Those About Him Who Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois by Amy Bass (review)

Cold War studies are in high gear, including recent attacks on the lively volume by Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America. Wiener investigates, sometimes comically, dozens of sites, a high proportion of them downright silly as well as tragic (a California suburb has a Korean War jet on display, with a plaque honoring City Council members—even though no Korean War veterans are among them). Amy Bass homes in on a single location, the homesite of the greatest of African-American political thinkers in the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois.

Great Barrington, Massachusetts, now home to prosperous, educated Manhattanites on vacation or in retirement, might easily and logically have tried to benefit from the celebrity of the location. After all, Du Bois led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the crucial early years, wrote volume after volume of black history as it had never been written before, delivered his own kind of fiction and popular interpretation of religious practices and ideas, and lived long enough to influence Martin Luther King, Jr, and the whole civil rights movement.

This last point was, admittedly, part of the problem. If Du Bois had conveniently died as early as 1930, his memory would have been far easier to accept and hail. Thereafter, the great scholar delivered Black Reconstruction (1935), now seen as a masterpiece, but ignored or discredited by the historical profession for almost thirty years. Reconstruction in the eyes of liberal and conservative historians was not such a tragedy after all: it had a happy ending of sorts, with social stability restored and the country spiritually reunited. Compared to the dangers of “black rule” and the unrest it caused, the unhappiness of African-Americans was not such a big thing. Young radical historians, including African-American scholars, took issue with this view, but they could be kept aside for scholarly influence until the dawning of the 1970s. Popular elections in the historical associations, an unwanted innovation of the time, finally led to the demise of the old establishment, confirming significantly changed views of the American past.

Du Bois, depicted as a crypto-communist and supporter of the Soviet Union, was not exactly a new figure by the 1930s. He had supported Woodrow Wilson and at the same time, looked upon Bolshevik Russia as potentially ushering in a new era for the world’s people. He could oppose American Communists’ strategy of the legal defense case of the Scottsboro defendants while holding the idea that they, or some Marxists, could do better. But it was Du Bois of the 1940s and later who rankled. He was not loyal enough, he accused the liberal as well as conservative communities of favoring racial integration for the purposes of global power rather than out of a deep sincerity (until 1960, most liberals believed integrationists were “moving too fast,” and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr along with Hannah Arendt assailed the Southern school-integration campaign as bad for America in the world). In his nineties, removed to Africa, he became a Communist. It was a parting gesture of an old man that could not easily be forgiven.

Du Bois had, in fact, been fond of Great Barrington and its physical beauties, but here he also discovered what he called “the veil,” the separation of whites and non-whites. He was not broken by it; quite the contrary. But it left a memorable scar.

That scar was still evident when, in 1950, and retired from Atlanta University, he drafted a petition accusing the United States of hypocrisy, and the American South as a far greater danger to black people than the Soviet Union could be. A firestorm followed. By 1968, when a handful of residents set out to do something with the former Du Bois homestead, The Berkshire Eagle supported the effort, but conservative and “Cold War Liberal” locals howled...