Books: Negro’s Autobiography

DUSK OF DAWN—W. E. B. Du Bois—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Dusk of Dawn is the autobiography of a Negro whose lifelong attempt has been to ease friction between U. S. whites and blacks. In William E. Burghardt Du Bois’s youth the faith of the nation was Progress. The faith of his college, the Harvard University of 1890, was Science and Truth.

In 1909 the home town of Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Ill., was the scene of race riots, a lynching. Du Bois lost faith in Science and Progress, dropped tiis research at Atlanta University for a new policy: Propaganda. He founded a crusading monthly, The Crisis, became an xecutive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, struggled no less against the submissive Negro philosophy of Booker T. Washington than against white prejudices.

By 1932 Du Bois thought he saw two world trends: 1) the waning of capitalism; 2) the waning concept of man as a rational being. From these he derived a new program for U. S. Negroes: 1) cooperative action among Negro consumers, building toward industrial democracy, i.e., socialism; 2) recognition of the deep, irrational roots of race prejudice, demanding “on our part not only the patience to wait, but the power to entrench ourselves for a long siege. . . .”

Negroes dislike twice-disillusioned Du Bois’s newest plan because it accepts racial segregation. Whites dislike its Marxist economics. At 72, W. E. Burghardt Du Bois stands alone but not unrespected. When he broke with the N. A. A. C. P. in 1934, his colleagues conceded: “He created what never existed before, a Negro intelligentsia. …”