen a white person before. They were dressed impeccably, wearing traditional garments of the finest materials, reserved for such rare and special occasions. Stanley panicked and slaughtered them all. Or so legend has it.

In a way, Sir Henry Morton Stanley lived my dream 100+ years before I could dream. He wrote for a great New York newspaper, he lived in the most vibrant city in America and he saw the world. Moreover, he made my dream happen for himself. I admire his drive and his determination, his will to succeed in all circumstances against all the odds. I also admire his whit. When he met Dr. Livingstone, he had not seen another white person since the Navy sailed away some two hundred days ago: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ I try to focus on the good things he did, but sometimes he makes it very hard.


The family grave still has no headstone.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

Our Staff

I can't help but feel bad about how poor some of our weekend staff are. I feel part of their inability to work is my fault; I feel part of their inability is their fault; and I feel part of their inability is due to the failing of fundamental education to prepare them properly for the working world.

Firstly my fault. I've seen them making mistakes and I try and point them out as pleasantly as I can. I almost always manage that. I've seen them slacking around and being generally lazy and teenage-ish (if you know what I mean), but I've done little to help the situation. I did try to lead by example, but they simply aren't mature enough to recognize what I was doing. I watched them pricing last week, with white labels, wrong prices and putting them anywhere on the product. I told them once how to do it. But they didn't bother to change (in the end I changed the white labels in that gun). The only other way I stepped in was to tell one of them to not just throw the seed into the containers, but arrange it neatly. I feel bad about pointing things out like that because it seems straight forward common knowledge to me. I just think I could have done more though.

I feel partly responsible seeing as I trained one of them, but an incident last week makes me think I did everything right. He was putting a bag of compost through the till and didn't use the PLU codes and Andy walked past, and I happened to be standing in the vicinity. Andy asked him, "you know how to use the PLU codes, don't you?" and he said no. Andy told me to show him how to use the PLU codes. But I remember taking him outside when training him (even though Andy had already given him a tour of the garden centre). I showed him the bags of compost outside and telling him that if someone brought one of these bags to his till then he should use these codes in the book. I then took him to the till and showed him how to use the codes! I then gave him a demonstration!

Not only are they crippled by their inability to listen, but they have no work ethic what-so-ever. For the likes of you and I, and all the full-time staff, we have to work or we don't eat. But if they get fired, they still get food put on their tables by their Mums. They seriously need to read Booker T. Washington's book 'Up From Slavery'. They simply don't care if they do the job right because they don't have to care. It just isn't possible to survive in the working world with the same attitude that gets you through school. You just can't do it. The same can be said about university. In university, you have to listen to pass exams to get a degree. But above all, they don't understand the fundamental principle of interdisciplinarity. The grossest lack of such a skill was evident a few weeks back. I don't want to 'grass' on people, but if I have to I will. I saw her tearing one of her many voids off the top of the till and throwing it in the bin. I thought, "did I just see that?" so I stuck around. Two minutes later she did it again. It became painful to watch so I made a hasty exit. It just seems silly, illogical, stupid and wrong. I still can't believe she does that. It just seems sad that, in the end, most of it really is all her fault.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright