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We do not merely protest: we make renewed demands for freedom
hear ihe im m ortal word* o f Claude M c K a y ’ s lines from these lines written
by DuBois eight years before M c K a y ’s / / We M u s i D ie. This is OuBois,
1911: “ Let every black American gird up his loins, a great day is coming.
W e have crawled and pleaded for justice and we have cheerfully spat upon
and murdered and burned. W e will not endure it forever. I f we are to die, in
Ood's name let us perish like men and not like bales o f hay.”
You w ill understand then that when one speaks o f DuBois and o f his
approach to life and his zest for life , one is speaking o f a fighter, o f an
agitator. Indeed, here is DuBois writing on agitation, again in 1911: "Some
good friends o f our cause we represent fear agitation. Such honest critics
mistake the function o f agitation. A toothache is agitation; is a toothache a
good thing? No. But is it therefore useless? N o. It is useful because it tells
the body o f decay. W ithout it the body would suffer unknowingly. It would
think all is well when Io. danger lurks.” Three years later he wrote that basic
to human progress is the radical, the disturber, the agitator, the organizer.
These are the ones he then wrote o f and always believed. These are the ones
who, “ seeing the disinherited and the damned can never sit still and silent;
on the contrary, these are the men and women who go down in the blood
and dust o f battle. They say ugly things to an ugly w orld. They spew the
lukew arm fence straddlers out o f their mouth like G od o f old. They cry
aloud and spare not. They shout from the housetops and they make this
world so damned uncomfortable with its nasty burden o f evil that it tries to
get good and does sometimes get a little bit better."
T o make a life, one must face it. One needs courage no matter who one
may be. But if the person is black and lives in the United States and is to
retain sanity and effectiveness, courage is vital. This is true now, and God
knows it was true f if t y and th irty years ago. I l ’ s true now here in the
North and it certainly was true then in the N orth and in the South. And if
one is a black man and a poet, and a black militant poet and lives and writes
and agitates and organize* while in the South, one surely needs courage. In
addition, a pistol on one's person and a shotgun in one's home will not do
any harm either and DuBois had both. As fo r courage, let one exam ple
suffice.
I l is I9 S I and W ashington is in the lowest depths o f M cC arthyism . As
part o f the vicious insanity, D r. DuBois has been indicted as, quoting the
indictment, “ an unregistered foreign agent" because he headed the Peace
In fo rm a tio n C e n te r th ro ug h w hich over 2 m illio n signatures to the
Stockholm Peace Pledge against the A-bom b were obtained in this country
despite terror and H itler-like propaganda. O f course if Thomas Jefferson
and Frederick Douglass could be called “ foreign agents’ * in their day as they
were, why not DuBois? In 1951. unlike Jefferson and Douglas, there was
an actual in d ictm en t and D uBois was m ugged, fin g erp rin ted and even
handcuffed, and put on trial. In the course o f that trial, when world public
opinion let the chauvinist government o f the United States have some in k ­
ling o f who it was they were trying and when the Prime Minister i f India,
Nehru. DuBois’ friend, sent a cable to the United States, to M r. Eisenhow­
er, asking if everybody in Washington had gone quite berserk and crazy;
when the damned chauvinist government had some idea o f who they had a r­
rested, other than an old black man, they came to the conclusion that they
had better o ffer a deal. So the government indicated to DuBois’ attorneys
that if he, at 83 years old, would plead what the lawyers call “ no defense,”
he would be given a suspended sentence and not go to prison.
O n this m a tte r D r. D u B o is w ro te to one o f his a tto rn ey s, a black
attorney, James A . Cobb, A p ril 10, 1931, “ I want to make clear to you my
own attitude after careful thought and deliberation. I regard this case as a
great opportunity to communicate the right o f free speech and advocacy o f
peace. O n this line I want the case fought and under no circumstances will I
curry favor or ask leniency o f this government. I f that involves declaring
that I ever acted as an agent for any foreign person, organization or stale I
will prefer to rot in ja il than utter that lie and I have refused too many offers
to sell out to be bribed now in my old age.” And he closed with this charac­
teristic paragraph which w ill give a hint o f his humor and his sweetness: “ I
know you w ill respect my decision and I put it down in plain words to be
sure it is understood. I was always cranky, as you know, and this grows with
the years. At the same time, I am not really hankering for jail and want your
best effort* to keep me o u t."
I bespeak to you his legacy. Speaking for the Niagra movement, which he
founded, speaking for it in 1906 he warned, " N o promise o f money or
notoriety, no promise o f wealth or fame is worth the surrender o f a people’s
manhood or the loss o f a person’s self-respect.. . .O n this rock we have
planted our banners, we will never give up though the trump o f doom finds
us still fighting. . . . W e appeal to the young men and women o f this nation,
to those whose nostrils are yet befouled by greed, snobbery and racial nar­
rowness----- Courage, brothers and sisters, the battle for hum anity is not
lost or losing. The m orning breaks over bloodstained hills. W e must not
falter and we may not shrink." That was 1906.
Here is 1938. " L if e has its pain and evil, the disappointm ents, but in
healthful length o f days there is trium phal fullness o f experience, joy, and
the most interesting of continued stories unfold. Not eternity but time is for
the living.**
He had his moments o f despair. Even he had such moments; he was hu­
man. W ith this in his Litany a l A tlan ta, written on a train in 1906 when he
got news o f the terrible pogrom o f that year, when a crazed mob, assisted by
the police, was rampaging through the ghetto where his wife and little girl,
Yolanda, lived. And he did not know what had become o f them and so he
wrote L itany at A tlan ta, one o f the great poems in the English language.
There is in this poem a note o f despair. “ North is greed and South is blood.
W ithin the coward and without the liar. Whither? T o d eath."
But they were very fleeting moments To the end he held fast to his rock.
In his last message which characteristically he drafted years before his death
and sealed it in an envelope and told his w ife , his second w ife — Shirley
Graham DuBois— " M y dear, when I am being buried I ask you to read this
message at the g rave," which she did: "O n e thing alone I charge you. As
you live, believe in life . Always human beings w ill live and progress to
greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in
that truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is lon g ."
" A ll o f us need,” he said in 1904, "the uplifting presence o f morning on
the hills, (he whistle o f birds in the treetops o f the daw n, the fla ir o f the
flaming sword in ihe hands o f that dread angel who keeps (he way o f life ."
DuBois was as learned as one could become in a formal sense, with years
o f concentrated study at Fisk, at Harvard and Berlin. He taught Germ an,
Greek and L atin , and sociology, history and economics. H e had studied
with Albert Bushnell H a rt, with W illiam James, George Santayana, M ax
Faber, Josiah Royce, and George Chaney. He had dined with counts and
dukes, wined with heads o f state and even been appointed a Minister Prime
Potentiary by the President o f the United States, M r. Coolidge. in 1924.
Still he was not corrupted and still he persevered. Harvard published his dis­
sertation in 1896 but never thought o f adding him to its faculty; the U niver­
sity o f Pennsylvania published his massive pioneering effort ir. urban sociol­
ogy, what we now call urban sociology, in 1899 but never thought o f adding
him to its faculty. In Atlanta he was forbidden use o f its main library, filled
with his own books. W orking on his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction,
first published in 1933 and revolutionizing the understanding o f United
States history, he apologized in his book, in its introduction, for possible re­
search failures since the archive depositories o f half a dozen stales prohibit­
ed his entry. In Nashville a white woman slapped him fu ll in the face and
hurled obscenities at him. A kind o f pogrom entered his home and terro r­
ized his wife and daughter and his wife was never the same thereafter. When
he was 83 years old the United States government arrested him as a foreign
agent and mugged him and fingerprinted him and put manacles upon his
wrists..
A youngster o f 22, at the H a rv a rd com m encem ent o f 1890, a black
student, delivering the speech fo r the student body o f H a rv a rd in 1890,
facing an audience including the wife o f a form er president o f the United
States, the governor o f Massachusetts, the Episcopal Bishop o f New Y o rk,
let alone the assembled dignitaires o f his university, facing an audience o f
white faced in 1890— twenty-two years o f age, he had ten minutes to speak.
He chose as his topic “ Jefferson Davis as a Representative o f C ivilization.”
A nd Je fferso n Davis was then dead o nly eleven years. " H e and his
civilization represented,” said the black young man, "th e cool logic o f the
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