Oh! breth-er-en, my way, my way’s cloudy, my way,
Go send them angels down. (Sundquist, 500)
Transcript:
ATLANTA UNIVERSITY
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
April 24, 1935
Mr. George Streator
211 West 149 Street
Apartment 5A, C/O White
New York, New York
My dear Mr. Streator:
I have received your two letters of April 9 and 18. As I wrote you, I did not have time to write you at length immediately, but I am writing now.
- You must not be too impatient at the muddle in colored men’s thinking just now. These are difficult times and we are all striving for clarity and for the firm road. Leadership is difficult to obtain, and unselfishness rare, but neither are entirely lacking.
2. Your main questions have to do with (A) The persistence of race prejudice; (B) The helplessness of minority groups.
A. It is natural for Youth to expect changes quickly. In the years from 1896 to the war, I expected that race prejudice in the United States was going gradually to crumble before scientific fact and agitation. I think now that we made some progress and inroads, but I am satisfied that we expected too rapid a solution, and as I said in Washington, it does not seem to me that any person now living is going to see essential change in the attitude of whites toward Negroes. Some change there will be, but race prejudice is going to persist for a long time in the United States.
If, now, we had reasonable economic independence, we could just wait, even though the waiting took a few generations. But our economic situation is such that while we are continuing to hammer at the false logic of race prejudice and continuing to bring forward scientific fact, we have got to live and earn a living, and therefore the immediate problem is how to do that?
B. I am not convinced of the helplessness of minorities. (1) They can agitate. (2) They can combine with other forces for good. (3) They can take some lines of independent action.
The only possibility of combination that seems fruitful to me today is that which can stress: mainly, combination with the newer forms of the trade unionism as contrasted with the older craft unionism. This is the point in your program which is to me most reasonable. But the point that I make is that even there progress is going to be slow, and that in the interim, minorities, like the Negro, must do something for themselves. I am convinced from wide contact with the working people of the United States, North, East, South, and West, that the great majority of them are thoroughly capitalistic in their ideals and their proposals, and that the last thing that they would want to do would be to unite in any movement whose object was the uplift of the mass of Negroes to essential equity with them.
I know that the vertical trade union is against this, and that it is growing in power. I think that Negroes should keep in closest touch and co–operation with it; but I think you exaggerate the rapidity of its growth, and the prospect of its triumph. It represents to my mind, a minority and a small minority of the labor movement in the United States. I hope I am wrong.
C. I am still convinced that the organization of consumers is an immediate program for minorities. I do not mean by this simply consumers’ co–operation on the old lines., although I want to use this method. I mean a complete change in that ideology among Americans, both white and black, but especially among colored people, which puts production first and consumption as its tool. I want to get Negoes thinking from the consumers’ point of view, which is the only way to gage their real power. A people who spend (even according to Jones’ faulty estimate) $185,000,000 a month, have got economic power, and of that there can be no doubt. Now, I propose that they use a new method for protecting themselves by the very segregation of which they are victims; that they concentrate this consuming power for mass buying, elimination of the middle man’s profit, and an increasing number of productive operations. I know this is difficult. I know it has vast chances of failure, but I believe it has clear possibilities of success, if it is led by trained men of unselfish character, and if it eliminates the private profit motive.
3. I believe in Karl Marx. I am an out and out opponent of modern capitalistic labor exploitation. I believe in the ultimate triumph of socialism in a reasonable time, and I mean by socialism, the ownership of capital and machines by the state, and equality of income. But I do not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Marxism scriptures.
First of all, I do not believe that Marx ever meant to say that under all circumstances and at all times, a violent revolution is necessary to overthrowing the power of capitalists. Even if he did say this, I do not believe that it is true, and I am not interested in working out a perfect dogmatic system on the basis of the Marxism brand of Hegelianism. What I want is a realistic and practical approach to a democratic state in which the exploitation of labor is stopped, and the political power is in the hands of the workes.
4. I am a pacifist. I regard with astonishment militarists who agitate against violence; and lovers of peace who want the class revolution immediately. It is quite possible that there have been times in the world when nothing but revolution made way for progress. I rather suspect that that was true in Russia in 1917. I do not think that it is true in the United States in 1935. But whether it is true or not, Negroes have no part in any program that proposes violent revolution. If they take part, they will make the triumph for such a program more difficult, and they will bring down upon the mass of innocent Negroes, the united vengeance of the white race. The result would be too terrible to contemplate.
I am, therefore, absolutely and bitterly opposed to the American brand of communism which simply aims to stir up trouble and to make Negroes shock troops in a fight whose triumph may easily involve the utter annihilation of the American Negro. I, therefore, attack and shall continue to attack American communism in its present form, while at the same time, I regard Russia as the most promising modern country.
5. Under any circumstances, and whether I am right in my line of thought, or only partially right, or altogether wrong, I see but one path of salvation for American Negroes, and that is the one which I have been striving desperately for ever since I left the N.A.A.C.P.; and that is to get a growing group of young, trained, fearless and unselfish Negroes to guide the American Negro in this crisis, and guide him toward the coming of socialism throughout the world. I think that the path for such guidance leads along the path of consumers’ organization, but if I am wrong here, I am perfectly willing to be shown.
I think your worst difficulty is your assumption that no such body of young leaders can be found. You think that they are all bourgeois and reactionary and of the type of those in the N.A.A.C.P. office. I am convinced that you are quite wrong. Streator and Du Bois are not the only unselfish people among Negroes, nor does the fact that a Negro has a first-class college education disqualify him from being among the real leaders of the Negro race. The difficulty is today that so few of this class of young men and women have had any opportunity to hear the truth. They did not get it at all, or only partially, in their college course, particularly if they were trained in reactionary Northern institutions. They are not hearing it today in Southern colleges, for the most part, and they do not get it in social intercourse.
What you are attacking, therefore, is not their character, but their teaching, and what has got to be done is to teach the Negro intelligencia that either we get such a group leadership of the Negro race or we are lost. In this procedure, we are no different from other groups. Karl Marx was not a worker. He was a university teacher. Socialism in the modern world has been led by intellectuals, and while they can be blamed for such its failure, they must also be credited for most of its success.
This is my present philosophy. I shall change it when I think it ought to be changed, and no jibes from critics will keep me from following in the future as in the past, the truth as I see it.
I have been working on a basic creed, as you know, for sometime. I am enclosing the seventh edition. I shall be very glad to have your criticism of it.
Very sincerely yours
W. E. B. Du Bois
WEBD/DW
Enclosure 1.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to George Streator, April 24, 1935. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b076-i212.