John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change

5 DISCRIMINATION AND DESTINY: John Brown and the NAACP

5 DISCRIMINATION AND DESTINY John Brown and the NAACP The keynote speaker at the Harpers Ferry Niagara convention in August 1906 was Reverend Reverdy Ransom, but his volatile cofounder of the Niagara Movement, W. E. B. Du Bois, delivered the weekend’s closing speech (figure 5.1). The convention was “in significance if not in numbers one of the greatest meetings that American Negroes ever held,” Du Bois wrote in his Autobiography. Congregating at the scene “of John Brown’s raid” was essential, not least for the barefooted “pilgrimage at dawn . . . to the scene of Brown’s martyrdom.” There, Du Bois wrote, “we talked some of the plainest English that had been given voice by black men in America.”1 Du Bois’s remarks in August 1906 articulated the goals of his fledgling organization and its intense connections to John Brown. We “believe in John Brown,” Du Bois told the Niagara attendees, “in that incarnate spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation , and life itself on the altar of right. And here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom, we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free.”2 As he would do on numerous occasions, Du Bois used John Brown to engage the past as a means to make sense of the present and put forth plans for the future.3 During the next three years, Du Bois made dramatic efforts to combine these strategies, publishing what he considered his finest work, a short biography of John Brown, in the fall of 1909. However, Du Bois’s plans for the book’s role in the final emancipation were short-lived; as soon as John Brown appeared in print, it received crushing reviews in The Nation and the The Negro American faces his destiny and doggedly strives to realize it. —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1909 80 Discrimination and Destiny New York Evening Post. Oswald Garrison Villard, Du Bois’s eventual NAACP colleague and fellow Brown biographer, wrote these hatchet jobs anonymously . But long before the two men began their respective Brown projects, Du Bois and Villard were far from friends. Their tumultuous relationship and competing portraits of Brown took shape while they helped found the most important black organization in American history, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. These dovetailing narratives underscore the importance of controlling Brown’s memory, an increasingly volatile commodity, particularly as activists began to articulate the needs, desires, and demands of black Americans .4 Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, outwardly progressive philanthropists like Villard frustrated and were frustrated by the opinions and personalities of outspoken blacks like Du Bois. Observed through the prism of John Brown, their story reveals the strategies and conflicts involved in the greater project for racial equality, the longest and most significant struggle in American history. As part of that centuries-long process, the stories of Du Bois and Villard reveal the limits of interracial partnership and understanding, limitations Brown exposed with particular Figure 5.1. Niagara Movement delegates, Harpers Ferry, August 17, 1906. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Discrimination and Destiny 81 clarity because he forced these men to mesh their reforming impulses with his methods and beliefs. Exploring Du Bois, Villard, and the formational moment of the NAACP also reveals the degree to which each man identified with Brown and appropriated his memory in the service of broad social reform and individual ego. Du Bois’s approach to Brown does much to explain his past, his fiery endorsements of violent change, and many of his struggles in the first half of the twentieth century. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, seemingly far removed from the world that Brown sought so desperately to change (figure 5.2). Boasting distinguished backgrounds on both sides of his family, Du Bois could trace ancestors back to both Revolutionary War soldiers and the French aristocracy in Haiti. Unlike the majority of his black countrymen, Du Bois enjoyed the advantages of this lineage and a relatively accepting environment. An exceptionally gifted student, Du Bois attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Summer teaching in rural Tennessee exposed the young Yankee Figure 5.2. W. E. B. Du Bois, 1907. Special Collections and University Archives, University of...