Those about Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois (review)

This thoroughly researched study presents much interesting information on the struggle to suitably commemorate the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois at his birthplace, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The title is a bit misleading, for at first glance it seemingly alludes to its subject's 1951 indictment for failing to register as a "foreign agent." Du Bois wrote of his sense of abandonment during his trial in The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, listing the numerous African American institutions and individuals who "sat in almost complete silence," due to "wide fear and intimidation" (391). The book under review is neither an account of those events, nor of Du Bois' activities as a communist sympathizer, which even today few historians seem eager to discuss. Nor, as the title seems to promise, is it a discussion of the continuing attempts to appropriate the symbolism of Du Bois, by friends and enemies alike seeking to impose differently nuanced interpretations on his life. This continuing "Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois" which exists among American intellectuals and academics is not professor Bass's specific focus.

Professor Bass retells the story of Du Bois' youthful relationship to Great Barrington, whose sympathetic citizens arranged for his education at Fisk University in 1885. She then illustrates how seventy-eight years later, the occupants of that village found it difficult to celebrate the life of a native son who had outlived his benefactors, and whose activities in living memory seemed incomprehensible. Persons of various political persuasions found it difficult to accept the decision he reached towards the end of his life to join the Communist Party. Even those personally sympathetic to his Marxist interpretation of history were uneasy with his carefully considered and cool acceptance of Communist totalitarianism.

This book neither justifies nor critiques Du Bois' more questionable positions, as expressed in his obituary for Joseph Stalin in The Guardian, or his tacit support for the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Du Bois was hardly the sole individual to turn a blind eye to the evils of Stalinism. During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill made their own cynical, if necessary, deal with the Soviets. Bass might have noted that Du Bois' problem was not his compromise with Stalinism, but his continuing support for the Soviet system after others decided, in timely fashion, to focus on its evils.

The struggle for public and official commemoration of Du Bois' birth in Great Barrington invites comparison to the struggle for the Martin Luther King Holiday, and Professor Bass does not fail to observe some similarities. The Martin Luther King most Americans acknowledge is celebrated for four disembodied words, "I have a Dream," which are removed from their context and stripped of any historical significance. All but forgotten is his more radical "Riverside Street Church Address," in which he denounced the unconstitutional, immoral, and purposeless war in Vietnam. If Du Bois is destined to become a national hero, it should not be at the cost of truth. Let us hope he will not be reconstructed in the same way as Martin Luther King has been—banalized and trivialized to meet the needs of a politically correct and harmless American mythology.