Throughout most of my life I have sought to follow the notion that, "I can't be anyone but me no matter what other people want or expect me to be." In portraying William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), America's greatest black intellectual, for the Missouri and Illinois Humanities Councils in 1995 and 1996, as part of their summer chautauqua series, this one titled "Visions of America," that notion came under severe challenge. I suspect this was because there were times when I found it difficult to recognize where DuBois left off and I began. At the same time, however, doing DuBois allowed me to learn some things about myself that only began to become clear after my seventh performance. And now that I am somewhat removed in time and distance from the portrayal, I have begun to think about how I might use that portrayal to reflect on questions of social significance, in particular questions of race and race relations in the United States that now at the beginning of the twenty-first century might be quantitatively but perhaps not qualitatively different than earlier periods in the history of the United States. Before I move on to consider this, permit me to set the stage so to speak by providing some contextual details so that when I return, having incorporated here one of the presentations I gave on the trail, that discussion will make a little more sense than would be the case otherwise.

To begin, I was doing this portrayal as part of a troupe (staffed by experienced players) that also featured portrayals (one each evening during the week we spent in a particular community) of William Jennings Bryan (A. Theodore Kachel, Assistant Professor and Theatre Director, Tulsa Community College), Isaac Meyer Wise (Noel H. Pugach, Professor of History, The University of New Mexico), Andrew Carnegie (Jeffery E. Smith, Public Scholar, St. Louis, MO), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Sally Roesch Wagner, Research Affiliate, The University of California at Davis). I had got the part by responding to a request for proposal sent out by the Missouri Humanities Council sometime in November 1994 (also published in the Organization of American Historians Newsletter). My immediate supervisor gave me her copy of the RFP and encouraged me to apply if the spirit moved me. I phoned the MHC office in St. Louis, whereupon I was sent a more detailed application. This application also required a statement of rationale for applying, some information about the portrayer and knowledge of the character to be portrayed, and a taped sample performance of fifteen to twenty minutes that also included responses to two questions I had received in a sealed envelope from the executive director of the council that was to opened on camera and addressed at that time.

Because this was the first such thing I had ever done, and because the last time I had done any "acting" was so far in the past I have since forgotten the role I played, I wanted it to be just so. After putting together the other materials, pointing out that I had once taught a course on DuBois, and that I used his works with some regularity in my other classes, I wrote out a short script that included an overview of the Man and his ideas. I decided to portray DuBois at age 55/56, roughly in the middle of his tenure as director of publicity and research at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and editor of the Crisis magazine. I did this for at least two reasons.

First, I believed it would be easier for me to act my own age in the short time I initially had available to prepare and present the man and his times; and, second, because of my contention that his life (he lived for 95 years from just after the Civil War to just before the commencement of the black power phase of the modern civil rights movement) consisted of several "eras" that would make attempting to do the whole of it from the perspective of just before his death more complicated for me and, perhaps, too confusing for the audience. For, in surveying DuBois's life, I was able to discern a number of distinct periods therein based on his associations and activities that emphasized different orientations/approaches to the issues of family, race, education, economy, social justice, et al, that I had detailed in a companion essay published by the Missouri and Illinois Humanities Councils and distributed at each performance site.

Still, I was at somewhat of a loss as to how he might have behaved at a public presentation. Like most folk, I had learned my history from the outside in. Thus most of the biographical materials I was familiar with up to that time, dealt more with DuBois's writings and his activities and only indirectly addressed what kind of person he was and how his earlier life affected his later life. What little I did have to go on was based on a couple of conversations some decade and a half earlier with the late Charles H. Wesley, a contemporary of DuBois, and a former executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (these conversations took place before the organization changed its name to Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History). So, I winged it, as they say, cobbling together the bits and pieces I had, and hoped for the best (I would add additional materials along the way wherever there was a library leavening subsequent presentations with revisions gleaned from earlier performances and audience reaction to them). A friend helped me set up and run the camera in my living room for the first day's taping. I entered from stage left--the dining room--in an old three piece suit (I already knew DuBois was a rather formal man), with some papers in my hand, looked up at the lens, and went for it--no rehearsal, no nothing. And, as you might have guessed, there had to be a second day's taping because I had forgotten to address the questions in the sealed envelope. I put the package together and sent it off. Quite astonishingly, I got a letter from the Council in December 1994, telling me that it was my mission to portray DuBois if I wanted to accept it.

Those of you who have gotten research grants that you hoped for/did not hope for, will understand the familiar mixed feelings I experienced here. If I accepted, it meant lots of work to justify my having been selected (I would later find out that after viewing the tape, some selection committee member danced down the passageway chanting "We've got a DuBois; We've got a DuBois"!). Apparently, the other inquirers had either not followed through, or were not satisfactory, and the council was faced with the possibility of not being able to find someone to portray the good doctor.

The next step in the process was to go to St Louis for a rehearsal in February 1995, and to meet with the local community representatives. As I faced the task of preparing for the portrayal, I realized I would have to do more than I did to secure the role in the first place. The question was what would I do? This was especially important in that I knew I needed more information about DuBois' mannerisms when on the lecture circuit and aspects of his personality beyond the glittering generalities (family background and early years in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, his education, work habits, writings, ideas, activities, and associations). I had secured some of this information by consulting a number of biographical sources and analyses, good and not so good, that had been written of him and his works. There was additional detail on his travels, and interpretations of his influence on local and world events--but very little on the man himself, and the other roles he played: husband, father, manager, mentor.

I knew he was married and had had two children. But his first wife, Nina Gomer, and his daughter, Yolanda (Burghardt, his first born, died at the age of eighteen months), appeared to play minimal roles in his life. Did he smoke? Yes (he allowed himself three cigarettes a day), but I was not sure of that until I had a chance to visit with Herbert Aptheker, DuBois's literary executor in San Jose after the second tour was over who confirmed for me that many of the things I had guessed at and incorporated in my presentation turned out to be more correct than not. Did he drink? Yes, but no hard liquor, a promise he made to his mother. Did he smile or laugh? Yes, but it depended very much on the situation in which he found himself. How did he sound when he talked? How did he phrase his words? Did he speak rapidly, slowly, softly, bruskly? When he wanted to make a particularly trenchant point in a presentation, did he use volume or tone to effect the emphasis he desired? And while I was aware that he did not suffer fools gladly, I was left to wonder how he comported himself at social events because, as I would learn, he was somewhat shy. And finally, when he was on the public platform, did he read his speeches, give them extemporaneously, look at the pages or the audience when he spoke--what? As it turned out, he carefully prepared his remarks sometimes including in his presentation a salient fact about the community in which he was speaking; read from his prepared text in a low monotone, and seldom if ever made eye contact with his audience. He also began his presentation by telling his audience beforehand approximately how long he would talk and then finish his presentation with one to two minutes left from the time he allotted himself.

All of this was especially important because, although he had grown up in New England immersed in a culture of reserve, he had been schooled in the South, the North, and in Germany; and he had had lengthy periods of work and residence in Atlanta and New York City both of which exhibit distinctive speech patterns. Not ever having heard his voice, and not knowing at the time that there was a video interview of him done in his later years in the Oral History Archive at Columbia University, I used my imagination and hoped for the best. The sources I had helped me to become more familiar with the broad contours of his life not the intimate details I wanted or would need to effect a dialog with someone creating the impression that they were actually conversing with a person who might have become known to them but a few short moments earlier from what they had read in the printed guide. And while I do not believe myself to be any kind of perfectionist, I did want to make my portrayal a memorable one for those who came to see, and perhaps learn, something about Afroamerican history and black people they had not known before.

Let me make clear here that I was not trying to recreate DuBois although I had to make my portrayal of him believable. I wanted simply to show him as I understood him and communicate that understanding to those who would be in the audience in the communities we visited, and who might not know very much, if anything, about him. DuBois, as a writer, had had quite an impact on me as a student, as a scholar of the black experience, and as a teacher of his life and writings in my courses in Afroamerican Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Many of his ideas, some of which I did not agree with, had signally shaped my perceptions of the black experience and how I had chosen to explore it and present it to my students. And then, there was the problem of the format within which I would have to "perform." Once we went on the road--three cities in Missouri and one in Illinois in 1995, and two each in Missouri and Illinois in 1996--the plan called for each player to "recreate" the character in appropriate costume that could last up to fifty minutes. Then we were to spend some twenty minutes or so answering questions from the audience "in character." The third section of the evening performance, questions about the historical figures and their times addressed to the scholar doing the portrayal, allowed us to deal with matters that our characters could not be expected to address because they were "out of period," meaning the event we were asked to address transpired after the death of the character, or in my case especially, subsequent to the time of my visit to the community in question. The rehearsal in St Louis differed only in that it was a short précis of what was to come during the summer tour.

After watching the others in the troupe perform (all of whom had done this before, two even professionally) it got to be my turn. I stepped to the podium and puffed myself up to my most reserved best, laid my papers on top and began to read my remarks (including some disquisition on an event or person from the community being visited that aimed at pointing out how undemocratic the nation was and what was needed to fix the society) without raising my head from the pages until I had finished.

Once I finished, William Jennings Bryan, who also served as a master of ceremonies, stepped to the stage, as he had done before with all the others, to field questions from the audience of MHC officials and representatives from the several communities we would visit. Just as he was about to call for the first question, I looked at him and said, "Thank you, Mr. Bryan, but I believe I am quite capable of fielding my own questions." I remember Ted looking at me rather strangely; but consummate actor that he was, he accepted the change and rolled with it. Because this seemed so in keeping with what DuBois might have done, we decided, after discussing it, to leave it in as a part of the presentation style for both years of the tour.

I knew ahead of time that this business of answering questions from an audience while in character was going to be a little dicey. I understood that Chatauqua was intended to be an interactive experience. I also understood that DuBois did not suffer fools gladly. That questions from the uninformed directed to someone whose reputation bespoke a person well informed about many things, might lead to some acerbic retort that would confuse and even maybe insult the questioner. How real did I want the interaction to be? I wanted to be accurate; I wanted folks to learn a thing or three; but I, William M. King, also wanted to have some fun; so I made room for a little mischief to creep in here and there. I don't mean to suggest maliciousness here&emdash;rather, more an improvisation.

As I would when we took the show on the road, I remained behind the podium where the others worked either without one or used something else to create a different effect with the audience. I then gazed out into the audience with a look of impatience almost daring someone to ask a question. When a hand was raised, I would look at the person in an intimidating manner. If they persisted, I acknowledged their presence, treated them as a challenge, and waited for a moment or so after they finished speaking to create the impression I was pondering what had been said. Then I responded.

I sought to make my replies as short and succinct as possible. The message I wanted to send was that the answer to the question was obvious if only the questioner would think before uttering a sound. The first couple of times I did this, both at the rehearsal and at each site a silence ensued, and hands went down. Then a question might be directed at the manner of my answer. This would get another response that might be equally trenchant. When the frustration level reached some point where I sensed the moment was right, I, as DuBois, would deliver some "outrageous" opinion that was contrary to the conventional wisdom of the 1920s, the time of my portrayals.

When someone would ask an out of period question, if it was something that had not yet happened, I would say, if the event could be positively characterized, "Would that what you speak of might come true. But, given what we have now, I sincerely doubt any such thing is possible." Where negatively characterized, I would pause, as if musing, and then say, "I don't know whereof you speak. But if what you say is true, then the future is little different than the present, and hope for change is a useless emotion." The idea, here, as I saw it, was to effect a concrete reality that wanted people to deal with things as they were&emdash;that truth was a function of the belief system one embraced not some abstract ideal common to all regardless of their station in life. I felt it important to create a contrastive environment that might entice the audience to realize, in a Socratic manner, that "The unexamined life was not worth living." The problem with this was that it made the character seem somewhat evasive, arrogant and antagonistic, especially when the response to the questioner was a retort of sorts. Consequently, I made it a point to open the scholar portion of the performance by making clear that DuBois was a man with a mission, that his acerbity was a mask he sometimes employed to shield his insecurity on the public stage--he was, after all, a writer not a speaker, although he traveled and spoke primarily as a means of raising money for the NAACP--and, that among close friends he was often described as warm, gay and witty, the opposite of how most people remembered him. When I sensed that all questions had been asked, I stepped away from the podium, took off my coat and tie, and said, "That ain't me folks!" in an attempt to effect as sharp a break as I could with the character I had just been performing. Then, I would attempt to talk about the man as I knew him, and offer what I believed were plausible explanations for his conduct.

Clearly, DuBois wanted change. He wanted America, as Martin Luther King, Jr. would later opine, "To be true to what she had put on paper." It was his task, through his writings principally, to raise a critical consciousness that would ask the fundamental questions, and secure the requisite information, to effect social change. His appearances on the platform, aside from his being there to raise monies for the organization, were reminders that there was work to be done; work that might allow us to transcend the limitations we had imposed on ourselves, and attempted to impose on others.

What follows in the next section of this paper is the talk I gave in Springfield, Illinois 28 June 1996 my last performance. It is best described as what I believe was DuBois' vision of America in the 1920s. It contains material taken from a number of his works arranged to meet the objectives I noted earlier. It may be more "radical" in tone than something he might have done but then, as I have said, my job was to portray him as I understood him not as he actually was.

A VISION OF AMERICA 150 YEARS AFTER ITS BIRTH

Although it differs from my customary practice, I have assented to a request to answer a few questions following my talk so that those of you not familiar with my writings might be provided the opportunity to become more acquainted with my ideas. For the more restless among you, I plan to speak for about thirty-seven minutes.

It is my task this evening to speak to you about my vision of a democratic America that I hope will one day come to pass; a vision that is in some respects conditioned by the New England town meetings of my youth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. For it was in Great Barrington that I learned that "the dignity of all humans, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should not be abridged as a consequence of race, class or gender." Unfortunately, as my experiences, my studies of history and social science, and my studies of the American nation have made clear, that has not at all been the case in this land which in my view makes all its tendentious posturing about freedom, equality, liberty, and justice, its so-called founding concepts, so much empty rhetoric, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

It is precisely for that reason, as I will shortly adduce by a presentation of appropriate evidence from the American past and present, that I believe "the responsibility for their own social regeneration ought to be placed largely upon the shoulders of the Negro people." I believe this because of the lack of meaningful response from the leaders of either of the major political parties to the expressed concerns of colored people, and because of my conviction that a commitment to self-reliance is the only way black people can become an efficient and productive part of the nation. However, such responsibility must carry with it a grant of power, because responsibility without power is a mockery and a farce.

If, then, America is seriously committed to becoming a democratic society instead of playing make believe, it will see to it that the Negro people will not continue to be deprived of the freedom and power to realize their inherent potential. "Such social power means, assuredly, the growth of initiative among Negroes, the spread of independent thought, the expanding consciousness of manhood [however much] these things to-day are looked upon by many with apprehension and distrust. [Indeed,] there is systematic and determined effort to avoid this inevitable corollary of the fixing of social responsibility. Men openly declare their design to train these millions as a subject caste, as men to be thought for, but not to think; to be led, but not to lead themselves." How quickly it seems to have slipped from the public consciousness, as I wrote in the Souls of Black Folk, that the task of education is not to make men carpenters, but to make carpenters men. Only the pursuit of a process dedicated to bringing out and developing the native talents of the person being educated, one that teaches the student to think critically about the great moral issues of our times, one that assists us in the identification and address of our biases, our narrow and blind beliefs about those different from us can prepare us for the future.

"'Those who advocate [industrial schooling of the type practiced at the late Mr. Washington's institution among others to the exclusion of other forms of learning] forget that such a [simplistic] solution flings them squarely on the other horn of the dilemma: such a subject child race could never be held accountable for its own misdeeds and shortcomings; its ignorance would be part of the Nation's design, its poverty from thriftlessness which such oppression breeds; and above all, its crime would be the legitimate child of that lack of self-respect which caste systems engender. Such a solution of the Negro problem is not one which the saner sense of the Nation for a moment contemplates; it is utterly foreign to American institutions, and is unthinkable as a future for any self-respecting race of men. The sound afterthought of the American people must come to realize that the responsibility for dispelling ignorance and poverty and uprooting crime among Negroes cannot be put upon their own shoulders unless they are given such independent leadership in intelligence, skill, and morality as will inevitabl[y] lead to an independent manhood which cannot and will not rest in bonds.'" But, then, doing this flies in the face of what has been accepted as truth about the Negro lo these many years. Sad, is it not, that truth is more often than not a function of the belief system one embraces.

As the historical record makes clear, the black experience in the United States has been one of the denials of democracy since the arrival of Africans in the British colonies as trade goods aboard a Dutch Mann o Warre in 1619. And as much as it pains me to say this, I see little relief on the horizon in the light of my statement at the Pan African Congress in London in 1900, at which I observed that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far the differences of race&emdash;which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair&emdash;will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over one-half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization."

Even now, today, Friday, the 28th day of June, in this year of our lord, one thousand nine hundred twenty-four, the cloying tendrils of America's commitment to racism and oppression stay the passage of the Dyer Anti-lynching bill, which practice, over the past three decades, has accounted for the deaths of more than 3000 black persons. This is a most revealing statistic for a manifestly capitalist nation that has audaciously engraved on the front of its Supreme Court building in Washington, the dubious and misleading statement, intimating that this is a society that practices "equal justice under the law," when it knows that the law is little more than the social expression of vested interests.

And while I am on the subject of lynchings, I do wish that those who attempt to rationalize their conduct by alleging that it is the rape or attempt to rape white women, who require protecting&emdash;a kind of protection, I would point out, that leads more to their continued oppression than their safety&emdash;that is the primary cause of what they see as those necessary lessons to remind colored people of their proper place in society beneath the feet of white men, would cease and desist their specious name-calling. For if we really want to talk about rape, then let us begin with the treatment of black women by white men during and after slavery times when our mothers, sisters, and daughters were appropriated&emdash;without permission&emdash;by their owners and masters as if they were the private seminal vessels of a mythical master race. Perhaps, what is closer to the truth is that all too many white people fear us and feel threatened by us whenever we act like men and demand that white America recognize and treat us as such; for after all, we, too, "are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion." And so white people hate us because we are constantly reminding them that our commitment to Americanism is every bit as long-lived as theirs; it differs only in our insistence that this country live up to its ideals and cease being a hypocrite draped in red, white, and blue.

How else do you explain the treatment we have received in those churches that delusionally and deceitfully proclaim their commitment to brotherhood yet keep us in the back pew, making the so-called Christianity they profess little more than 'cheap piece of special pleading' over concerned with dogma and under concerned with ethics. Or the schools that preach a fabricated history of America loudly proclaiming that we are not in the texts because we have not accomplished anything worthy of inclusion&emdash;oh how little they know! Or, when we are present, appear in such a distorted fashion that even our own mothers would not recognize us. I would, of course, learn of the long struggle of my people from my classmates at Fisk, whose professors were genuine scholars interested in developing the talents of each individual. Indeed, the principal difference between them and the ones I encountered later as a student at Harvard (I was at the school not of it) is simply that those at the latter institution were more well know than those who taught me at the former.

And then there are the sociology and psychology texts espousing a kind of scientific racism contending that were it not for our inherent inferiority and criminality, we might make something of ourselves. As I observed in an article of mine published in 1910 in the American Historical Review on the subject of reconstruction after the Civil War, those who write the history of the vanquished do so to protect, preserve or defend their own advantage&emdash;for clearly, such history is seldom more than the propaganda of the victor. As some of my ancestors have long understood, "When lions have historians, hunters will cease to be heroes."

Finally there are our restricted opportunities in the world of work where a black man with a Ph.D. working as a red cap in the train station is not unknown; nor is the glib, insincere politician who comes down to the colored community only when he wishes to be reelected remaining invisible and unavailable the rest of the time when the people who elected him want something important from their so-called representative.

But as I wrote in "The Conservation of the Races," a paper presented to the American Negro Academy in 1897, America would not be America without its black citizens: we whose "subtle sense of song has given America its only American Music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy" but who have yet to see more than an immodest return on our investment paid in sweat, blood and tears over the years of our long sojourn in this land.

Perhaps there will come a day when the victim ceases to be blamed for the crimes of the oppressor, an oppressor who has not taken the time or exhibited the patience necessary to understand us and what we have to offer the nation preferring instead to prattle on about some state's rights nonsense, in actuality little more than a code word for its deep and abiding commitment to the preservation of its white supremacist doctrines.

Indeed, what America needs to understand as it continues to grapple with its white problem is that the more we colored people are denied opportunities to improve ourselves because of the biased visions others hold of us, the more white people word their social policies so as to reflect those biases, the more difficult it becomes for those who accuse us of being indolent, ignorant, and larcenous, to continue justifying and rationalizing their assertions arguing that we ought to be held accountable for our shortcomings and misdeeds. In short, it is incumbent on white people to prove to us that they are not racist, that they are not anti-American, that they are indeed the human beings they purport to be, something of which I have been reminded all too infrequently during my first fifty-six years of life.

In the few moments remaining to me this evening, allow me to set forth a few facts in support of my contention that America's problem with race&emdash;a problem it created, it maintains, it profits from, and that has become an integral element of the society's successful operation, a core ingredient it cannot do without&emdash;has led it to renege on its professed commitment to democracy. For I ask you, how do we effect democracy in a state continuously committing a moral wrong when that wrong (slavery and its attendant racism) was instrumental in the development of that state, whether it is practiced in ancient Greece, said to be its birthplace&emdash;which it most assuredly was not&emdash;or in the United States, where not all the citizens of the state proclaiming it is democratic are extended the rights, privileges and immunities set forth in its founding documents?

Indeed, it is in those founding documents themselves that we find our first instance of compromise with those noble concepts that fall so easily and smoothly from the lips of politicians, divines and like persons. For it was no less a luminary than Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave holder, yet bewitched by Sally Hemmings, who was forced into that compromise by Carolina and Georgia slave-holding interests and who thus removed man-theft and forced captivity from the Declaration of Independence as one of the charges against George the III adopted by the colonists to justify their actions.

How soon we forget that when that document was authored, America had already been a going concern for one hundred sixty-nine years. That it had, by 2 July 1776, a fully functioning social system complete with a class structure that had been imported from England: a class structure comprised of values, attitudes, norms, ways of behaving, and vested interests shaped so as to keep the society stable, orderly and thus not easily susceptible to legislative change however stirring were the words put on paper.

And was it not your very own Continental Congress whose carefully crafted Constitution disrespected its wonderful Preamble in such a fashion that the slave trade was allowed to continue until 1870 five years after the Civil was ended; five years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in the United States although it was supposed to have been ended in 1807 as I showed in my first book, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, based on my researches while a student at Harvard University. Or that that document had its first article construed in such a fashion in concert with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to define Blacks as three-fifths of a man (tacitly undermining simultaneously our designation as a species of property useable for whatever purpose) the better to settle the taxation concerns of the North at the same time that it addressed the representation concerns of the South.

And then there was the Peculiar Institution itself through which my people were reduced to little more than beasts of burden and sometimes bred as if they were little more than any other farmyard animal to increase the wealth of the master. Not only was it the imposition of authorized terror in public to keep the slaves in a subordinate position: the whippings, brandings, hamstringings, mutilations or executions that made slavery so successful, it was also the fact that the Africans were thousands of miles from home; that they were unfamiliar with the territory, and that their black skins made them immediately noticeable anywhere in the New World.

It matters not whether we are talking about the external trade or its more debilitating and uniquely American counterpart, the internal trade that developed with unbridled passion upon the conclusion of the War of 1812. For it was especially the internal trade that was responsible for the sundering of black families where children were snatched from their mother's arms; where wives and husbands were displayed separately on the auction blocks of several major cities including Washington, DC, a practice easily visible to one of your local citizens who took up residence there in 1861.

Local slave codes, including those promulgated in Illinois prior to 1835 but whose impact lasted long after they had been removed from the statute books forbade the marriage of Blacks held in bondage because more money might be made selling singlets rather than a conjoined pair whose self-interest might become more paramount than the master's. And so they 'took up' because they had been ordered to live together. No matter. For as far as whites were concerned, the sale of one or the other of the 'Marriage' partners ended the relationship with no regard for whatever feelings might have developed between them reinforcing their powerlessness to shape their own destinies. Thus they were parted from one another and sold into the deep South perhaps never to see each other again to feed the rapacious maw of an economic system that commoditizes all within its view to appease its inhumane god profit. Dressed and driven into the yards, wrote William Wells Brown, a Missouri fugitive, "they were made to dance, jump, sing, and play cards so their prospective buyers might see how happy and cheerful they were," while not a few had tears running down their cheeks.

Yes, there was day-to-day resistance to slavery that was fostered to some extent by the dependency of whites on Blacks. For the curious question in such circumstances is who really is the slave&emdash;the one with the chain around his neck, or the one who has to hold the chain and is beset with all manner of fears and insecurities about whether the darkies out back are planning a revolt. And yes, there were a large number of those also&emdash;more than 700 in fact. From the first in 1526 in what would become the Carolinas about which we know little because the rebels killed all the whites and fled into the woods, to the Prosser Rebellion in Virginia in 1800. There was also the Vesey Conspiracy in Charleston in 1822 betrayed by one of the conspirators, and the Turner Revolt in Virginia in 1831, whose 'success' led to the slaughter of over 100 innocent Blacks at the hands of outraged and fearful whites who wanted to teach the slaves a lesson&emdash;perhaps because it took so long to find and capture him raising some painful questions about black folks that were inconsistent with what was believed about their abilities. And because these incidents were often fomented by literate Negroes, there usually followed a spate of anti literacy laws that forbade the teaching of reading and writing to black people. What has always intrigued me about these laws was the illogic on which they were predicated. If you argue that Blacks were enslaved because they were inferior, that they were intellectually incapable of learning, then what sense does it make to pass a law prohibiting and punishing the teaching of reading and writing to someone who is supposedly incapable of learning. The only thing that makes sense is that those who do this are engaged in a kind of ritualistic activity designed to preserve a myth everyone knows is not true.

A marvelous example of this kind of thinking, concrete evidence of the scientific racism to which I alluded earlier on, is seen in the 1840 census of population in the United States. This tabulation, the first to count the inhabitants of insane asylums, found that the farther away a Black was from the Peculiar Institution, the more likely he was to be crazy. For surely, how else could you explain the greater preponderance of Blacks in mental institutions in Massachusetts than in Louisiana. Or the learned article by Dr. Samuel A Cartwright, a noted southern physician, in the October, 1857 number of the New Orleans Journal of Medicine and Surgery titled, "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro," in which he spoke at great length about Disaesthesia aethiops a malady that led the Blacks to break their tools or maim themselves so they could not work in the fields. And then there was drapetomania whose principal symptom was manifest in the slave's desire to escape from slavery. How else, I ask you, can we explain what appears to be willful behavior in what is admittedly mindless property? Neither should we forget the equally conundrous decision handed down by the Supreme Court in the same year in the Dred Scott case. This case, which originated in Missouri and involved Illinois is infamous for the statement made by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney to the effect that Blacks were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." Interestingly, this says more to me about the shortcomings of the author than it does about the object of his treatise.

Finally, there was the War Between the States that like all wars in which the United States has been involved thus far saw black servicemen fighting for a freedom and democracy they themselves could not enjoy. Our role in this struggle began with the heroic exploits of the First Kansas Colored Volunteers who defeated a confederate guerrilla force at Mound Island in Bates County, Missouri, 29 October 1862. This was almost three months before Lincoln, 'The Great Emancipator,' was forced to issue his masterful stroke of psychological warfare, the Emancipation Proclamation, a document that did little more than recognize a fait accompli&emdash;Blacks already beginning to free themselves showing up in Union encampments as contraband of war.

By the time of the southern surrender in April 1865, Illinois, like most other states and territories had supplied Blacks to the conflict. We lost some 37,000 of the over 200,000 men we supplied to that endeavor. Would that those who were captured would have been treated as prisoners of war. Sad to say they were treated as escaped slaves in all too many instances and executed on the spot. And there was the case of the Fort Pillow massacre in which 562 black men, women and children who had surrendered were put to death in 1864 after the Rebels overran their sanctuary in Tennessee.

After the war there was Reconstruction, presidential&emdash;that did not go far enough&emdash;and radical that failed to cement the modest gains it proffered to the newly freed men and women. Its duration varied throughout the region in which it was mounted. In Missouri, for example, it was over by 1870 although it lasted in other parts of the South to as late as 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the presidency following a compromise deal in which he agreed to remove federal troops from the South if selected. This act signaled Redemption during which many black landholders lost their holdings as whites regained political and economic control of the region. These holdings disappeared because their owners could not secure the funds to keep their property in the face of terrorist campaigns mounted by those who could not abide the presence in their midst of persons whose activities made a lie of the myths they embraced in pursuit of the belief that they knew what was best for the former slaves. Unabashedly this was a telling example of the reality that while capitalism may create opportunity for the few, it creates inequity for the many; especially those who do not share the arbitrary criteria of acceptance that are more often used to exclude rather than include, the hallmark of a truly democratic society that the United States is not.

Clearly this suggests that the northern victors used the insincere and temporary award of certain social and democratic rights during Reconstruction to tie up southern attention while they consolidated their economic hold on the West. I say this because black people are still waiting for the forty acres and a mule they were promised as payment for their services. And if I may venture a guess&emdash;look at how we were treated upon our return from the late, great war to save the world for democracy that was in reality about the divine right of white people to steal what did not belong to them&emdash;we will probably still be waiting through the end of this century if my perception is any indication. For in the summer of 1919 alone, 77 Negroes were lynched&emdash;one who was a woman&emdash;11 while still in their uniforms. Fourteen of that total were publicly burned 11 who were still alive at the time they were set afire. Too often to count we were told that if we expected to find things different, if we hoped for the democracy we had been sent to Europe to fight for to be implemented in America we were sadly mistaken. Although we had wrested control of our bodies from the chains of bondage, our oppressors sought now to break our spirits by claiming as they had done before but now with greater intensity, that we were inescapably inferior, without character or hope for the future; that we were most assuredly on the verge of dying out&emdash;something that first appeared in an article in The Nation in 1865&emdash;without slavery and its kindly ministrations looking out for us. We were to be cast adrift in "a world which yield[ed us] no true self consciousness, but only let [us see ourselves] though the revelation of the other world.

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Ah, if we were but gone from this place, all too many still believe, America would soon be released from its accursed white man's burden.

Coincident with America struggling to betray the Negro, Africa was being partitioned in Berlin for the greater glory of European greed. Meanwhile some Americans followed in their footsteps wildly waving their own banner of imperialist aggression in the Spanish-American war in the guise of exporting a kind of democracy that differed little from the oppressive regimes that were being overthrown. And let us not forget Plessy. This decision that was handed down to legitimize the fact of segregation, will, I believe, hold back the development of the South in much the same fashion as did slavery. Indeed, I would go so far as to contend that while the North may have won the war militarily, the South won the peace. This is evident in the fiction those who masquerade as our leaders seek to perpetuate fallaciously postulating that whatever is separate can be made equal something we know they can neither afford nor sustain. We can only hope they will abolish such nonsense before they entirely bankrupt themselves.

Moving on, prejudice, and its behavioral handmaiden discrimination, foster injustice. It is easily seen in under funded schools, debt peonage, and exclusion from the right to work by segregating Blacks in auxiliary unions and restriction in public accommodations. There is also the business of inadequate justice because the Negro cannot afford to pay for his lawyer and so more often winds up in jail while others with the resources to secure more effective talent receive lighter sentences or no sentence at all. In this and other ways, the existence of race prejudice shows that the race that practices it is afraid that it is not superior; that it is somehow inadequate, and so must reduce all others to its level. This is another reason why America is not a democracy.

There was a time when I believed that if I just pointed these truths out to white people or those who acted in an oppressive manner, some change might be secured. But, alas, that was not to be. Well do I remember the incident that took place in Palmetto, Georgia in 1899 that changed my attitudes and forced me to become a propagandist for my race&emdash;forced me to realize that telling people the truth was one thing; getting them to act on that truth irrespective of the consequences that action might bring was another matter entirely.

A man I knew, Sam Hose by name, had got into an argument with his landlord in April of that year in a quarrel over wages that resulted in the landlord's death. Sam fled, was hunted and captured after a charge of raping a white woman had been added to ensure greater white participation in his pursuit. Having heard this, I prepared a letter detailing the facts of the case that I then proceeded to take down to Mr. Joel Chandler Harris of the Atlanta Constitution. As I walked down to the paper because I would not ride the segregated streetcar, I was approached and told: "They got Sam; his fingers and toes are hanging in the window of that butcher shop around the corner." Not only had they hanged him but they had also burned him and then displayed the charred bones for all to see. I turned around and went back to my office at the University having realized that whatever I had to say would mean little in the face of such barbarism. I had "before me a problem that could not await the last word of science, but demanded immediate action to prevent social death."

I would also speak of the Atlanta Riot of 1906 that occurred while I was in Alabama doing field research that scared my wife into hating the city beyond that which she felt for it taking our first born from us&emdash;a riot in which ten Negroes including my physician and the president of the theological seminary were killed and over sixty other persons wounded; an incident that had me, a man dedicated to the peaceful reconciliation of conflict, purchasing a pistol for the first time in my life. More recently there have been the riots in Houston, Texas and East St Louis in 1917, Chicago and Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, and Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, that taken collectively amount to nothing less than a white pogrom against the Negro people.

Of special significance, however, is a disturbance that took place but a few short miles from where I speak this evening. I refer, of course, to the affair that took place in Springfield, 14 August 1908. An affair catalyzed by Mabel Hallan's inability to own up to her marital infidelities. As she would admit to the grand jury in early September, "the man she saw the night of her alleged rape, was her 'white sweetheart.' And, 'seeking to escape blame and shame and outcast,'" she invented the story of a black rapist, that appeared as a headline in the Illinois State Register 'Negro Assaults High-tone Lady in a Most Prominent Neighborhood.' Her evasion of the truth, including her identification of George Richardson, a man she knew not, was thus "an outstanding example of the racial bitterness and brutality that can be provoked…by deliberate falsehood." Before the presence of over 4000 state militia effected a cessation of the hostilities, two Blacks, Scott Burton, who died defending his property and William Donnegan, aged 80, whose only crime was that he had been married to a white woman for 32 years, were lynched; another five persons, all white, succumbed to assorted accidental wounds received during the riot; and more than 100 others were wounded. Over 40 black homes were burned to the ground, and another two dozen black business were required to close for repairs. Finally, more than 2000 Negroes fled the city.

This led to a conference in New York in 1909 hosted by a group of well-meaning white people who were appalled not only by what happened but by where it happened and who desired to finish the work they believed Lincoln had started. I attended and spoke at that conference. And in 1910, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a biracial organization I serve as director of publicity and research, was formed.

By way of summary, I would remind you as Frederick Douglass reminded us at a dark time in our history that he who would be free must himself strike the first blow. Throughout our long history, black people have always been concerned with, and worked for freedom, liberty, equality and justice for all. Whether it was through the means of contesting the Peculiar Institution, emigration to Africa or elsewhere, military combat, or something as simple as John Berry Meachum's 'floating school,' a steamboat he had built and equipped with a library and moored in the middle of the Mississippi River so that it was subject to federal and not state law as a way of evading the Missouri anti-literacy law of 1847, we have sought to define and determine our own destiny rather than have it defined or determined for us by others who have not always had our best interests in mind.

It was for this reason and because my attention had long been focused on democracy and democratic development, and the admission of my people into freedom and democracy, and because I had called for a 'New Negro' as early as 1887, that I asked some people to join me in 1905 at Fort Erie, Ontario on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, to form a new organization addressed to our concerns. Of course we met on the Canadian side because no hotel on the American side would rent us rooms.

At this first meeting of the Niagara Movement, which we saw as a reasoned judicious response to the Tuskegee machine that hindered our flexibility in addressing the oppression we experienced, we concluded that without freedom of speech and criticism; an unfettered and unsubsidized press; manhood suffrage; the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color; without the recognition of the principles of human brotherhood as a practical present creed; the recognition of the highest and best human training as a monopoly of no class or race; without a belief in the dignity of labor, or a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership, there could be no democracy in America.

One year later, at our second annual meeting at Harper's Ferry on 14 August 1906, I said "we will not be satisfied with one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, social, and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave&emdash;a byword and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishment."

A former mentor of mine, the late John Henrik Clarke, emeritus professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York, was in the habit of saying that "the greatest miracle in the history of the universe was the survival of black people in white America because no one could figure out how they did it." He also wrote in a number of places that when the Europeans set forth on their mission to conquer and colonize the world, "they also colonized information about the world." This was done, he argued, to aid and abet the subjugation of people of color because to "make a people partly assume that oppression is their natural lot, you have to remove them from the respectful commentary of history and make them dependent on the history of their conquerors." History, he continued, "is a clock people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is also a compass people use to find themselves on the map of human geography. The role of history is to tell a people what they have been and where they have been, what they are and where they are. The most important role history plays is that it tells a people where they still must go and what they still must be."

As I reflect back on the tone, style and substance of the preceding section of this paper, I pause to wonder whether there has, in fact, been a qualitative as well as quantitative change in the position and conditions of black people in the United States. Are we really better off now than when I, as DuBois, spoke before that audience in Springfield in 1924? And, if we are not, then what must we do to improve our lot? What can we learn from our history in this land and what are we to do with what we learn? Was there something different, for example, about those we looked to for leadership then&emdash;the Douglasses, the Washingtons, the Powells, the DuBoises, even&emdash;who exhibited a kind of pride and character not evident today? Were we different then than we are now, and if so in what way?

Yes, we are more middle class than we were in earlier times&emdash;perhaps not proportionally&emdash;but are we different from other middle class Americans? Are we still in tune with us as a whole people whose needs must be addressed differently because there are those of us (maybe more than before) who have lost our way as we have become more "integrated" into American society and culture becoming in essence shallow copies of white folk wrongly believing that by so doing we will effect liberation from oppression? Is this what we have done? And if it is what we have done, how do we free ourselves to create alternative pathways that might help us to better realize who we are and what we can do?

Some people today speak of a desire for the United States to become a colorblind society. My concern here, however, is that maybe we would be better served by assisting people to realize that we already are a colorblind society. That perhaps the greater need is for us to become more color conscious. That only by moving away from the monochromacity of whiteness can we begin to accept, understand, and appreciate the reality of diversity as the true foundation stone of democracy. How do we do this&emdash;how do we secure unity without uniformity? We do it I believe by focusing on the fact that our differences are the only thing we have in common. That difference does not have to become deviance. We do it by identifying and meliorating the ways in which we resist change as a natural process in life and society. We do it by becoming more rather than less inclusive. What I propose here cannot be accomplished without struggle&emdash;the kind of struggle that Douglass made clear was at the root of reallocating power in society. We must continue to agitate and we must continue to demand. Without them the tyranny of which he and DuBois spoke will continue unabated.

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