X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

Notes

{  } Notes B anacrusis . Dedication: More than any other, and for more than a quarter of a century, Cecil Taylor’s work has been my most constant companion in the journey of thought. The singular capacity for the transconfiguration of the limits of existence in our time that shows forth in his work of more than half a century may yet be understood as epochal. The gift of the capacity to give, perhaps that is the greatest of gifts. For such a giving, in the example of his practice, and his friendship, even to give “thanks and praises” is no restitution. For his is a work of freedom. Thus, I offer here both the simple and the absolute, in acknowledgment and respect, for his example and his friendship, never enough, always yet to come. . Two decades on, the question of the future is even more implacable and at stake. The question of what is to be done is also necessarily the question of how shall it be done. So, too, across an earlier turn of the centuries, the eruption of such a question in the form of brutality also marked the experience of W. E. B. Du Bois. In his  text, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, in the chapter titled “Science and Empire,” he wrote, “At the very time when my studies were most successful , there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose [sic], had killed his landlord ’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way the news met me: Sam Hose [sic] had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther on down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the University. I began to turn aside from my work. I did not meet Joel Chandler Harris nor the editor of the Constitution” (Dusk, ). Historiography NOT E S  has now rendered available to us that early in April , Sam Holt, “a black farm laborer of Palmetto, Georgia, [was] accused of murdering his employer in a quarrel over wages.” He escaped, and while still at large was accused of raping his employer’s wife. After his capture, following a sensationalized two-week manhunt in central Georgia, “he confessed to the murder but refused even under duress to admit to the rape charge. He was lynched, burned alive, and mutilated, with a mob of nearly , men, women, and children looking on; the tree on which he was hanged was chopped up by souvenir salesmen” (Huggins , ). This event marked the inception of a tide of lynching throughout the state, at least nineteen of which occurred between May and November of that year (Brundage , –). At that time, the spring , Du Bois was living in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was a professor of sociology and history at Atlanta University . He was in the final stage of preparing his study The Philadelphia Negro for publication. As memorialized in that most poignant chapter of The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, “Of the Passing of the First Born,” his son would take ill and suddenly and tragically die on May , in part because of being refused proper medical attention in the Jim Crow South (from both sides of the color-line, so to speak), just a week before Du Bois would sign off on the preface of that landmark study. At Atlanta, he had begun to carry out a program that he had devised across the second half of , while in Philadelphia, to pursue a comprehensive study of the social and historical life of African Americans in the United States, in both rural and urban contexts. Some eighteen months later, in a  essay that would be redeployed as a referential chapter in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Black Belt,” at the very beginning of that discourse Du Bois placed these events in an allegorical frame: “And a little past Atlanta, to the southwest, is the land of the Cherokees, and there, not far from where Sam Hose [sic] was crucified, you may stand on the spot which is...