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75 spirit Alexander Crummell, Prophets, and Destiny This planet was built for the growth of manhood. Everything on earth and in the sea, above, beneath, like the geist in Goethe’s Faust, plies at the whizzing loom of time to weave for humanity the garments of nobler manhood. No man can degrade the manhood of another without doing violence to his Maker. No man can surrender his manhood to another without dishonoring God. To know this is to know the meaning of life and of the world. —Reverdy C. Ransom1 Scholars who have written on The Souls of Black Folk regularly take special note of Du Bois’ chapter on Alexander Crummell. Some of the most useful discussions explore the intellectual links between the two men, recognizing Crummell as a mentor, a role model, even a father figure to Du Bois. Other interpreters read political motives into the chapter, one concluding that through it Du Bois castigated Booker T. Washington perhaps even more than through the earlier chapter that focused on him. And, in one instance, the ascribed motives behind the chapter appear more self serving and designed by Du Bois to situate himself in a lineage of great black men, of which Crummell was the patriarch.2 Certainly, Du Bois’ veneration of Crummell is obvious in Souls, and all of the above conclusions provide insight into the chapter on him. But as clear as Du Bois’ admiration, even adoration, of Crummell is in Souls, as much as Du Bois feared the potential consequences of Washington’s program (and his power to implement it beyond Tuskegee), and as highly as Du Bois might have thought of himself, none of these conclusions fully explains the chapter on Crummell. What remains missing from these careful and useful analyses is a discussion that focuses on the chapter as an intellectual exercise, a literary accomplishment, and a philosophical statement. If we are able to see the story of John Jones as Du Bois’ rendition of a fable and his Talented Tenth as analogous to Plato’s Philosopher Rulers, then the life of Alexander Crummell, as Du Bois presented it, might similarly speak to us allegorically and philosophically and as 4 76 Spirit another intellectual exercise, in this case, about destiny and spirit in the case of truly special people. Consider, first of all, the manner in which Du Bois wrote of his and Crummell’s meeting. I spoke to him politely, then curiously, then eagerly, as I began to feel the fineness of his character,—his calm courtesy, the sweetness of his strength, and his fair blending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively I bowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets of the world. In that passage alone, Du Bois provided a powerful image, that of a prophet. The passages that precede it, beginning with the first sentence of the chapter , make the significance of the above sentences even more poignant. This is the story of a human heart,—the tale of a black boy who many long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark dunes that lay gray and dismal before the wonder-eyes of the child: the temptation of Hate, that stood out against the red dawn; the temptation of Despair, that darkened noonday; and the temptation of Doubt, that ever steals along the twilight. Above all, you must hear of the vales he crossed,—the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver relate Du Bois’ “geographical language” in these sentences to “the spiritual struggle” embodied in “John Bunyan’s classical allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.”3 Du Bois was, without a doubt, outlining Crummell’s spiritual struggle for the reader, and Bunyan’s classic work would have been a good model. But not only did the language embedded in the opening paragraph of the chapter reflect traditions that were much older and deeper than Bunyan’s seventeenth-century work, it simultaneously reflected intellectual traditions that were much more recent. David L. Lewis, more than anyone else, has articulated both the literary and intellectual traditions Du Bois deployed in the chapter on Crummell. Lewis wrote: In “Alexander Crummell” Du Bois offers a secular parable that mimics the Calvary—a moral and racial instruction in which the anointed [18.218.129.100] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 07...

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