race & war - contending ideas, W.E.B. Du Bois' life and times (1910s)

Du Bois (1860s — 1960s)

• Top Black activist-intellectual

• NAACP

• Souls of Black Folk

2 famous (1903) ideas from Souls of Black Folk:

1. Global “Color Line”: the 20th century problem is how darker and lighter races relate in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and islands — a changing same of racialized labor division

2. Double-consciousness: a Black person’s internalized

Pan-African Congress, Du Bois

1900

NAACP - Du Bois, Mary Ovington

1909

Society of American Indians (SAI) - Zitkala-Sa (Dakota), Charles Eastman, and Du Bois

1911

Universal Races Congress

Du Bois, Ovington, Eastman, Gandhi. Respect between "white and colored," "Occident and Orient": the race-and-empire link

Du Bois stance: WWI begins — “The African Roots of War”

1914-1915, he argued Africa is a prime cause of the war, because European powers competed over its riches

Du Bois stance: “close ranks”

1917-18, Black support for the US war with a service claim (serve now, claim rights after), native people served

Du Bois stance: “we return fighting”

1919, after Red Summer - “make way for democracy!”

Col. Charles Young

highest-ranking Black officer and Du Bois’s friend, dishonored in WWI

Henery Johnson

combat hero honored in 1910s but not in the US until 2010s

Red Summer

1919, Wilson increased federal segregation as the second KKK rose. Black veterans targeted in lynchings and riots. Red Scare, Tulsa Massacre

Paris Peace Conference

1919, League of Nations and ILO founded, Wilson promised “14 points”, self-determination, but rejected the Racial Equality Proposal