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NAACP

Lest We Forget: W.E.B. Du Bois

Brian K. Noe · February 8, 2017 ·

This was originally written for Learnist. Sadly, that site is no longer online, so I’ll be republishing some of the articles here.

In the first of this series honoring American heroes unknown to many Americans, we remember the great philosopher and freedom fighter W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP.

Du Bois’ Early Life in Massachusetts

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, less than three years after the end of the American Civil War. His mother’s grandfather was a slave named Tom Burghardt, who served in the Continental Army during the War of Independence and gained his freedom. Du Bois’ father’s grandfather was a French-American slave owner.

Du Bois’ father left him and his mother when the child was only two years old. They moved into her parent’s home for awhile, and she worked to support herself and her son until she suffered a stroke when Du Bois was in his early teens. She passed from this life when Du Bois was only seventeen years old.

Du Bois attended an integrated public school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, growing up alongside white classmates in a community that would have been considered “tolerant” for that time. Later in life, Du Bois would write of the racism that was a part of his daily life as a child, despite living in a place that wasn’t formally segregated.

His sharp intellect was apparent to his teachers, and he was encouraged to pursue a higher education. Du Bois would be the first African American to earn a Doctorate from Harvard.

First Experiences in the South

It was during his four years of study from 1885 through 1888 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, that Du Bois first witnessed and experienced Southern Racism. Formal segregation was the law and lynchings of African Americans were commonplace. In fact, between 1880 and 1930, more than 2000 black men, women, and children were killed by lynch mobs.

A less courageous man might never again have ventured to the South after graduation from Fisk, but Du Bois would return to teach at Atlanta University in 1897.

Address to the Nations of the World

In 1900 Du Bois gave the closing address at the First Pan African Congress held in London.

He began: “In the metropolis of the modern world, in this the closing year of the nineteenth century, there has been assembled a congress of men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair-will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.”

He appealed to all people and all nations: “Let the world take no backward step in that slow but sure progress which has successively refused to let the spirit of class, of caste, of privilege, or of birth, debar from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness a striving human soul.”

Break with Booker T. Washington: The Niagara Movement

After the brutal lynching of Sam Holt in Atlanta in 1899, Du Bois was moved to increasing activism, having grown frustrated with the capitulation of the most well-known and popular African American leader of the time, Booker T. Washington.

Du Bois called for a meeting of black leaders to be held at Niagara Falls, New York. The meeting was eventually held on the Canadian side of the Falls, after being denied accommodations in white hotels on the American side.

They drafted a manifesto that included the following declaration. “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave…”

The Souls of Black Folk

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published one of his most influential works, The Souls of Black Folk. It included 14 essays, each chapter beginning with a poetic quote.

A major theme of the book was the dual nature of consciousness for Black Americans.

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

“The history of the American Negro,” wrote Du Bois, “is the history of this strife.”

You can read the entire book for free at Project Gutenberg.

The NAACP and The Crisis Magazine

In the wake of the horrific race riots in Springfield, Illinois in 1908, a bi-racial alliance was formed that would become the NAACP.

Founded on the principles expressed by the Niagara Movement, the NAACP’s main goal was to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority group citizens of the United States and to eliminate race prejudice.

Du Bois founded The Crisis magazine as the premier crusading voice for civil rights. The official magazine of the NAACP, it is now one of the oldest black periodicals in the nation.

The NAACP continues to be a “multiracial army of ordinary women and men from every walk of life, race and class–united to awaken the consciousness of a people and a nation.”

The Harlem Renaissance

In the 1920s and 30s, Harlem became the center of a “spiritual coming of age” ushering in a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity.

In addition to reporting and advocacy, The Crisis became a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, as Du Bois published works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and other African American literary figures.

Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance in this video from History.com.

Leftist Politics, Peace Activism and Government Repression

Like many great Americans who upheld the ideals of peace, freedom and universal brotherhood, Du Bois became a target for the FBI and McCarthyism.

A longtime activist against imperial warfare, in 1950 Du Bois became chairman of the Peace Information Center, formed to promote the Stockholm Appeal which demanded the outlawing of atomic weapons.

The Justice department required that the Peace Information Center register with the federal government as an “agent of a foreign state.” Du Bois refused and was put to trial. Though the case was dismissed, the government confiscated Du Bois’s passport, holding it for the next eight years.

Du Bois had run for the United States Senate from New York in 1950 on the ticket of the American Labor Party, a group which had split from the Socialist Party of America. His belief that racism around the world was primarily a function of capitalism would eventually lead him to join the Communist Party in the early 1960s, at the age of 93. He reasoned that the Communist ideal was to build a world “whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part.”

Du Bois’ Death in Ghana and Enduring Legacy

In October of 1961, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to work on an encyclopedia of the African diaspora to be called the Encyclopedia Africana. The United States government refused to renew his passport in 1963, so he became a citizen of Ghana, where he died at the age of 95.

By coincidence, the March on Washington was held on August 28, 1963, the day after his death. Although Du Bois did not live to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, these landmark pieces of legislation codified into the law of the land much of what Du Bois had struggled for his entire life.

His legacy endures today in the work of historians such as Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, in The Crisis magazine, in the ongoing efforts of the NAACP, and in the struggles of people everywhere who strive for a more just and peaceful world.

Filed Under: Lest We Forget Tagged With: America, Anti-Racism, Black History, Communism, DuBois, Harlem Renaissance, Heroes, History, NAACP, Race, Racism

WKAN Interview – Racial Taboo

Brian K. Noe · October 22, 2015 ·

This morning I was in the studios of WKAN Radio with Bill and Allison to discuss our Racial Taboo townhall event that will be held at 6 PM on next Tuesday, October 27th in the fourth floor auditorium of the Kankakee Public Library. You can click on the player below to listen.

http://noebie.com/audio/wkan-morning-show-racial-taboo-102215.mp3

The event is sponsored by the Kankakee County Branch of the NAACP, the Kankakee Public Library and Feed Arts & Cultural Center. It’s free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there!

RACIAL-TABOO-poster-kankakee-102715

Filed Under: Audio Tagged With: Anti-Racism, Feed Arts Center, Interviews, Kankakee, Kankakee Public Library, NAACP, Race, Racial Taboo, Radio, WKAN

Racial Taboo Townhall Meeting October 27th

Brian K. Noe · September 1, 2015 ·

The Kankakee County Branch NAACP will be co-sponsoring a townhall meeting on race, featuring the film Racial Taboo, at the Kankakee Public Library auditorium on Tuesday October 27th, 2015 from 6 to 8 PM. The meeting will be an opportunity to learn more about the relationships in our society between people of various races, to discuss the topic in small groups, and to perhaps begin to establish your own friendships across racial lines.

Source: Racial Taboo Townhall Meeting October 27th – Kankakee County Branch NAACP

Filed Under: Video Tagged With: Anti-Racism, Kankakee, NAACP, Race, Racism

To Fight the Good Fight

Brian K. Noe · August 8, 2015 ·

Over the past four years, as I began to awaken politically, it’s become important to me not only to try to recognize and understand the causes of injustices in our society, but to actually make a contribution to the struggles against them. The challenge has been to identify opportunities to make a difference, living in a small (and fairly conservative) metropolitan area. Outside the realm of party politics, which I have mostly rejected as a dead end, there is a decided dearth of organized activism in my community. This was even more the case when we lived in a small rural community in the southern part of the state.

I more or less stumbled on to a set of pursuits that form the core of my activism. I didn’t set out consciously or methodically, but simply started working on things that I thought were of value, and only realized in hindsight that they essentially comprise a political program that turns out to be just what I would have wanted to undertake. Here’s a quick list of some of those things. I share it not to pat myself on the back, nor to seek the approval or praise of others, but to spark the imagination of folks who face a similar predicament. I’d also love to hear about your projects, and what has drawn you to your own personal activism, so please feel free to comment below.

I joined a union. In another day, even the billionaires recognized the value of labor unions to democracy. None other than J. Paul Getty once said “I do believe in unions and believe that free, honest labor unions are our greatest guarantees of continuing prosperity and our strongest bulwark against social or economic totalitarianism.” Tyrants recognize this, and have routinely suppressed organized labor on the path to total power.

Although I was raised in a union home, I had never held a union card in my life. I worked in jobs where we were not organized, and it never occurred to me that we could be. Once I became more conscious, and began researching options, I was delighted to learn that the Industrial Workers of the World organize the worker, not the job. I joined the Wobblies in November of 2011. My location and the type of work I do precludes me from being a participant in most direct face-to-face activities of the union branch, but the opportunity to lend support and solidarity to my union sisters and brothers (and to learn from them) remotely has been wonderful. I’m now also a dues paying member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981. The mere act of identifying as a union member has brought a new perspective to daily life, and has opened up conversations and opportunities to further the cause that were not possible before.

I became active in the NAACP. Much like joining a union, it had not occurred to me that someone like me could be a part of an organization like the NAACP. If you click on the “About” section of this site, you’ll see from the picture that I am a grey headed white guy. I didn’t know that the NAACP was open to people of all races, and didn’t know whether I would be welcome in its ranks. But when I read about some pamphleting that had been done in our county by the KKK, I felt compelled to do something formal and substantive to stand against racism. I found welcoming arms and the fellowship of kindred souls in Kankakee Branch 3035. I created a new website for the branch, got involved in the city council campaigns of some of our members, and am currently working to organize a community town hall on race.

I marched for marriage equality. This was at my wife’s prompting. It was a small demonstration, organized by the LGBT community and their allies, friends and family members here. We walked from the farmers market gazebo to the county courthouse, where we heard speeches and learned about the bills that were being considered in the state legislature. Besides showing solidarity by taking a visible public stand for justice, my wife and I also became acquainted with some of the local organizers. We joined them when they met with our state representative, and advocated for their rights under the principle of religious liberty. I also subsequently helped organize their tabling at the county fair. These efforts seemed almost trivial to me at the time, but thousands of similar efforts across the nation brought the movement to victory.

I started a community singalong and a radical reading group. Pete Seeger had great confidence in the power of song to change the world. He said this.

“Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.”

So on May Day of 2014, we held our first gathering of the Key City Singalong. We sing a wide variety of songs, in fact, everyone who attends gets to decide what we’ll sing. So it’s not all specifically songs about social issues, but we do sing our share of old union hymns and other songs of relevance. We are also creating a small community of people who demonstrate, each month, that there are things of value in the world that are not commodities.

This month will also mark the first meeting of the Chicago Southland Jacobin Reading Group. It’s too early to tell whether we’ll be successful in creating and sustaining any scale of interest in monthly discussions of explicitly socialist ideas in the area where I live, but I have hopes.

Both of these events are held at Feed Arts and Cultural Center, where I’m a resident artist. The place also hosts lots of other wonderful activities to build community and nurture the arts. We’ve even had concerts from notable singers in the political folkie tradition, like Matthew Grimm and David Rovics.

I help out at a food pantry. Pope Francis says this is how prayer works: “You pray for the hungry, then you feed them.” Although our family contributes funds to organizations that feed and care for others, I wanted to get involved directly in some work that helps to alleviate the effects of poverty and meets the basic needs of people in our community. After speaking with Sister Denise Glazik, who is a Pastoral Associate at our church, I began volunteering at the Center of Hope. It’s about an hour of honest work on Thursday morning, unloading trucks, sweeping and mopping floors, stocking shelves and such. I find it to be one of the most satisfying and rewarding activities of the entire week.

I’m working to organize against the military recruitment of our children. While attending a talk in Chicago last month about the realities of the war on terror, one question was stirring in my heart. What can I do about this? Our nation’s unrestrained militarism around the globe seems like just too big an issue to approach. Fortunately, the presenters mentioned in their talk that under the No Child Left Behind legislation, schools were compelled to give the personal data of students to military recruiters unless a parent explicitly opts out, and that groups formed to educate parents on the issue were springing up around the country. I’ve begun to reach out to school board members and others about this issue, and plan to make it a project in the coming months.

Will any of this matter? Considering the massive and daunting problems we face, we may not know for a long time, perhaps not even in our lifetimes, whether any of our efforts will be enough. I do know that each of these activities are concrete, practical and have potential. Beyond that, they make sense in terms of the grand narrative of our era. The principal menace in our world today is an ideology centered on corporate power, militarism, racism, anti-intellectualism and attacks on freedom and democracy. So to fight the good fight we join unions. We work against the war machine. We build friendships and unity across racial lines. We support the arts and cultural literacy. We engage in intellectual pursuits and discussions. We feed the hungry.

When we do any of that, we rise up against the forces of greed and death. Whether it will be enough to turn the tide in that struggle, I know not. But I must believe that it matters. There’s just no sense in believing that there’s nothing we can do.

rise-up

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: Activism, Anti-Racism, Anti-Recruitment, Class Struggles, Community, Community Groups, Community Organizing, How To, Hunger, IWW, NAACP, Politics, Poverty, Union, War On Terror, Wobblies

Things That Caught My Eye – Week of August 4th, 2014

Brian K. Noe · August 7, 2014 ·

Here are some links to articles that caught my eye this week.

6 Ways Wall Street Is Hosing Chicago Teachers – Matthew Cunningham-Cook unpacks how the country’s biggest investment firms are endangering the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund.

We Need to Fight for Equality – William Spriggs reflects on how the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement must be united.

Catholic Social Teaching and Adjunct Faculty Organizing – John Russo writes about Catholic Universities and the Social Teaching of the Church.

Some Facts That Poverty-Deniers Don’t Want to Hear – Three-quarters of conservative Americans think poor people have it easy. Paul Buchheit shows that they don’t.

Imagine If People Were Paid What Their Work Is Really Worth to Society – Professor Reich imagines.

Films that Debunk Corporate Education Reform – A list of must-see videos from Diane Ravitch’s Blog.

Israel/Palestine FAQ – Who are the Palestinians? Who are the Israelis? Is Folk Singer David Rovics a self-hating Jew? Find out in this FAQ.

Do Palestinians Really Exist? – When he was nine years old, Dean Obeidallah finally learned about his father’s people.

Filed Under: Curated Links Tagged With: AFL-CIO, Catholic, Chicago, CTU, David Rovics, Israel, NAACP, Palestine, Poverty, Union

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