W.E.B. Du Bois and Civil Society

Sociologist and writer, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) became nationally known after 1905’s Niagara Movement. He helped form the NAACP in 1909 and the Pan-African Congress during World War I and focused on peacemaking and decolonization. In 1910, Du Bois served as the editor of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, the “oldest black-oriented journal in the world.” His work that spanned 1910-1934 with the NAACP, The Crisis, and Pan-Africanism served as his three greatest contributions to civil society, or nongovernmental organizations that advanced the interests of citizens outside of the government and corporation.

Du Bois’s Internationalism

Building on his work from The Crisis that addressed human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings, “Du Bois as Diplomat” wrote timely articles for Foreign Affairs including “Worlds of Color” in 1925, where he explained how European democracy was largely based on exploiting colonial labor. He cited the Portuguese, Belgian, and French uses of direct rule. Du Bois was not only critical of European racism but pushed back against Senegalese classism as a form of indirect violence.

Further, he wrote about the threats to sovereignty in his 1933 essay, “Liberia, the League and the United States,” and elaborated on global sovereignty in Ethiopia in 1935. By the late 1930s, he shifted his focus to human and social development in South Africa, Rhodesia, Congo, and Kenya, and argued for their economic self-determination.

In 1947, as the NAACP representative at the San Francisco United Nations Conference, Du Bois helped to write An Appeal to the World! A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. He historicized systemic oppression and argued that it undermined American democracy and impacted its ability to take a lead role in protecting colonized people under an emerging International Bill of Human Rights.

Du Bois’s work in 1947 expanded on Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World: The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. One article stated:

We demand that our duly accredited representatives be given proper recognition in all leagues, conferences, conventions or courts of international arbitration wherever human rights are discussed.

Throughout the 1950s, Du Bois engaged more forcefully in socialist and communist politics and joined anti-imperialist movements. The FBI started surveilling him and his wife Shirley Graham in 1942. By 1961, Du Bois moved to Ghana, and he strongly denounced U.S. capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism. The Progressive Youth Organizing Committee started W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs at the local level from 1959-1963 to foster political education. After he died in 1963, he left behind a social and cultural legacy rooted in political education continuing into 1964, when the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America were formally founded by the Communist Party USA, a national youth organization. His educational legacy still provides a national and global presence for civil society.

DCA and Civil Society

In their initial report on culture and education, the Du Bois Clubs of America (DCA) adopted a series of measures at the founding convention in San Francisco on June 21, 1964. The Convention Report focused on the organization’s internal political education, socialist students balancing book learning and real-world organizing, cultural commentary, and resolutions that covered the intersections of power, race, and class.

In the tradition of Du Bois, they emphasized the work of civil society. The social goal of education was to promote justice and equity, not simply enjoying elite cultural abstractions, which were void of social struggle. For example, they referenced acting and painting as two vital skills beyond vocational training and how they could serve as ways “to defend against brutality and darkness.” In short, students should not be relegated to an undemocratic technocracy but encouraged to think critically and challenge domination.

They also targeted segregation, elitism, and the “cult of the Intelligence Quotient and all its paraphernalia as a sham and an injustice.” They pointed to structural issues surrounding the role of the guidance counseling office and the privileged nature of select student groups, fraternities, and sororities rooted in cultural norms of privilege.

The statement demanded quality education as well as “bread.” They recognized “the greatest single problem of education is economic, both for institutions and individuals.” The document called for ending loyalty oath provisions, military recruitment on campus, and mandatory Cold War curricula. They considered these hindrances antithetical to academic freedom and democracy while battling the “ultra-right” and their “quiet takeover of an increasing number of local educational systems.” DCA members were also pleased to announce the founding of A.I.M.S., The American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City and stated, “we shall do everything possible to acquaint students with its purposes, its needs, and the services it offers.”

Additionally, they referred to the impacts of advertisers and mass media and provided a critique of race culture. At the same time, the club pointed to the importance of the Free Southern Theatre at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and the founding of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). DCA included a class critique and stated, “race is again only one part of the larger issue.” “The white worker,” they wrote, “must also discover their image of dignity in the thickets of violence.” A 1969 edition of the Daily World reiterated the Du Bois Clubs’ focus on workers.

Their final resolution, number XIV, referenced “Cops” and stated an opposition to all forms of police brutality including, “local fuzz, the United States Department of State, and the Post Office.” This included “the stopping of ‘contraband’ literature, and the interception of mail from China, North Vietnam, and other socialist countries.” The report demonstrated a general suspicion of civil society work as the New York Times asked in 1966, “Are Du Bois Clubs a Danger?” At times, the groups faced internal fragmentation, or difficulty in organizing as motions failed in specific clubs subject to both decline in membership and government attack. The CIA called the Du Bois Clubs “communist controlled” and “subversive.”

The W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America still have reunions to celebrate the memory of local clubs that spread across the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, as well as Albuquerque, Madison, Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Jose, East Lansing, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. These groups galvanized around local, state, federal and international issues that included a fair economy, health care, independence, and issues of war and peace in Vietnam.

Bettina Aptheker and Angela Davis were prominent leaders of the club as were Terrence Hallinan, serving as West Coast coordinator, and Jarvis Tyner, another well-known coordinator located in Philadelphia. This CSO work was not the safest and usually carried a risk. For example, its national headquarters in San Francisco was bombed in 1966.

Du Bois Movement School

Although the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America were largely challenges to Cold War liberalism through the mobilization of Marxist youth, today’s W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction is a political education program based in West Philadelphia, “designed for aspiring revolutionaries and movement leaders from communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration.” The program “emerged in the wake of the 2020 uprisings following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, when many people were eager to engage with questions of abolition but lacked the framework and historical grounding to do so.”

As a result of 2020, 140 new oversight laws were passed. In linking the earlier Du Bois clubs and forms of civil society and political education, the Du Bois Abolition School features “organic intellectuals,” who seek to “not only understand the world, but to actively transform it.”

The school’s coordinator is writer and organizer, Geo Maher, the author of A World Without Police and Anticolonial Eruptions: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (Verso, 2021). Christopher R. Rogers, a professor from Chester, PA and a national steering committee member for Black Lives Matter also serves on the leadership team. They work alongside Philadelphia natives and facilitators  Nneka Azuka and Anthony Smith of the Black Philly Radical Collective. Another community organizer and advocate is Saudia Durrant with the Gender Justice Fund. All these individuals that work on abolition in Philadelphia emphasize the importance of local history and the meaning of figures like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Russell Maroon Shoatz extending globally.

Epilogue

Du Bois’s early civil society work was not without criticism. The tradeoff for acquiring early forms of soft power for racial uplift via the “talented tenth” included gradualism in ending World War I, hesitancy on addressing anti-lynching laws, and ultimately support for Woodrow Wilson, arguably the most openly racist modern president. The person that highlighted these class-based critiques most effectively was Hubert Harrison.

Over time, Du Bois moved closer to Harrison politically. The fact that present day abolitionists also devote their time to international affairs is emblematic of the “Du Bois Doctrine” and an ability to link his formative theories with his later radical global politics. Du Bois’s thoughts on democracy and empire connect his radical legacy in protesting state violence with international issues, civil society work, and the “politics of care.”

U.S. cities have reorganized their methods in public safety since the 2020 George Floyd uprisings and reforms in places like Minneapolis and Louisville currently face resistance. Cities such as New York and Los Angeles have reestablished their police funding after considering cuts, but some alternative crisis response programs conducted by civil society in the spirit of Du Bois remain. Reform has not disappeared, but its momentum has been disrupted in an era of vigilantismand the dismantling of federal oversight. Activism is messy. Struggle is never to be abandoned, only reconfigured moving forward in the tradition of Du Bois.

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