W. E. B. Du Bois was 39 years old when “The Song of the Smoke” was published in the February 1907 issue of Horizon, a magazine which he himself edited. The poem is understood as “an affirmation of black pride,” but Du Bois’s ultimate acceptance of the need to call for black pride was the culmination of a difficult process. He was born into a community of free blacks in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, and after his mother’s death, he was given a scholarship by the primarily white town. Although he had deeply desired to go to Harvard, it was the town’s stipulation that this scholarship was to be used at Fisk University, founded for the children of emancipated slaves. While Du Bois had long believed that education and a sense of purpose were all that blacks needed to gain a place as Americans after having been freed from slavery in 1865, his education at Fisk was twofold. Here he could feel what it was to engage with educated minds, with no race considerations to affect the exchange. He also was made acutely aware of “the color line” in the South, and realized it would take far more than the higher education of African Americans to overcome this barrier.
In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. His reputation as a distinguished scholar commenced with the acceptance of his dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870,” as the inaugural work in the Harvard Historical Studies series. Du Bois soon acknowledged, however, that his subsequent scholarly work in the new field of social science was not having the impact that he expected. Thus he turned to other forms of writing, including poetry, to present his theories and beliefs regarding “the problem of the color line,” which he considered the major problem of the twentieth century. He further took responsibility for bringing this message to the public by editing the magazines Moon, Horizon, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publication Crisis, all of which introduced the work of many new black writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
Du Bois was one of the first African Americans to foster the idea of race-consciousness and of the African American as hero. His life’s work focused on the rebuttal of the claim that the African race engendered only slaves and savages unable to make contributions to civilization and American culture. “The Song of the Smoke” clearly stands as an affirmation for African Americans, but it is also a proclamation to America as a whole of the historical and economic significance of African Americans.
Author Biography
Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in the western Massachusetts town of Great Barrington, to a family whose ancestry was French Huguenot on his father’s side and Dutch and African on his mother’s side. Du Bois’ father Alfred Du Bois left his family when his son was a young boy. Du Bois lived with his mother Mary Sylvina Burghardt Du Bois until her death in 1884. Left penniless, Du Bois moved in with an aunt and worked as a time-keeper at a local mill to support himself. He graduated from high school that same year, the only black student in his class. An outstanding student, Du Bois was encouraged by his principal to attend college. With the aid of a scholarship, he enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1885. Du Bois graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1888 and entered Harvard University as a junior, where he graduated, cum laude, with a second Bachelor of Arts degree in 1891. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin in Germany for two years before returning to Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in 1895. He was the first African American to receive this degree from Harvard. From 1895 to 1897, Du Bois taught Latin, Greek, German, and English at Wilberforce University in Ohio. While Du Bois
was at Wilberforce, his dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870,” was published in 1896 as the first installment in the Harvard Historical studies series. Also in 1896, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, a Wilberforce student. They had two children. In 1897, he moved to Atlanta University, where he taught economics and history for more than a decade. In 1903, Du Bois published his most widely acclaimed work, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.
In 1905, Du Bois expressed the desire to publish a journal that would appeal to intelligent African Americans. This coincided with his belief that the most promising blacks should be educated in colleges and universities, and they in turn would emerge to serve and lead the black race. In 1906, with the help of two Atlanta University graduates, he established a small printing shop in Memphis, Tennessee, and began the Moon Illustrated Weekly. A year later Du Bois established the Horizon in Washington, D.C. This publication was meant to be the voice of the Niagara Movement, an organization of black intellectuals founded by Du Bois in 1905. The Horizon did not become the official voice for the Niagara Movement, but Du Bois managed to keep the monthly publication going until 1910, at which time he merged the Niagara Movement with the newly organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also made several other important changes in his life that same year; he resigned his faculty position at Atlanta University, became director of publications and research for the NAACP, and founded Crisis, a magazine he would head for almost twenty-five years. Du Bois saw this magazine as a vehicle to communicate to the world the problems faced by blacks in American society as well as those faced by other oppressed people, mainly Africans on the African continent.
Following World War I, Du Bois took an even greater interest in Africa, especially those colonies once held by the now-defeated Germans and Italians. With an agenda designed to place the problems of all blacks before the world, Du Bois helped organize the second Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. (A previous meeting of this body had taken place in London in 1900.) Du Bois argued for the seizure of German territories in Africa as the foundation for an international African state, and Crisis, which had obtained an international circulation, became the platform from which Du Bois could argue for the concept of “Africa for the Africans.” The 1919 congress and subsequent meetings in 1921, 1923, and 1927 were well chronicled in the magazine.
Between 1934 and 1940 Du Bois spent much of his time teaching, conducting research, and writing. Already a prolific and well-known author, during the next five years Du Bois published two of his most important historical works, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935) and Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1939). He also wrote articles for several of the leading periodicals of the time, including Current History, Journal of Negro Education, Foreign Affairs, and American Scholar. However, Du Bois still desired the forum provided by a publication of his own. He proposed a scholarly journal dedicated to research and the documentation of matters concerning race problems throughout the world. He believed this kind of research must include the study of all groups of men. He explained: “Naturally, we shall usually proceed from the point of view of black folk where we live and work to the wider world.” Du Bois became editor-in-chief of such a publication in 1940 with the establishment of Phylon at Atlanta University. He held that position until he retired from the university in 1944.
Also in 1944 Du Bois rejoined the staff of the NAACP as director of special research, but his association with the group was terminated in 1948 as the result of political disagreements with the NAACP’s executive secretary. From this point on, the influence and leadership of Du Bois began to decline steadily. By the 1950s Du Bois was shunned by most leading publishers, except those with leftist views. For years Du Bois had made no attempt to conceal his approval of Soviet Communism. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, he wrote in the November issue of Crisis: “I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am Bolshevik.” Du Bois’s other political activities included a run for the U.S. senate on the American Labor Party ticket in 1948.
After his first wife died in 1950, Du Bois married Shirley Lola Graham in 1951. At age eighty-three he was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department as an “agent for a foreign power.” Although acquitted by a federal judge, he was not allowed to leave the country until 1958. This completely disillusioned Du Bois with American democracy, and in 1961 he officially joined the Communist Party and moved to Accra, Ghana. About a year later he renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana. Before his death, he began work on “The Encyclopedia of Africana,” a project he was not able to complete. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana.
W. E. B. Du Bois was 39 years old when “The Song of the Smoke” was published in the February 1907 issue of Horizon, a magazine which he himself edited. The poem is understood as “an affirmation of black pride,” but Du Bois’s ultimate acceptance of the need to call for black pride was the culmination of a difficult process. He was born into a community of free blacks in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, and after his mother’s death, he was given a scholarship by the primarily white town. Although he had deeply desired to go to Harvard, it was the town’s stipulation that this scholarship was to be used at Fisk University, founded for the children of emancipated slaves. While Du Bois had long believed that education and a sense of purpose were all that blacks needed to gain a place as Americans after having been freed from slavery in 1865, his education at Fisk was twofold. Here he could feel what it was to engage with educated minds, with no race considerations to affect the exchange. He also was made acutely aware of “the color line” in the South, and realized it would take far more than the higher education of African Americans to overcome this barrier.
In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. His reputation as a distinguished scholar commenced with the acceptance of his dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade in the United States of America, 1638–1870,” as the inaugural work in the Harvard Historical Studies series. Du Bois soon acknowledged, however, that his subsequent scholarly work in the new field of social science was not having the impact that he expected. Thus he turned to other forms of writing, including poetry, to present his theories and beliefs regarding “the problem of the color line,” which he considered the major problem of the twentieth century. He further took responsibility for bringing this message to the public by editing the magazines Moon, Horizon, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publication Crisis, all of which introduced the work of many new black writers, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
Du Bois was one of the first African Americans to foster the idea of race-consciousness and of the African American as hero. His life’s work focused on the rebuttal of the claim that the African race engendered only slaves and savages unable to make contributions to civilization and American culture. “The Song of the Smoke” clearly stands as an affirmation for African Americans, but it is also a proclamation to America as a whole of the historical and economic significance of African Americans.
Author Biography
Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in the western Massachusetts town of Great Barrington, to a family whose ancestry was French Huguenot on his father’s side and Dutch and African on his mother’s side. Du Bois’ father Alfred Du Bois left his family when his son was a young boy. Du Bois lived with his mother Mary Sylvina Burghardt Du Bois until her death in 1884. Left penniless, Du Bois moved in with an aunt and worked as a time-keeper at a local mill to support himself. He graduated from high school that same year, the only black student in his class. An outstanding student, Du Bois was encouraged by his principal to attend college. With the aid of a scholarship, he enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1885. Du Bois graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1888 and entered Harvard University as a junior, where he graduated, cum laude, with a second Bachelor of Arts degree in 1891. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin in Germany for two years before returning to Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in 1895. He was the first African American to receive this degree from Harvard. From 1895 to 1897, Du Bois taught Latin, Greek, German, and English at Wilberforce University in Ohio. While Du Bois
was at Wilberforce, his dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870,” was published in 1896 as the first installment in the Harvard Historical studies series. Also in 1896, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, a Wilberforce student. They had two children. In 1897, he moved to Atlanta University, where he taught economics and history for more than a decade. In 1903, Du Bois published his most widely acclaimed work, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches.
In 1905, Du Bois expressed the desire to publish a journal that would appeal to intelligent African Americans. This coincided with his belief that the most promising blacks should be educated in colleges and universities, and they in turn would emerge to serve and lead the black race. In 1906, with the help of two Atlanta University graduates, he established a small printing shop in Memphis, Tennessee, and began the Moon Illustrated Weekly. A year later Du Bois established the Horizon in Washington, D.C. This publication was meant to be the voice of the Niagara Movement, an organization of black intellectuals founded by Du Bois in 1905. The Horizon did not become the official voice for the Niagara Movement, but Du Bois managed to keep the monthly publication going until 1910, at which time he merged the Niagara Movement with the newly organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also made several other important changes in his life that same year; he resigned his faculty position at Atlanta University, became director of publications and research for the NAACP, and founded Crisis, a magazine he would head for almost twenty-five years. Du Bois saw this magazine as a vehicle to communicate to the world the problems faced by blacks in American society as well as those faced by other oppressed people, mainly Africans on the African continent.
Following World War I, Du Bois took an even greater interest in Africa, especially those colonies once held by the now-defeated Germans and Italians. With an agenda designed to place the problems of all blacks before the world, Du Bois helped organize the second Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. (A previous meeting of this body had taken place in London in 1900.) Du Bois argued for the seizure of German territories in Africa as the foundation for an international African state, and Crisis, which had obtained an international circulation, became the platform from which Du Bois could argue for the concept of “Africa for the Africans.” The 1919 congress and subsequent meetings in 1921, 1923, and 1927 were well chronicled in the magazine.
Between 1934 and 1940 Du Bois spent much of his time teaching, conducting research, and writing. Already a prolific and well-known author, during the next five years Du Bois published two of his most important historical works, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935) and Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1939). He also wrote articles for several of the leading periodicals of the time, including Current History, Journal of Negro Education, Foreign Affairs, and American Scholar. However, Du Bois still desired the forum provided by a publication of his own. He proposed a scholarly journal dedicated to research and the documentation of matters concerning race problems throughout the world. He believed this kind of research must include the study of all groups of men. He explained: “Naturally, we shall usually proceed from the point of view of black folk where we live and work to the wider world.” Du Bois became editor-in-chief of such a publication in 1940 with the establishment of Phylon at Atlanta University. He held that position until he retired from the university in 1944.
Also in 1944 Du Bois rejoined the staff of the NAACP as director of special research, but his association with the group was terminated in 1948 as the result of political disagreements with the NAACP’s executive secretary. From this point on, the influence and leadership of Du Bois began to decline steadily. By the 1950s Du Bois was shunned by most leading publishers, except those with leftist views. For years Du Bois had made no attempt to conceal his approval of Soviet Communism. After a trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, he wrote in the November issue of Crisis: “I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am Bolshevik.” Du Bois’s other political activities included a run for the U.S. senate on the American Labor Party ticket in 1948.
After his first wife died in 1950, Du Bois married Shirley Lola Graham in 1951. At age eighty-three he was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department as an “agent for a foreign power.” Although acquitted by a federal judge, he was not allowed to leave the country until 1958. This completely disillusioned Du Bois with American democracy, and in 1961 he officially joined the Communist Party and moved to Accra, Ghana. About a year later he renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana. Before his death, he began work on “The Encyclopedia of Africana,” a project he was not able to complete. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana.
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