The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
by John Fabian Witt · 14 Oct 2025 · 735pp · 279,360 words
Trial lawyer, defender of Garland Fund causes. Madeleine Doty. Author and journalist, specialist in prison reform and pacifism; egalitarian marriage to Roger Baldwin in 1919. W. E. B. Du Bois. Founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and editor of The Crisis magazine, sometime Garland Fund beneficiary and frequent Garland Fund
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Walter Lippmann. Columnist and author, advisor to the Garland Fund, theorist of democracy in mass society. Alain Locke. Howard University philosopher, intellectual sparring partner of W. E. B. Du Bois, proponent of education for Black Americans. Robert Morss Lovett. English professor at the University of Chicago; New Republic editor; Garland Fund director who later fought
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American Birth Control League received support for its voluntary motherhood campaign, though the Fund steered clear of her baleful ideas about eugenics. Civil rights firebrand W. E. B. Du Bois consulted regularly with the Fund and relied on its support for projects that turned the Fund’s attention toward segregated education. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr worked
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St. Louis had been directly involved in the riot to blame it on the city’s industrial cabal.54 The brilliant Black advocate and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois had a different view of what had happened. A founder of the NAACP, Du Bois understood how deeply the racist sentiments of white workingmen
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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Johnson was the NAACP’s first Black executive secretary and a close associate of its founder, W. E. B. Du Bois.32 Baldwin leaned heavily on people in the liberal press and the free speech movement, which made sense given his hopes to alter public opinion
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could be so dealt with,” and shame, too, for his country, which claimed to be “the great example of democracy to the world.”6 * * * W. E. B. Du Bois would later describe Johnson’s near-lynching in Jacksonville as the formative event in his friend’s life. His brush with danger caused Johnson to
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put into practice Charlie Anderson’s lessons about loyalty. An increasingly bitter fight in Black politics was breaking out between Washington and his younger rival, W. E. B. Du Bois. Johnson knew Du Bois, too. They had met in 1904, shortly after Johnson read Du Bois’s searing 1903 book, The Souls of Black
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-lynching law.” The Louisville Courier-Journal opined that the Republican Party was secretly “not at all displeased with the result of the filibuster.” An irate W. E. B. Du Bois concurred. Republicans, he wrote in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, “never intended to pass the Dyer Bill, unless they could do so without
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about race, more ways to alter public opinion. His connection with the new American Fund seemed to provide a path.81 James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois (pictured here at middle and left, respectively, in a 1917 march against the East St. Louis massacre) won a grant from the Fund to
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to support studies at the Atlanta School of Social Work on white racism as a psychiatric pathology. A who’s who of Black leaders—including W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard University’s Alain Locke, and Philadelphia lawyer Sadie Alexander—applied for funds to endow a Negro Foreign Fellowship Foundation to support Black college
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path, moreover, that would defy the legacy of the vast philanthropic foundations. They proposed to transform Black education in the South. Fasten Slavery Permanently W. E. B. Du Bois first glimpsed the way forward. Schools for Black students in the South might draw the interest of white radicals like Baldwin if their purpose could
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the Negro” stood out to Baldwin (always the Fund’s most active member) as anomalous. Grants like the one made three months earlier to W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of school inequality in the South seemed disconnected from the Fund’s main work. The Fund, Baldwin contended, should focus on its principal
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And a once-in-a-generation economic boon had been seized from poor Black members of the community and appropriated largely by the richest whites. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to the New York World in late November to rebut its coverage of the episode. “There is not a civilized country in the world
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Shaler and Louis Agassiz had taught such things to generations of Harvard students, Baldwin included. It was commonplace in white circles, radical and otherwise. As W. E. B. Du Bois saw it, the Scopes monkey case revealed not an America divided between North and South, secular and evangelical, sophisticated and rube, but an America
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Tree” and “Congo Love Song.” 10 Capturing the Captors I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. —W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1926 In December 1925, on the heels of the first Ossian Sweet trial in Detroit, James Weldon Johnson hosted an intimate dinner for Clarence Darrow
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contributions of African Americans from the earliest days of slavery to urban Harlem in the twentieth century.11 * * * Johnson’s colleague at the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois, shared his friend’s commitment to using cultural accomplishments to prove the genius of Black America. Even as the two men crafted their proposal about
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-called Old Crowd Negroes, whom they excoriated as “me-too-boss, hat-in-hand, lick-spittling” supporters of Wilson’s Jim Crow war. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose 1917 decision to close ranks with the White House in support of the war effort had astonished the two younger men, drew the magazine
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have suffocated. And without the Brotherhood, the Fund’s assault on Jim Crow, with its controversial project of school equalization, might never have begun.74 W. E. B. Du Bois, Nina Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson (left to right) in 1930. 15 Millennia Don’t Just Happen The largest group of unorganized workers
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Black Belt thesis, which applied to a sickle-shaped region stretching from Virginia south and west to Texas, was disastrously ill-conceived—even “suicidal,” as W. E. B. Du Bois put it. There was, to be sure, an intermittent tradition of Black nationalist separatism in the United States. Marcus Garvey had led its latest
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Ernst that “so many matters lie within the discretion of administrative officers that your purpose would be defeated” even if “technically you had won.” W. E. B. Du Bois amplified the critique. Frustrated by the American Fund’s omission of a set-aside for The Crisis in its big NAACP grant, Du Bois warned
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, whose book on Black labor had just been published by Vanguard Press, played lead roles. The splintered old guard of the organization came, too. W. E. B. Du Bois attended the Howard sessions, having just quit the NAACP. So did NAACP lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston. Norman Thomas sent prepared remarks on the sharecroppers union
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8 One of the Fund’s first grants financed iconic full-page anti-lynching advertisements (left) in newspapers around the country. Soon thereafter, Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois (together at right) won a Fund grant to study Black schools in the South. They described schools as a tool of discriminatory government spending;
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leads a dramatic teach-in for Passaic strikers on how to use gas masks to combat police tear gas while walking the picket lines. 27 W. E. B. Du Bois, pictured in the offices of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, worked closely with Fund director James Weldon Johnson on a large NAACP grant application
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Press records, ca. 1925–ca. 1985, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University VRP Victor G. Reuther Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University WEBDBP W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts Special Collections and University Archives PROLOGUE: A Curious Inheritance 1. tall, with dark hair: “On Refusing a Million,” New York Times
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–1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 1988), at 88. “without strikes”: Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” in Jacqueline M. Moore, ed., Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 127. “separate but equal”: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 12. “almost worship”…
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American Pogrom, 71, 124. Tensions: Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (World Publishing, 1964), at 16–22. “growing menace”: W. E. B. Du Bois and Martha Greuning, “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” The Crisis, Sept. 1917, 219. Armour… “industrial standards”: Gompers, “East St. Louis Riots,” 621. 49.
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of America’s Great Migration (Random House, 2010). 8. “ill-fitted”: RNB, “Autobiography (1920–1931),” b. 20, f. 12, RNBP. “soul of a poet”: W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1940). 9. Johnson was born: JWJ, Along This Way, 3
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Constitution, Dec. 6, 1922, 6. “not at all displeased”: “Collapse of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill,” Louisville Courier Journal, Dec. 9, 1922, 6. “never intended”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Opinion,” The Crisis, Jan. 1923, 103. “convicted of failure”: JWJ, “Memorandum from Mr. Johnson to Dr. Du Bois, 1923,” in Wilson, Selected Writings of
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Americans in East Florida,” Journal of Florida Studies 1 (2018): 10, 14. 17. “robbery of the white man”: Bond, Education of the Negro, 103. “taxation”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Negro Education,” The Crisis, Feb. 1918, 176. 18. “really pays”: JWJ, “The Importance of the Negro to the South,” New York Age, Aug. 16,
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(1978): 371–96; Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education (University of Missouri Press, 1999); Donald Johnson, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle for Social Education, 1900–1930,” Journal of Negro History 85 (2000): 71–95. only to segregated… whites-only schools
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See 1924 correspondence in reel 2, AFPSR. 34. “labor world”… “devised”: JWJ to AFPS, Dec. 17, 1924, r. 31, b. 49, AFPSR. 35. 1901… study: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Common School: Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Sixth Conference for
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the Meetings of the Board of Directors, NAACPP. 36. tangle with: Matter of Du Bois Address, 1924–1925, b. 22, LHWP; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (Henry Holt, 1993), at 70, 143–50, 422–53. 37. Born in Wales: Johnson
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Genius’: Thomas Jesse Jones and the Problem of Indian Administration,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5 (2018): 37–69. 38. “actual needs”… “hearsay evidence”: Johnson, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle,” 79, 85. 39. “more adequate”… “mental, moral”: Thomas Jesse Jones, Negro Education; A Study of the Private and
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standards”: Ibid., 174. “deliberately shut”: Ibid., 175. “cheap labor”… “double taxation”: Ibid., 176. “practically unrepresented”… “sinister danger”: Ibid., 178. “contented labor”… “white union labor”: Johnson, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle,” 87 n2. 41. Committee on Education: Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors, Feb. 14, 1923, 2
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Scott, “Carter G. Woodson & Thomas Jesse Jones: A Comparative Study in Race and Philanthropy, 1915–1921,” M.A. thesis (Clark University, 2003); also Marybeth Gasman, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson: Differing Views on the Role of Philanthropy in Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 42 (2002): 493, 495. 43. “will not
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allow”… “sneer and yell”: WEBDB, “Gifts and Education,” 151. “one half”: WEBDB, Souls of Black Folk, 143. “labor reservoir”: “Reflections of W. E. B. Du Bois on Education as a Force for Racial Progress,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 2 (1993): 4–5. 44. “form a large”… “read and write
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: See Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011). “civilized country”: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (Henry Holt, 1993), at 8. “vicious exploitation”: WW, “ ‘Massacring Whites,’ ” 715. “lawfully”: Wells-Barnett, “
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Renaissance and the Vogue,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. George Hutchinson (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28–40; also David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (Henry Holt, 1993), at 156–75. 14. education grants: Minutes of the Fifty-Second
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and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 1979); Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harvard University Press, 1976), 193; Bernard, “Renaissance and the Vogue,” 34; Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry, “The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem
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at 61–66; Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 13–14. “suicidal”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Rayford W. Logan (University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 31, 61. grandiose iteration
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Lawyering and Politics in the Era Before Brown,” Yale Law Journal 115 (2005): 256, 318–31. 60. on-again-off-again socialist: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (Henry Holt, 1993), at 523–43; William P. Jones, “ ‘Nothing Special to Offer the Negro’: Revisiting the ‘Debsian
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: The Crisis and the Labor Problem [n.d., Jan. 1930], b. I-C-196, f. 3, NAACPLC. of the 2.5 million Black people: Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, at 251. “include Negroes”: NAACP Press Release, Oct. 15, 1929, b. I-C-196, f. 2, NAACPLC. “barriers set up”: Twentieth Annual Report, 4.
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: William Fischel, Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 112. 59. Du Bois: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (Henry Holt, 2000), at 262–65. Randolph: APR, “Why I Would Not Stand for Re
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Rights; Megan Ming Francis, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture,” Law & Society Review 53 (2019): 275. flimsy right: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?,” Journal of Negro Education 4 (1935): 328–35. “cash value”: Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in
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Gone,” New York Herald Tribune, June 20, 1941, 16. 11. “main agencies”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The American Fund,” The Crisis, June, 1926, 57. “the impossible”: W. E. B. Du Bois, “We Rejoice and Tell the World,” National Guardian, May 31, 1954, 5; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (Henry Holt, 1993
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, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library; 343: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; 356: W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries; 360: Bettmann / Getty Images; 365: James S. Allen, The Negro
Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav · 3 Nov 2020 · 175pp · 45,815 words
These ideas were taken up in various guises by Otto Neurath—the original target of the socialist calculation debate—and by thinkers as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, and Karl Polanyi. All advocated for a world in which democratic associations of women and men replaced the rule of markets with cooperative
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, so the rest of society could be raised above the muck, see Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 30–1. See also W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, Dover, 1999 [1920], p. 69. 7 See More, Utopia, pp. 60–72; Étienne Cabet, Travels in Icaria, Syracuse University
The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S Dream
by Gary Younge · 11 Aug 2013 · 162pp · 51,445 words
jobs and freedom.” On the morning of the march, news had arrived from Africa that one of the country’s great Black intellectuals and activists, W. E. B. Du Bois, had died. Du Bois had been living in Ghana, where he had vowed to play his part in building a new continent. His passing was
Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century
by Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston · 18 Apr 2016 · 338pp · 92,465 words
Normal and Agricultural Institute, founding president of the Tuskegee Institute, is remembered today as the man who lost a great debate with his arch-rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, champion of civil rights and advocate for the “talented tenth” among African Americans. In his well-known “Atlanta Address,” Washington argued that black people less
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, one-size-fits-all basket: We encourage all students to attend college rather than preparing any of them for work. We follow the example of W. E. B. Du Bois rather than the advice of Booker T. Washington. Harvard’s Pathways to Prosperity report argues that students need exposure to work opportunities and that the
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Root, February 18, 2013, http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/02/talented_tenth_theory_web_du_bois_did_not_really_invent_it.html. 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” from The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: J. Pott, 1903). 3. Gates, “Who
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah · 27 Aug 2018 · 285pp · 83,682 words
National Socialists. In 1900, in an address “To the Nations of the World” at the first Pan-African Conference in London, the eminent black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed that the “problem of the twentieth century” was “the problem of the color-line,” to wit: the question as to how far differences of
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-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg with Judit Bokser Liwerant and Yosef Gorny, Transnationalism: Diasporas and the Advent of a New Disorder (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 598. 19.W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900, ed. Philip Sheldon Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University
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. 20.Du Bois, op. cit. 21.Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 22.W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Present Condition of German Politics,” Central European History 31 no. 3 (1998): 170–187. 23.Lord Moran cited in Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire
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: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 33. 24.Cited in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 400. 25.“Innerhalb der Deutschen Grenze wird jeder Herero mit
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Zeno’s Conscience (Svevo), 84–86, 104, 145 Zhumadian, China, 18 OTHER BOOKS BY KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH As If: Idealization and Ideals Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen Experiments in Ethics Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers The Ethics of
Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
by Charles Emmerson · 14 Oct 2019 · 950pp · 297,713 words
of Congress, Washington DC National Endowment for the Advancement of Colored People Sigmund Freud Collection NA: National Archives, Kew, London RL: Royal Library, Windsor WEB: W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts at Amherst USNA: U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland Published Documents In the endnotes published documents are cited by abbreviation
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rogue’: interview with Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph by Charles Mowbray White, MG II, 609–612, 609. ‘more or less a fraud’: letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to H. L. Stone, 24 July 1920, MG II, 435. ‘think he is a demagogue’: interview with Du Bois by Charles Mowbray White, 22 August
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1923. • PARIS: Polizzotti, 189–192, and Sanouillet, 278–282. • NEW YORK: ‘million other Garveys’: speech on 20 May 1923, MG V, 308–311. ‘Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Thomas E. Will’, 3 July 1923, WEB, Series 1a. • ESSEN: ‘the name of Schlageter will be’: Baird, 27. ‘Hitler claims that Schlageter’s death
Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
by Jason L. Riley · 14 May 2008 · 196pp · 53,627 words
passage, including the Colored American in Washington, D.C., which wrote, “There is no room for these disease-breeding, miserly, clannish, and heathen Chinese.” Later, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington would complain that immigrant labor was pushing blacks out of manufacturing jobs. The black separatist Marcus Garvey—an immigrant from Jamaica
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2 Oct 2017 · 349pp · 114,914 words
. When those measures proved insufficient to enforcing white supremacy, black citizens were shot, tortured, beaten, and maimed. Assessing Miller’s rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. From Du Bois’s perspective, the 1895 constitutional convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge
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adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land. W.E.B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the
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shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.” It extends through Martin Delany, through Booker T.’s nemesis W.E.B. Du Bois, and through Malcolm X. It includes Martin Luther King Jr., who at the height of the Vietnam War called America “the greatest purveyor of violence
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American leaders petitioned the government to stop the lynching, they conceded that the Vardamans of the world had a point.*12 In an 1897 lecture, W.E.B. Du Bois declared, “The first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races—commonly called the Negro problem—lies in the correction
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on my family the day of my last interview with the president. EPILOGUE THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT Their “honor” became a vast and awful thing. —W.E.B. DU BOIS, BLACK RECONSTRUCTION I It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were
The Abandonment of the West
by Michael Kimmage · 21 Apr 2020 · 378pp · 121,495 words
these ambiguities into account. They dominate the debates and disagreements over the West: the precious West of Eisenhower versus the disturbing West of his contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois, the luminous West of John F. Kennedy versus the menacing West of his critic Noam Chomsky, the liberating West of Ronald Reagan versus the colonizing
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are not twentieth-century facts, and they were not discovered in the 1960s. Their revelation had been the life work of the historian and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (born in 1868), among many others. Yet the recognition of a wider America in the midst of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and
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, the organizers of the fair had struggled to disprove their underlying fear of decadence.16 Race and civilization were scrutinized from a different angle by W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the era’s most original scholars and public intellectuals. The status quo was desperate enough for Du Bois, who wanted progress more than
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America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress Prepared for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Among its authors was W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote the statement’s introduction. Du Bois began with an outline of African American history and the internal dilemma of an African American polity
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not just to the universities. American foreign policy was opening up, and some of the old barriers were breaking down. These changes retraced the problem W. E. B. Du Bois had ascribed to African American politics in 1947, the dilemma of traveling further into the American mainstream or of standing as a group apart. The
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Council on African Affairs, an organization founded by the activist Max Yergan to lobby the US government on workers’ rights and independence movements in Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois, the activist and performer Paul Robeson and the politician Adam Clayton Powell were fellow members of the council. An Africa analyst for the Office of
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somebody as famous as Armstrong, and he used it to criticize the hypocrisy of the American-led West.13 Not quite the celebrity Armstrong was, W. E. B. Du Bois was moving beyond criticism and toward exile in the 1950s. To be sure, his outrage with the transgression of Western ideals dated back to the
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unhappy to maintain, had been pioneered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Nixon had been the one to go to China some thirteen years after W. E. B. Du Bois posed with Mao. Détente’s set-piece achievement, the Helsinki Final Act, was negotiated pre-Carter in the early 1970s. It guaranteed Europe’s borders
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endorse or reject the West but to move fluidly in and out of it. His teenage reading in the African American literary and intellectual canon—W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and many others—refined the questions of belonging and not-belonging that haunted his adulthood. As an undergraduate at Columbia, Obama
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a limit to historical grievance. Over the previous decade, Zimbabweans had managed Zimbabwe, and they needed to face up to the results. In Accra, where W. E. B. Du Bois is buried Obama had spoken of the need for “strong institutions” (also in 2009). He was advocating for government as it existed in the EU
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a by-product of World War II—an accident of the 1930s and 1940s, one could almost say—and it had never lacked for critics. W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X had accused the West and especially the American-led West of practicing a racially motivated colonialism without end. James Burnham had pinned
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Republic had always been a fiction. It was destined to be replaced by the acknowledged diversity of a post–Columbian Republic. Early in his life, W. E. B. Du Bois had pictured a United States that was larger or better than the West, humanized by a democratic acceptance of racial difference that he never witnessed
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of any one ethnic, racial or religious group. While threading African American sorrow songs through The Souls of Black Folk, the music of his people, W. E. B. Du Bois affirmed his right to sit with Shakespeare and Aristotle, an inheritance of his people. Du Bois appreciated all there was in Shakespeare’s and Aristotle
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Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 16. 17. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, in Nathan Huggins, ed., Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 55, 586–587, 570. 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Commencement Address,” in Huggins, Writings, 812–814. 19. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Huggins, Writings, 364, 365. “There are
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and Thomas on Dean Acheson, Wise Men, 514. Dean Acheson, “Europe, we had always believed,” quoted in Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, 697. 21. W. E. B. Du Bois in W. E. B. Du Bois, ed., Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and
No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey · 14 Apr 2015 · 324pp · 93,606 words
intellectual foresight, was essential if you wanted to curry his favour and receive philanthropic support. In the early 1960s, a few months before his death, W. E. B. Du Bois met for an interview with Ralph McGill, a prominent white anti-segregationist news editor. Du Bois recalled his and Booker T. Washington’s efforts to
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’s History, 271. 30Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 238. 31Carnegie, quoted in Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 459. 32Zinn, A People’s History, 252. 33ibid., 254. 34Ralph McGill, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois’, Atlantic Monthly (November 1965). 35Ibid. 36Zinn, A People’s History, 272. 37Nasaw, ‘Introduction’, xii. 38Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, Abridged, Together With Man versus the State
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