Review by Edward Tanguay May 7, 1997

"John," she said, "does it make every one-- unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?"
He paused and smiled. "I am afraid it does."
--- from "Of the Coming of John," W.E.B. Du Bois

Du Bois was one of those people who studied and learned a lot of things about the world, a lot of things which he found to be extremely unjust. This became his source of energy for becoming an intellectual beacon for America, warning it of "the 20th century color problem" and suggesting sound and reasonable courses of action for the country to take.

I had heard that Du Bois was opposed to Booker T. Washington but this book brings out the reasons why. Du Bois stood in opposition to Washington because:

• Washington had a program that was unnecessarily narrow. The white man said, "If that is all you and your race ask, take it."
• Washington claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission
• Washington believed that the black man should simply stick to manual work and try to join the American consumer mentality in that way.

As Dr. Nathan Hare mentions in the introduction to my book, "Du Bois condemned America's attempts to 'reduce life to buying and selling,' cheating and deceiving, and he bewailed the 'bankruptcy of white christianity.' Having lost faith in the good intentions of his white fellows, he complained that Negroes and West Indians--and most of West Africa--were aping the acquisitive white society, a tendency he fought all his life, ground in his faith that these inclinations would disappear on 'an inner cultural ideal.'"

And you have to like Du Bois' double-edged compliment to Mr. Washington "It is as though Nature must make men narrow in order to give them force."

I believe that Du Bois' ideas were not to fight so much for the Negroes cause, but to fight for the cause of the country and for civilization itself. Being raised in a wealthly New England home and having studied at Harvard and in Europe, Du Bois could not identify personally with the majority of the poor blacks in the South. Du Bois' message is for the sake of the country in the 20th century. He has advice for both blacks and whites, as " both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent."

. . . the way for a people to gain respect is not continually belittling and ridiculing themsevles; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

And he presented the problem to the white man in a way he could understand. Here, Dr. Poussaint on Du Bois:

He maintained that it was not only unjust, but illogical for the white community to continue attempting to thrust the blame for the black man's condition solely on to the shoulders of th former slaves. The blame was shared by both races, but it was up to the whites as the economically and politcally stronger of the two to initiate the necessary steps involved in correcting the situation.

You can't help but notice a type of intellectual disgust for the South on the part of Du Bois in this book. He intellectually browbeats them throughout the book, at times quite obviously:

The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance.

Also revealing is Du Bois' conception of Negro psychology:

"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."

I found it interesting that just as in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Declaration of Indepencence is referred to as a document with which the black men could demand their freedom--an interesting irony in American history: a country based on the protection of individual rights, yet allowing the ownership of slaves.

It must have been an extended exercise in control for Du Bois to hold back as much passion for the cause as he did in this book considering that he, for instance, according to Dr. Nathan Hare:

. . . as a professor at Atlanta University, bought a shotgun and two thousand rounds of shells filled with buckshot and resolved that if a white mob were to cross the campus to his house he would, without hesitation, "spray their guts over the grass." The whites dutifully stayed away.

and he was aware that:

. . . no human group had ever achieved freedom without being compelled to murder thousands of its oppressors . . .

By keeping this a low-key, intellectual study instead of a passionate cry for rebellion, Du Bois set an example of positive change which the country direly needed at the beginning of the century.

It is a book not only for blacks and whites in America, but for people who are negatively classified by their outer appearances rather than by their skills and deeds. Just as many people in other circumstances of life, a black living in America at the beginning of the 20th century necessarily was bombarded by social and personal pressure from every side. Du Bois makes this effect on personality clear:

From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,--from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence.

And Du Bois' advice for those in this situation:

Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity.

Du Bois' style was strange. After some very concise and high-powered argumentation, the reader finds himself reading a description of chugging down a train in the south looking out the window at the landscape. Du Bois mixed both intellectual argumentation with a "reader come sit by me and let me show you some scenes of the South of this here train window" type of story telling. It was a bit jolting, but innovative.

The story "Of the Coming of John" is powerful and could be well used by itself as a study text on the struggle of the blacks in post reconstruction days. In fact, I had seen or read it before but I don't remember where. Also, the chapter on sorrow songs capped off a complete and very unique book.

Reading American history from a conservative angle, I believe Du Bois is truly an American hero next in line after Washington and Lincoln as one of the most significant Americans who fought for individual freedom in the midst of opposing opinions and obstacles.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed rougly in his face.

Edward Tanguay

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