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2 “Of Beauty and Death” W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater When W. E. B. Du Bois returned to New York harbor in February 1919, after witnessing firsthand in Europe the world trying to destroy itself, he was haunted by the intuition that the First World War had somehow followed him back across the Atlantic. Resuming his responsibilities as editor of the Crisis ( Jessie Fauset had ably managed the journal in his absence), Du Bois once again set his pen against racial injustice. But the splendid sight of “colored soldiers” in France could not be reconciled with the photographs of mutilated black bodies awaiting him on his desk at the Crisis headquarters on Fifth Avenue. Sifting through dozens of pictures of murderous rage exacted on black military personnel and their communities sent to him from brave NAACP operatives like Walter White, Du Bois’s “already grim state of mind verged on apocalyptic bitterness.”1 His moral outrage at these sorts of atrocities had already been unfortunately invoked many times previously. Years earlier, following the charring of a black man chained to a post in the center of Coatesville,Pennsylvania,Du Bois inked a ferociously sarcastic editorial called “Triumph,” in which the spirit of “Anglo-­Saxon civilization” was purified by the actions of a “howling mob of the best citizens . . . of the white race.” Du Bois’s editorial was noteworthy not just because he called national attention to this sort of terrorism; rather, the editorial bristled due to his insight into white racial psychosis. A black man was burned to death not due to any criminal act, real or imagined, Du Bois wrote: “The point is he was black. Blackness must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes. . . . Why is it a crime? Because it threatens white supremacy.” This danger must be beaten back with all the might of white power. But Du Bois’s penetrating vision went deeper: “‘The Churches were nearly deserted,’ say the­ papers . . .Was it not fitting that Coatesville religion should lend its deacons and Sunday-­ school superintendents to the holy crusade . . . Ah, the splendor of that Sunday night dance. The flames beat and curled against the moonlit sky.The church bells chimed.The scorched and crooked thing,self-­wounded 26 / Chapter 2 and chained to his cot,crawled to the edge of the ash with a stifled groan,but the brave and sturdy farmers pricked him back with the bloody pitchforks until the deed was done.”2 The acidity of Du Bois’s tongue and the anguish of his heart should not distract us from recognizing that he painted a picture of murder as a communal event and ritual.3 Dislodging the church as the site of moral education, lynching teaches lessons about the “fitting” emotional and ethical response to black threats to white civilization: “people walked and drove out to the scene of the burning,” Du Bois dourly reported. “Men and women poked the ashes and a shout of glee would signalize the finding of a blackened tooth or mere portions of unrecognizable bones.” Prefiguring by eight years the militant stance of Claude McKay’s poem,“If We Must Die,”4 Du Bois closed the editorial with a call for black self-­ defense: “If we are to die, in God’s name let us perish like men and not like bales of hay.”5 Given this call to arms, it makes sense that Du Bois’s grand editorial in the Crisis, “Returning Soldiers,” signaled an effort to seize the enthusiasm of showcasing black military heroism during the FirstWorldWar and magnetize it to another great cause: to save democracy at home: “‘Returning Soldiers’ spoke to all of [the Talented Tenth] in their new, self-­ proclaimed, exhilarating incarnation:The New Negro.” The manipulation of black patriotism in this manner illustrated,for David Levering Lewis,Du Bois’s “militant petit bourgeois opportunism.”6 As I see it,Du Bois’s “opportunism” was largely a function of his supreme ego coupled with his critical understanding of and sensitivity toward the manner in which diverse forms of public discourse and aesthetic practices marshaled the images and emotions responsible for making Coatesville possible. For example, in an editorial in the Crisis titled “The Manufacture of Prejudice: Three Ameri­ can Fairy Tales from the Associated Press,” Du Bois accused the news agency of widely distributing an unsubstantiated story coming out of Mississippi regarding black thuggery. Du Bois and his staff could find no corroborating facts to support the story.7...

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