WHO IS AN AMERICAN? ★^763Blacks subject to disenfranchise-
ment and segregation were under-
standably skeptical of the nation’s
claim to embody freedom and fully
appreciated the ways the symbols of
liberty could coexist with brutal racial
violence. In one of hundreds of lynch-
ings during the Progressive era, a white
mob in Springfield, Missouri, in 1906
falsely accused three black men of rape,
hanged them from an electric light
pole, and burned their bodies in a pub-
lic orgy of violence. Atop the pole stood
a replica of the Statue of Liberty.
W. E. B. Du Bois and the
Revival of Black Protest
Black leaders struggled to find a strat-
egy to rekindle the national commit-
ment to equality that had flickered
brightly, if briefly, during Reconstruc-
tion. No one thought more deeply, or
over so long a period, about the black
condition and the challenge it posed
to American democracy than the
scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts,
in 1868, and educated at Fisk and Harvard universities, Du Bois lived to his
ninety- fifth year. The unifying theme of his career was Du Bois’s effort to rec-
oncile the contradiction between what he called “American freedom for whites
and the continuing subjection of Negroes.” His book The Souls of Black Folk
(1903) issued a clarion call for blacks dissatisfied with the accommodationist
policies of Booker T. Washington to press for equal rights. Du Bois believed that
educated African- Americans like himself— the “talented tenth” of the black
community— must use their education and training to challenge inequality.
In some ways, Du Bois was a typical Progressive who believed that investi-
gation, exposure, and education would lead to solutions for social problems. As
a professor at Atlanta University, he projected a grandiose plan for decades of
scholarly study of black life in order to make the country aware of racism and
point the way toward its elimination. But he also understood the necessity of
political action.
How did the war affect race relations in the United States?A poster advertising the 1915 film The Birth
of a Nation, which had its premiere at Wood-
row Wilson’s White House. The movie glorified
the Ku Klux Klan and depicted blacks during
Reconstruction as unworthy of participation in
government and a danger to white womanhood.