Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

Du Bois the political philosopher

Just got the first finished copies of an exciting book from our Fall list. With In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, Robert Gooding-Williams describes the contours of a distinctly Afro-modern tradition in American political thought and examines Du Bois’s own orientation to that tradition, one to which, as both theorist and practitioner, Du Bois considered himself rightful heir. In this, the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Gooding-Williams, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, takes Du Bois’s landmark work, The Souls of Black Folk, and subjects it to the same sort of rigorous analysis we often reserve for Locke, Kant, and Rousseau—the “classic” theorists of the social contract tradition. But Souls, in Gooding-Williams’s opinion, constitutes a contribution to American political philosophy that’s as important as the work of those better-known thinkers, all the more so since we find it rooted in and framed explicitly as a response to the distinctly American system of racial apartheid that went under the name Jim Crow.

Gooding-Williams places Du Bois in a long line of contributors to what he calls the “Afro-modern” strain in American political thought, a line that includes Equiano, Delany, Crummell, James, Fanon, and Rodney. But most crucially, it includes Frederick Douglass, whom Du Bois considered his intellectual forefather and who stood as one of the progenitors of the tradition of “assimilation through self-assertion” to which Du Bois considered himself heir. In setting himself up thusly, Du Bois was able to enlist Douglass’s ideas against what he considered to be inferior responses to segregation and white supremacy, such as the “assimilation through submission” ethos that he decried in his now-famous attack on Booker T. Washington, the outlines of which reverberate to this day.

Indeed, in subjecting Du Bois’s thought to the critical analysis it deserves, Gooding-Williams is able to reveal the degree to which modern discourse on race in America takes the shape that Du Bois gave it, and, further, to question the usefulness of some of the more problematic aspects of Du Bois’s philosophy in the debates on race that continue to occur. As the principal theoretical defense of the “politics of uplift” that animated the ideas of African American elites throughout much of the twentieth century, Souls is as much with us today as it ever was. By utilizing Du Bois’s work as an interpretive lens through which to view Afro-modern political thought, and the competing strains within it, as part of a distinct and distinctly American philosophical tradition, Gooding-Williams shows us how we have, perhaps unwittingly, been doing the same thing all along.

||| In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

Back into the pantheon

That seems to be the consensus on the effect of Norell's Booker T. Washington bio Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Shelby Steele in Sunday's New York Times Book Review:

No black man in American history has been more a victim of this paradox than Washington. And it is hard to think of a historical figure more in need of biographical rescue. Yet Washington is an awkward challenge for the contemporary scholar. He is so thoroughly stigmatized as politically incorrect that rescuing him could seem a political act in itself, and even a balanced book could be dismissed as a polemic. But Robert J. Norrell, in his remarkable new biography, “Up From History,” gets around this problem the old-fashioned way: by scrupulously excavating the facts of his subject’s life and then carefully situating him in his own era.

Previous coverage of Up from History on the HUP blog here and here, the second instance containing an excerpt from Norrell's book in which the author explains his motivation and modus operandi.

People are talking about Booker T. again

... as a result of Robert J. Norrell's new biography of the once-admired, now-maligned Tuskegee founder. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley writes that he's reappraised his view of Washington:

Few great Americans have been more cruelly treated by history than Booker Taliaferro Washington. He has been mocked, vilified and caricatured, yet by any reasonable measure his life was extraordinary.

[...]

As one who came of age in 1960, who shared the movement's impatience for change, and who greatly admired Vann Woodward's work, I reflexively accepted the received opinion of Washington. Norrell persuades me that I was wrong. He has granted Washington what Du Bois, Woodward and so many others have willfully denied him: He sees Washington in the context of his own times and declines to judge him by the ostensibly more enlightened moral assumptions of our own. Certainly, Washington was not a perfect man; his fascination with politics led him into alliances and commitments of questionable value to his cause, and at times his willingness to curry the favor of whites led him into embarrassing self-abnegation. But he was the great African American leader of the day, a man who gave inspiration and hope to millions and played no small role in altering white perceptions of blacks, a remarkable accomplishment at what may have been the worst time for blacks in American history.

And in the Wall Street Journal, out today, a new piece on "The Wizard of Tuskegee":

Yet to the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty ... In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon.

For more on the motivation behind this trend toward reassessment of Washington's "place in the pantheon," see our post "100 Years Before President Obama," which explains the context and reprints the Prologue from Norrell's book in an effort to show why now is the time to take another look at a figure whose proper significance evades us to this day.

-------

Booker T. Washington's first home as a free person, in Malden, West Virginia. Photo by Frank Beard; from Booker T. Washington, The Story of My Life and Work (Atlanta: J. L. Nichols, 1901).

100 years before President Obama

You may have noticed that in his concession speech last night, avowed history buff John McCain made a poignant reference to an event that occurred just about a hundred years ago. On October 16, 1901, President Roosevelt, freshly installed after William McKinley succumbed to an assassin's bullet, did something that to many seemed literally unthinkable -- he invited a black man to dine with him and his family at the White House. "President Roosevelt Proposes to Coddle Descendants of Ham," screamed the headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That man, of course, was Booker T. Washington.

There are a lot of things about this situation that are hard for us to understand today, and the fact that the United States has just elected its first black president drives that fact home. While the assertion that political support for Obama speaks to the achievement of a "post-racial" America is still up for debate, it's hard to deny that today we inhabit a racial landscape that our ancestors simply would not recognize.

The same notion applies in reverse -- can you imagine, for example, a newspaper using the term "descendants of Ham" today? The idea is laughable. But it was real. So were lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and simple, consuming hatred, all the more cruel for its sheer casual pervasiveness. This gap in understanding, Mark Baurlein argued in an article for the Chronicle Review in 2003, is responsible for the eclipse in our respect for a man like Washington, whose tactics look to us rather soft and complacent. "To militants such as Du Bois, and to us today," Bauerlein says, "Washington's accommodationism is an abasement." Du Bois himself had this to say of Washington after his death in 1915: "We must lay on the soul of this man, a heavy responsibility for the consummation of Negro disfranchisement, the decline of the Negro college and public school, and the firmer establishment of color caste in this land." As Bauerlein reports, the man who once commanded the respect of the luminaries of the American intellectual world now barely rates a citation in the scholarly debate on race in America.

The last major biography of Booker T. Washington came out in the 70s -- Louis Harlan's two-volume assessment of the life and times of the man is a great achievement, but it's a study that reflects the negative scholarly consensus of the time. That landscape is about to change a bit with the publication in January of a major new biography of Washington, Robert J. Norrell's Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Within, Norrell aims to revise our understanding of the man by re-situating Booker T. in the context of his own time, rather than holding him to the standards of an age that might have made him proud, but which he would hardly recognize. In the excerpt below, from the Prologue, Norrell chronicles the posthumous demonization of Washington by subsequent black leaders and historians, whom, he claims, "should have been alert to the fallacy of anachronism, of applying 1960s expectations of protest to a man who had lived two generations
earlier." Booker T's story, he says, "deserves to be told anew," and with the publication of Up from History in January, this forgotten man will get what Norrell believes to be his due.

Cecil Brown

One of the coolest things about working in publishing is when you realize that an author you've known only via one or two books they've done for you has led a totally rad and interesting life unbeknownst to you and your fickle eye. Such is the case with one-shot HUP author Cecil Brown, profiled in the Berkeley Daily Planet. Brown's reminiscences read like a who's-who of 20th-century black America -- Jesse Jackson, Amiri Baraka (who was still LeRoi Jones when Brown met him), Huey Newton, and Richard Pryor all figure into the life story of a guy who seems to have been everywhere. Brown's novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, orginally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969, is sort of a forgotten classic -- Gerald Early, for one, remembers it as one of the "three books that everybody just had to read" during his high school years.

Brown's contribution to the HUP list (Stagolee Shot Billy, out in paperback) tracks the origin and development of the Stagolee legend, chronicled in countless songs from the ragtime era right up until the present day. Delving into a subculture of St. Louis known as "Deep Morgan," Cecil Brown emerges with the facts behind the legend to unfold the mystery of Stack Lee and the incident that led to his murder of "Billy" in 1895. The book was one of Esquire's "Best of 2003" and was praised everywhere from the New York and LA Times Book Reviews to Playboy.

MLK as a verbal artist

A quick round-up of coverage of Jonathan Rieder's The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr., coinciding with the sad anniversary of Dr. King's assassination in Memphis. We've got reviews from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and a revealing interview with Rieder in Pine Magazine.

Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Listen to HUP author Susan O'Donovan discuss her latest book, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, on the University of Massachusetts-Lowell's Sunrise Radio station.

Race and Music in America

Justin E. H. Smith draws upon two HUP books--Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves and Cecil Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy--among others, in a new essay on "Race and Music in America," posted at 3 Quarks Daily.

"And for Christ's sake, pull up those pants!"

HUP author Cecil Brown (Stagolee Shot Billy) in the San Francisco Chronicle on the "anti-sag" controversy shaking Louisiana towns to their very core. Several towns have passed resolutions decreeing fines for youth who choose to expose a bit more undergarment than the city councils would like. "If you expose some of your privates, the crack of your behind," one mayor said, you are guilty of "lewd behavior." For the record, we here at HUP take no position on the appropriateness of baggy pants--we leave it to you, the reader, to decide whether they are offensive or just plain fashionable.

Stagolee Shot Billy is a great little book--one of Esquire's Best Books of 2003--that tries to unravel the mystery behind the identity of "Stagolee," that incorrigable ruffian who has provided lyrical fodder for artists from the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, Taj Mahal, and countless others. Just who the heck was this guy? In the process of finding out, Brown chronicles the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality.

||| Read an excerpt from Stagolee Shot Billy.

Open to page 99 and you will find...

A new entry at the "The Page 99 Test," the blog that tests Ford Madox Ford's assertion that if you "open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you," applies the formula to Susan O'Donovan's Becoming Free in the Cotton South, a boldly argued work that focuses on a small place--the southwest corner of Georgia--in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women's experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom?

The last author of ours to appear at "The Page 99 Test" was Jeremi Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, who's just been interviewed by Marshal Zeringue for his "Author Interviews" blog.