CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

W.E.B. Du Bois and Civil Society

Founders of the Niagara Movement in 1905. Du Bois is in the middle row, with white hat – Public Domain

Sociologist and writer, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) became nationally known after 1905’s Niagara Movement. He helped form the NAACP in 1909 and the Pan-African Congress during World War I and focused on peacemaking and decolonization. In 1910, Du Bois served as the editor of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, the “oldest black-oriented journal in the world.” His work that spanned 1910-1934 with the NAACP, The Crisis, and Pan-Africanism served as his three greatest contributions to civil society, or nongovernmental organizations that advanced the interests of citizens outside of the government and corporation.

Du Bois’s Internationalism

Building on his work from The Crisis that addressed human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings, “Du Bois as Diplomat” wrote timely articles for Foreign Affairs including “Worlds of Color” in 1925, where he explained how European democracy was largely based on exploiting colonial labor. He cited the Portuguese, Belgian, and French uses of direct rule. Du Bois was not only critical of European racism but pushed back against Senegalese classism as a form of indirect violence.

Further, he wrote about the threats to sovereignty in his 1933 essay, “Liberia, the League and the United States,” and elaborated on global sovereignty in Ethiopia in 1935. By the late 1930s, he shifted his focus to human and social development in South Africa, Rhodesia, Congo, and Kenya, and argued for their economic self-determination.

In 1947, as the NAACP representative at the San Francisco United Nations Conference, Du Bois helped to write An Appeal to the World! A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. He historicized systemic oppression and argued that it undermined American democracy and impacted its ability to take a lead role in protecting colonized people under an emerging International Bill of Human Rights.

Du Bois’s work in 1947 expanded on Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World: The Principles of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. One article stated:

We demand that our duly accredited representatives be given proper recognition in all leagues, conferences, conventions or courts of international arbitration wherever human rights are discussed.

Throughout the 1950s, Du Bois engaged more forcefully in socialist and communist politics and joined anti-imperialist movements. The FBI started surveilling him and his wife Shirley Graham in 1942. By 1961, Du Bois moved to Ghana, and he strongly denounced U.S. capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism. The Progressive Youth........

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