Du Bois spent a busy “retirement” in political activism. For four years, he
returned to the NAACP as director of the department of special research. Among
his many other activities in retirement, he was a consultant to the founding of the
United Nations, co-chair of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, vice-chair of the
Council of African Affairs, and chair of the Peace Information Center. At the age
of 87, he even ran for senator of New York on the Progressive Party ticket.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Du Bois became even more enthusiastic
about the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In 1951, as the Cold War
warmed up, Du Bois was indicted as an “unregistered agent” of the Soviet Union.
Though acquitted of all charges, Du Bois was embittered with life in the United
States, and for the rest of the 1950s he traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and
China. In 1959, Du Bois received the Lenin Peace Prize, and in 1961 he officially
joined the Communist Party of the United States. Du Bois left the United States
for good in 1961, becoming a citizen of the African state of Ghana. There he died
at the age of 95. Following a state funeral led by Ghana’s president Kwame
Nkrumah, Du Bois was buried in Accra, Ghana.
To understand Du Bois’s philosophy, one must begin with the Hegelianism that
runs through his work. Hegel had argued that the “the study of world history...
represents the rationally necessary course of the World Spirit.”* All human history
is a dialectical process whereby the World Spirit becomes conscious of itself as
free. Whenever a thesis of freedom is asserted, it is opposed by an antithesis. These
are then both overcome by a synthesis that incorporates the best of both. In partic-
ular, Hegel held that the World Spirit that is coming to a consciousness of freedom
is always the spirit of specific world-historical peoples,not individuals. Hegel
traced the development of this World Spirit through six historical peoples:
Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Germans.
Du Bois accepted Hegelian history and applied it to the experience of African
Americans. In our reading from The Souls of Black Folks,Du Bois refers to
Hegel’s six historical peoples and adds,
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in
this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but
only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
According to Du Bois, “Black folk’s” consciousness of freedom is newer and
richer than that of any previous world-historical people because of slavery. As one
writer explains,
Out of slavery and out of the later striving of black folk for whiteness in an oppres-
sive white world came a rising sense of black soul. Thus it was that white thesis bred
black antithesis, which took the best of white culture and moved it upward toward a
new synthesis.**
*Hegel,Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History,see Forrest E. Baird
and Walter Kaufmann,Nineteenth-Century Philosophy(New York: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 54.
**Joel Williamson,The Crucible of Race(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 405.
1078 W.E.B. DUBOIS
