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From W.E.B. Dubois, to Barack Obama
Something to think about.
On the 27th of August, 1963 W.E.B. DuBois died in self-imposed exile in Ghana. He had gone there at the invitation of Kwame Nkhrumah believing that his seven decades of struggle for the rights of African-Americans had been in vain. That, in short, black Americans would not be able to achieve the rights of citizenship that he believed they deserved. That he, who had worked his whole life for equal rights for all Americans had done so in vain.
On the 28th of August, 1963, as the March on Washington was getting underway, word spread to the organisers that DuBois -- the founder of the Niagara Conference, one of the founders of the NAACP, author of major works of history and sociology, a man who had been the leading intellectual figure of black American life for two-thirds of a century (he was born in 1868, and received his doctorate from Harvard, the first African-American to do so, in 1895) -- had died the day before. It cast something of a pall on the event.
Forty-five years later, to the day. The political party that had upheld white supremacy for over a century. The party that precipitated the Civil War. The party that stood for the criminal doctrine of 'States' Rights', that meant that some citizens had rights and others had none, did something that DuBois would have deemed unthinkable and chose a man of African descent as its standard-bearer.
On the 27th of August, 1963 W.E.B. DuBois died in self-imposed exile in Ghana. He had gone there at the invitation of Kwame Nkhrumah believing that his seven decades of struggle for the rights of African-Americans had been in vain. That, in short, black Americans would not be able to achieve the rights of citizenship that he believed they deserved. That he, who had worked his whole life for equal rights for all Americans had done so in vain.
On the 28th of August, 1963, as the March on Washington was getting underway, word spread to the organisers that DuBois -- the founder of the Niagara Conference, one of the founders of the NAACP, author of major works of history and sociology, a man who had been the leading intellectual figure of black American life for two-thirds of a century (he was born in 1868, and received his doctorate from Harvard, the first African-American to do so, in 1895) -- had died the day before. It cast something of a pall on the event.
Forty-five years later, to the day. The political party that had upheld white supremacy for over a century. The party that precipitated the Civil War. The party that stood for the criminal doctrine of 'States' Rights', that meant that some citizens had rights and others had none, did something that DuBois would have deemed unthinkable and chose a man of African descent as its standard-bearer.