A Blues Moment in Dusk of Dawn:
A Note on Autobiography
W. E. B. DuBois’s writing in The Souls of Black Folk (1901) is spiritual, and Dusk of Dawn (1940) complements the first installment of his
autobiographical project with a secular sorrow song, with the blues. Despite the magnification of difference
between Booker T. Washington and DuBois, it is refreshing to know that DuBois
admitted his kinship and parallelism with Washington in the matter of
miscalculating a solution for the problems of black folk. In Dusk
of Dawn, Chapter 7, “The Colored World Within,” DuBois frees the cat from
the bag. A truth scampers out.
Here in the past we
have easily landed into a morass of criticism, without faith in the ability of
American Negroes to extricate themselves from their present plight. Our former panacea emphasized by Booker T.
Washington was flight of class from mass in wealth with the idea of escaping
the masses or ruling the masses through power placed by white capitalists into
the hands of those with larger income.
My own panacea of earlier days was flight of class from mass through the
development of a Talented Tenth; but the power of this aristocracy of talent
was to lie in its knowledge and character and not in its wealth. The problem which I did not then attack was
that of leadership and authority within the group, which by implication left
controls to wealth --- a contingency of which I never dreamed. But now the whole economic trend of the world
has changed. That mass and class must
unite for the world’s salvation is clear.
We, who have had least class differentiation in wealth, can follow in
the new trend and indeed lead it.
Does one respond to DuBois’s idealism with a mixtape of Sam
Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” and Gil Scott Heron’s “Home is Where the
Hatred Is”? It may be better to up the ante of ambivalence by reading Andrew
Zimmerman’s “Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute and the German Empire:
Race and Cotton in the Black Atlantic.” GHI
Bulletin No. 43 (Fall 2008):9-20, the coat-pulling essay Gregory Rutledge
brought to my attention. Washington by
way of a practical enterprise and DuBois by virtue of his German education came
to unfortunate conclusions in the danger zone of global capitalism. They ultimately had to pay the piper of grand
designs. DuBois lived long enough to
recant; Washington died too soon to make amends.
The blues moment does
not eradicate our ambivalence, but it retards our temptation to settle for
hasty conclusions about leadership. We
check ourselves by reading what Robert J. Norrell says about Washington and Africa in
Up from History: The Life of Booker T.
Washington (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2009). We reread DuBois’s The World and
Africa (1946) with greater skepticism. We ask what is leadership to
us. A panacea is a mirage, and DuBois’s
blues epiphany confirms that the unity of mass and class is an impossible dream,
that salvation cannot materialize.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January 26, 2013
