Washington and Du Bois could not have been more different. Born in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, the son of northern blacks, and with a little French and Dutch blood in the background, Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which he described as a ‘boy’s paradise’ of hills and rivers. He shone at school and did not encounter discrimination until he was about twelve, when one of his classmates refused to exchange visiting cards with him and he felt shut off, as he said, by a ‘vast veil.’6 In some respects, that veil was never lifted. But Du Bois was enough of a prodigy to outshine the white boys in school at Great Barrington, and to earn a scholarship to Fisk University, a black college founded after the Civil War by the American Missionary Association in Nashville, Tennessee. From Fisk he went to Harvard, where he studied sociology under William James and George Santayana. After graduation he had difficulty finding a job at first, but following a stint at teaching he was invited to make a sociological study of the blacks in a slum area in Philadelphia. It was just what he needed to set him off on the first phase of his career. Over the next few years Du Bois produced a series of sociological surveys – The Philadelphia Negro, The Negro in Business, The College-Bred Negro, Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans, The Negro Artisan, The Negro Church, and eventually, in the spring of 1903, Souls of Black Folk. James Weldon Johnson, proprietor of the first black newspaper in America, an opera composer, lawyer, and the son of a man who had been free before the Civil War, described this book as having ‘a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’7
Souls of Black Folk summed up Du Bois’s sociological research and thinking of the previous decade, which not only confirmed the growing disenfranchisement and disillusion of American blacks but proved beyond doubt the brutal economic effects of discrimination in housing, health, and employment. The message of his surveys was so stark, and showed such a deterioration in the overall picture, that Du Bois became convinced that Booker T. Washington’s approach actually did more harm than good. In Souls, Du Bois rounded on Washington. It was a risky thing to do, and relations between the two leaders quickly turned sour. Their falling-out was heightened by the fact that Washington had the power, the money, and the ear of President Roosevelt. But Du Bois had his intellect and his studies, his evidence, which gave him an unshakeable conviction that higher education must become the goal of the ‘talented tenth’ of American blacks who would be the leaders of the race in the future.8 This was threatening to whites, but Du Bois simply didn’t accept the Washington ‘softly, softly’ approach. Whites would only change if forced to do so.
For a time Du Bois thought it was more important to argue the cause against whites than to fight his own color. But that changed in July 1905 when, with feelings between the rival camps running high, he and twenty-nine others met secretly at Fort Erie in Ontario to found what became known as the ‘Niagara movement.’9 Niagara was the first open black protest movement, and altogether more combative than anything Washington had ever contemplated. It was intended to be a nationwide outfit with funds to fight for civil and legal rights both in general and in individual cases. It had committees to cover health, education, and economic issues, press and public opinion, and an anti-lynching fund. When he heard about it, Washington was incensed. Niagara went against everything he stood for, and from that moment he plotted its downfall. He was a formidable opponent, not without his own propaganda skills, and he pitched this battle for the souls of black folk as between the ‘soreheads,’ as the protesters were referred to, and the ‘responsible leaders’ of the race. Washington’s campaign scared away white support for Niagara, and its membership never reached four figures. Indeed, the Niagara movement would be completely forgotten now if it hadn’t been for a curious coincidence. The last annual meeting of the movement, attended by just twenty-nine people, was adjourned in Oberlin, Ohio, on 2 September 1908. The future looked bleak and was not helped by the riot that had recently taken place in Springfield. But the very next day, William Walling’s article on the riot was published in the Independent, and Mary Ovington took up the torch.10
The conference Ovington and Walling organised, after its shaky start discussing brains, did not fizzle out – far from it. The first National Negro Conference (NNC) elected a Committee of Forty, also known as the National Committee for the Advancement of the Negro. Although predominantly staffed by whites, this committee turned its back on Booker T. Washington, and from that moment his influence began to wane. For the first twelve months, the activities of the NNC were mainly administrative and organisational – putting finance and a nationwide structure in place. By the time they met again in May 1910, they were ready to combat prejudice in an organised way.11
Not before time. Lynchings were still running at an average of ninety-two a year. Roosevelt had made a show of appointing a handful of blacks to federal positions, but William Howard Taft, inaugurated as president in 1909, ‘slowed the trickle to a few drops,’ insisting that he could not alienate the South as his predecessor had done by ‘uncongenial black appointments.’12 It was therefore no surprise that the theme of the second conference was ‘disenfranchisement and its effects upon the Negro,’ mainly the work of Du Bois. The battle, the argument, was being carried to the whites. To this end, the conference adopted a report worked out by a Preliminary Committee on Organisation. This allowed for a National Committee of One Hundred, as well as a thirty-person executive committee, fifteen to come from New York and fifteen from elsewhere.13 Most important of all, funds had been raised for there to be five full-time, paid officers – a national president, a chairman of the Executive Committee, a treasurer and his assistant, and a director of publications and research. All of these officeholders were white, except the last – W. E. B. Du Bois.14
At this second meeting delegates decided they were unhappy with the word Negro, feeling that their organisation should campaign on behalf of all people with dark skin. As a result, the name of the organisation was changed, and the National Negro Conference became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).15 Its exact form and approach owed more to Du Bois than to any other single person, and this aloof black intellectual stood poised to make his impact, not just on the American nation but worldwide.
There were good practical and tactical reasons why Du Bois should have ignored the biological arguments linked to America’s race problem. But that didn’t mean that the idea of a biological ladder, with whites above blacks, would go away: social Darwinism was continuing to flourish. One of the crudest efflorescences of this idea had been displayed at the World’s Fair in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1903, lasting for six months. The Saint Louis World’s Fair was the most ambitious gathering of intellectuals the new world had ever seen. In fact, it was the largest fair ever held, then or since.16