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The Forethought: Du Bois the Journalist

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Author’s note: This part of an unpublished 2002 essay, “Not the Subject but the Premise: Postcards from the Edge of Du Bois’ Black Belt,”  is reproduced here for comment and as fodder in the body of work upon which I am drawing for my sabbatical project. I consider it to be a failed work with some useful nuggets.

“‘[T]he sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture —

‘Furniture?’ I asked; ‘but furniture is exempt from seizure by law.

‘Well, he took it just the same,’ said the hard-faced man.'”

— WEB Du Bois in Dougherty County, Georgia

“Of the Black Belt,” Souls of Black Folk, 1903.’

“It’s alright now/

alright now/

I gave it over to Jesus/

And it’s alright now.”

— sung at St. Mary’s Holiness Church in Hamlet, North Carolina, May, 2002

The Forethought: Du Bois the Journalist

Before he became a scholar, activist and would-be Bismarck of his race, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was a journalist. As a teenager in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, young Willie was a correspondent for the New York Globe, Freeman and Springfield Republican; at Fisk; he edited the school newspaper. After two commercially unsuccessful attempts to create his own journal of news and opinion, his Crisis magazine would be integral to the birthing of the modern civil rights coalition as well as the Harlem artistic movement of the 1920s.  After both of his departures from the NAACP, in 1934 and 1948, he became a regular contributor to several black and later, radical news organs.

The Souls of Black Folk is suffused with the best journalistic sensibilities: vivid description, pithy characterization, abundant but carefully chosen detail, and evocative narration. This, along with its seminal influence on racial thought, explains why the faculty of New York University gave Souls and his Crisis columns on race two separate spots on its list of the 100 best works of journalism of the 20th century. (NYU) Despite this, and the growing scholarly attention to Du Bois’ writings, the consideration of his work as journalism has been slight. Most of the attention that has been accorded has gone, understandably, to study of The Crisis.

Du Bois’ reporting was part of an evidentiary brief that, if heeded, would lead to greater support for the policies he advocated for black advancement: fair wages, rents and opportunities for land ownership investment in higher education, and physical safety. In using journalism as one of his weapons, he seems to have understood what media scholar Michael Schudson meant when he declared of 20th century reporting,

“…[T]he power of the media lies not only (and not even primarily) in its power to declare things to be true, but in its power to provide the forms in which the declarations appear. News in a newspaper … has a relationship with the ‘real world,’ not only in content, but in form; that is, in the way the world is incorporated into unquestioned and unnoticed conventions of narration, and then transfigured, no longer a subject for discussion but a premise of any conversation at all.” (Lule)

This essay will consider two journalistic essays in Souls of Black Folk. Particular attention will be given to what Du Bois saw as the proper aim of journalism, and the proper role of the black journalist. The power of Du Bois’ journalism in Souls lies in the specificity with which he placed black life in the context of the social and historical forces that shaped its essential character and defined its structures of opportunity. We get a glimpse of his nascent ability to draw out the multiplicative ways in which African Americans adapted to and agitated against their oppression. However, when viewed in terms of the evolution of racial discourse however, it may be that the most profound effect of Du Bois’ journalism was his ability to demonstrate the centrality of black labor, black culture and black action to American prosperity, identity and well-being. Ironically, we shall see that it is this example that contemporary African American journalists find themselves most challenged to follow.

In Souls, Du Bois the reporter is most evident in Chapters Seven and Eight, “Of the Black Belt” and “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece.” Both chapters are portraits of Dougherty County, Georgia. As works of journalism, they presage what Tom Wolfe preciously called the New Journalism of the 1960s — the blending of observation, contextual data and narrative technique. There is, however, another way in which the work has contemporary resonance: as a black journalist whose audience and markets crossed racial lines, Du Bois had to grapple with an oppressive and intricate racial ideology that constrained and discounted not only about such southern blacks as were found in Dougherty County, but also  educated northern blacks as himself.

Du Bois had to convince his readers that he was an authoritative interpreter of African American experience – a task made more difficult by the fact that his objective was to supplant what his readers thought they know about his subject. His task was complicated by several unique factors. One the one hand, he had to contend with those who would argue that Du Bois’ mixed racial background made him incapable of understanding the souls of real black folk. On the other, Du Bois faced the personal challenge of understanding people whose skin tones resembled his or his family members, but whose lives under Reconstruction and Jim Crow differed radically from his comparatively Edenic boyhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Finally, he had to contend with emerging standards both of scholarship and of journalism that discounted traditional rhetorical strategies employed by earlier black writers, such as appeals to emotion, biblical authority and first-person narratives.

If he faced unique challenges, Du Bois was also unique in the resources that he brought to the task of destroying and rebuilding the foundations of racial discourse. He could rely not only on his youthful reporting experience, expansive knowledge base and considerable literary gifts, but also the data collection that he was beginning to amass through his work for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and his direction of the Atlanta University studies. (Lewis, Biography, p. 195) Du Bois was a pioneer in the emerging field of empirical sociology, and the AU studies were part of his lifelong effort to build a comprehensive data portrait of every imaginable aspect of black life — from schooling to economic development to religion and family life. He had invented many of the fields’ methods of data collection and analysis during his first major sociological project, The Philadelphia Negro — among other things, he personally interviewed 3000 black residents of Philadelphia’s seventh ward.

According to Lewis, his principal biographer, Du Bois bragged that his knowledge came from having “lived with the colored people, joined their social life, and visited their homes.” He was particularly scornful of the “car-window sociologist,,, the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting a few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries….” (Souls, p. 128) In other words, he practiced immersive reporting long before there was a name for it.

Above all, Du Bois struggled to hold to his sense of personal and racial mission. As one of a small number of African Americans who had access to an elite education, Du Bois believed fervently that the future of the race depended on the disciplined, clear-eyed leadership of liberally educated men and women. He had declared, early on, his intention to be one of those leaders. On his 25th birthday, alone in his graduate student quarters at the University of Berlin, Du Bois wrote in his journal, “These are my plans: To make a name in science, to make a name in literature, and thus to raise my race.” (Lewis, Biography, p. 135)

Du Bois was not alone in his efforts to expose the fetid underside of American industrial development. This was, after all, the era of combat between the muckraking journalists and the robber barons. Ida Wells had published her anti-lynching expose, The Red Record. Lincoln Steffens was exposing The Shame of the Cities. Ida Tarbell was publishing her voluminous analysis of Standard Oil.

In fact, Tarbell’s disclosures specifically motivated the Rockefellers to disburse millions to establish the General Education Board (GEB) and the Southern Education Board (SEB) — two foundations that, in the absence of federal involvement in public education, would dominate African American education policy at all levels for decades to come. (Lewis 265-268) Emphasizing ”scientific philanthropy,” the GEB directed most of its funding to industrial and moral education programs at schools such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. The GEB was composed of some of the most powerful men in America, so their positions on black education limned the boundaries of mainstream thinking on race.

The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical

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With the commencement of the school year, I am officially on sabbatical to write about the research I’ve been doing to help bring together computing and journalism education. I have a proposal that lists the academic work I will complete. However, underneath the project is a cry of the heart that is aching for expression, and that will likely determine the form of the work I ultimately create.

This project is really about understanding how we foster constructive and inclusive conversation and problem-solving in an age where the craft of articulate writing and argument has lost much of its currency in public discourse and popular culture. We live in an age dominated by manufactured controversies, where propagandists like Andrew Breitbart get called journalists.

I could go on with all the examples of sour discourse out there, the full breadth of what Al Gore correctly called, The Assault on Reason, but I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the essential duties of journalism to democracy is to keep us talking so we don’t kill each other. My studies of other diverse cultures leads me to think that  a robust public square is what keeps a pluralistic democracy together. Our traditional fealty to uncovering verifiable truths is one of the important ways of fulfilling that obligation, but in the cacophony that our contemporary media landscape has become, it’s not enough. We have to facilitate democratic civic discourse even as the libertarian and utilitarian foundations of our belief in a free press buckle under the weight of the evidence that human beings are not rational actors, that it’s not always good that almost anyone can be a publisher these days, and that the tools that let us customize our news also allow us to ignore contrary views and evidence that we may need to understand for the sake of our own survival.

Also, we have to earn a living. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, I’ve seen some of the best newsroom minds of my generation completely buffaloed by the destruction of the business model for creating and disseminating the content that informs and entertains us. My job is to figure out what aspiring journalists and professional communicators need to know in order to be effective and ethical practitioners. I went into the classroom to serve people who are as I was – a young lover of words whose  dream was to earn a living weaving them together.

In 1990, when I took my magazine writing and public relations experience into the classroom full-time, we knew what that meant: reporting, writing, copy-editing.  A broad familiarity with literary forms and genres that could serve as writing models. A solid liberal arts education for the sake of cultural literacy, and as the foundation for developing expertise on a beat.  A little experience with a camera, enough graphics and production knowledge to be able to re-size a photo or write to a designer’s specs, and there was nothing wrong with some marketing and communications theory. Add campus media experience, some internships and you had the makings of a cub reporter, editorial assistant or PR staffer.

When I trained for my Master’s degree in journalism in the early 1980s, that approach to journalism education seemed natural. In fact, formal journalism education only began about a century ago, and this model of journalism instruction took a few decades to form. In other words, the academic discipline of journalism has always been in flux. Its place in the academy has always been suspect. The newspaper barons who endowed the first journalism schools believed that college educated men would create a superior product. Subsequent generations of journalism educators sought to define and instill certain professional norms through accreditation standards, ethics codes and other markers of professionalization. In this, they consciously mirrored such fields as law, engineering, education and medicine. However, unlike those other professions, there can be no licensing restriction on the practice of journalism, because that would violate the First Amendment.

Besides journalism education occupies a marginal place in both the Academy and industry because of the myopic view that journalism is primarily a set of skills and not an intellectually rigorous endeavor with its own approach to knowledge formation.   The media owners who were to be the primary employers of journalism graduates wanted to know that our students could report accurately, write grammatically and meet deadlines. That made them suitable raw material that could only be molded into a journalist after some real-world experience. They wanted faculty members who were steeped in newsroom culture, not some ivory-tower Ph.D. On the other hand, the attributes that employers valued were precisely the ones that led other scholars to disdain the intellectual value of formal journalism education and educators. There were a handful of journalism Ph.D. programs when I was pursuing my MA at NYU. My professors, all decorated veterans of the nation’s most prominent news organizations, were openly dismissive of them.

In any event, that world is long gone, and people who built their careers on that gospel either struggle to stay relevant or they have abandoned the game. We all have had to re-invent ourselves and examine our assumptions about the way civic discourse works, and the means by which one earns a living supporting it.

When you make a fundamental change in course, it’s good to reflect on how you got to be where you are. And so, the first part of this investigation will be a bit of auto-ethnography. I’m going to explore the roots and evolution of my approach to teaching and learning journalism and professional writing. Then I’m going to explore the shift from journalism to civic media, drawing heavily on my  teaching and formal research experiences. Then, I’m going to strive for some kind of coherent conclusion about how we meet the challenges of democratizing civic media.  Expect extensive explorations of seminal texts, such as Jay Rosen’s “What Are Journalists For?” Also I hope to record conversations with everyone from the retired principal of my middle school to my research partners, students and some of the leading lights in the contemporary media landscape. I’m also hoping for advice from you along the way.

In calling this entry the Re-Education of Me, I am paying homage to two unlikely sources of inspiration. The first is The Education of Henry Adams, an early 20th-century call for a shift away from the traditional 19th-century educational emphases on philosophy and classics in favor of  education in science and the professions. The second is Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, a blistering and still sadly-relevant expose of the ways in which our education system perpetuates false notions of human difference that warp the social fabric.  With that, I begin.

Bertin M. Louis: Some Haitian Protestants Agree With Pat Robertson

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“Haiti, Now and Next:

“On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, Leogane, and other parts of Haiti. The day after this catastrophe, Reverend Pat Robertson, the host of the 700 Club and an influential voice in the American fundamentalist movement, remarked that centuries ago Haitians swore a pact to the Devil in order to gain their freedom from slavery under the French. The moment to which Robertson referred in his comments was the Bwa Kayiman Vodou ceremony that launched the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Despite the humanitarian efforts of his charitable organization currently assisting Haitians with earthquake relief, Robertson’s remarks strike many as callous and racist. But missing in some of the responses to those remarks in the midst of this unimaginable tragedy, which include condemnations and historical essays, is an important reality of the contemporary Haitian religious landscape which has been neglected thus far and bears analysis: some Haitians (Haitian Protestants, in particular) also believe that Haiti is cursed…”

Read the whole thing

L’Heureux “Dumi” Lewis: Black Male Privilege

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Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis is an assistant professor of sociology at City College of New York. His professional website is at ProfessorLewis.com and he also maintains the blog UptownNotes.com. This talk was one of the presentations from the Morehouse College Founders Day Symposium.

Of interest: A New Sociological Critique of The Souls of Black Folk

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The 1903 publication of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk is considered a watershed in the history of American arts, letters and politics. Du Bois (1868-1963), then a sociologist at Atlanta University, offered his theory of “double-consciousness” – the notion that black Americans are deprived of agency and self-awareness because survival in a racist society requires that they constantly police themselves to remain acceptable to their oppressors.

Writer W E B Du Bois


A lot has been written about Souls of Black Folk and the contemporary relevance of Du Bois’ argument. The best literary and rhetorical analysis, as far as I am concerned, is still Arnold Rampersad’s Art and Imagination of WEB Du Bois (Harvard University Press, 1976.) Rampersad situates Souls within the context of Du Bois’ evolving framework for thinking about race, which rested on several key tenets:

  • People of African descent are one people, with great internal diversity.
  • Colonialism and slavery had a defining impact on African peoples in ways that bind them together despite their diversity
  • Contrary to Hegel, et. al, African-descended people are contributors to history (this conviction grew over time. At the time of Souls, he identified spirituals as an indication of the capacity for cultural contributions.) African-descended people have made strides in the years since slavery.
  • Strategies and policies for making progress should be built upon empirical evidence, not faith or ideology. That requires a cadre of trained and educated leaders, ergo, the “Talented Tenth“

Rampersad said that if “Huckleberry Finn” is regarded as the seminal work in American literature, “Souls of Black Folk” has the equivalent place in African American literature. Subsequent generations have had good reason to use it as the point of departure from which to articulate their own views of the African American experience. Agree or disagree, one has to reckon with it.

In a new monograph, The Soul-less Souls of Black Folk: A Sociological Reconsideration of Black Consciousness as Du Boisian Double Consciousness Paul Mocombe appears to argue that WEB Du Bois’ Hegelian articulation of the black experience really was about the desire of elite black folks to be accept by elite white folks. He says Du Bois relies on essentialist biological and cultural notions of race that were prevalent among 19th century intellectuals and steeped in white supremacy. Aspects of his critique are familiar, but his analytical framework seems new and inventive.

I’m not sure I’m going to agree with Mocombe’s assertion that Du Bois was in thrall to scientific racism. I’d say Du Bois struggled with them, trying to find an alternative framework that met the scientific standards of that day. (Mia Bay’s essay, “The World Was Thinking Wrong About Race: The Philadelphia Negro and Nineteenth-Century Science” from WEB Du Bois, Race and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) speaks to this brilliantly.

Still, I’m putting Mocombe on my summer reading list, and I’d love to know what Dr. Rampersad thinks of his thesis.