Pan-Africanism and the international color line: was the Du Boisian path of diplomatic Congresses right against Garvey's mass Black Nationalism, and what was Africa to mean for the diaspora?

W.E.B. Du Bois, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The Pan-African Congresses I organized between 1900 and 1945 were the right path: diplomatic, scholarly, institution- building, oriented toward African self-determination and the eventual end of colonial rule, and constructed in conscious partnership with the African leaders — Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Padmore — who would inherit the work.1 The opposition to Marcus Garvey was correct on two grounds.

The first was organizational and ethical: the Universal Negro Improvement Association's financial conduct, in particular the Black Star Line, was a catastrophe for the working-class subscribers Garvey had promised would be lifted by it. The second was philosophical: Garvey's "Africa for the Africans" rested on a race-as-blood essentialism — the view that race is a biological inheritance that confers a destiny — that I had been working most of my life to refuse.

Africa was to mean for the diaspora a homeland in the political-historical sense: the continent whose recovery from colonial domination would transform the global color line. It was not to mean the return-to-blood mysticism of the UNIA.234

Sources

  1. We tried in vain to convene a congress in Africa itself. The great depression of the 'thirties then stopped our efforts for 15 years. Finally in 1945 black trade union delegates to the Paris meeting of trade unions called for another Pan-African Congress. This George Padmore organized and, at his request, I came from America to attend the meeting at Manchester, England.
    The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, pp. 233–234
  2. In fact the whole tremendous drama which followed the war, political and social revolution, economic upheaval ai<d depression, national and racial hatred, all these things made a setting in which any such movement as I envisaged was probably at the time impossible. I sensed this in the bitter and deep opposition which our resolutions invoked in Belgium.
    Dusk of Dawn - An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, pp. 138–139
  3. I was tired of finding in news¬ papers, textbooks and history, fulsome lauding of white folk, and either no mention of dark peoples, or mention in dis¬ paraging and apologetic phrase. I made up my mind that it must be true that Africa had a history and destiny, and that one of my jobs was to disinter this unknown past, and help make certain a splendid future.
    The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois - A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, pp. 343–344
  4. When the artillery belched they shivered, but never faltered. They marched The Collapse of Europe + 5 straight into death; the war cries became fainter and fainter and dropped into silence as not a single black man was left living on that field.
    The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, p. 46

Where the argument is made

  • "The Conservation of Races" (1897) on the message of African civilizations
  • First Pan-African Conference address, London (1900) — the founding statement of "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line"
  • The Negro Ch 1-3 (1915) on African history
  • Darkwater Ch 2 "The Souls of White Folk" and Ch 3 "The Hands of Ethiopia" (1920)
  • Crisis editorials on Marcus Garvey, particularly "Marcus Garvey" (December 1920, January 1921) and "A Lunatic or a Traitor" (May 1924)
  • reports of the Pan-African Congresses of 1919 (Paris), 1921 (London/Brussels/Paris), 1923 (London/Lisbon), 1927 (New York), 1945 (Manchester)
  • Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945)
  • The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947)

How the argument was received

settled