Of the Meaning of Pedagogy: W. E. B. Du Bois,Racial Progress,and Positive Propaganda

The Teacher Denied

To return to Wright’s (2012) earlier warning, it is instructive that Du Bois himself once reflected on racial progress in the span of a decade. In “Of the Meaning of Progress” from The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois ([1903] 2018) described his experience teaching first grade in the rural Tennessee town of Alexandria. ⁴ Du Bois feels the weight of his responsibilities as an instructor. Hope glimmers on the faces of his young charges. But 10 years later, he returns to the town to find the log schoolhouse gone. Children had died and deep poverty had overtaken the town. If there had been any progress, Du Bois ([1903] 2018:68) intoned, it was “necessarily ugly.” “Of the Meaning of Progress” is a reminder that before Du Bois embarked on a career as a researcher, he was a teacher whose early experiences in the classroom indelibly shaped his larger social vision and the language he would use to capture the nature of change and progress. Du Bois’s vision resonates with that of the American pragmatist tradition, which sees teaching as an expansion of the imagination with the aim of reconstructing an imperfect democracy (Rogers 2023).

That racial progress, if any, is slow, nonlinear, and ugly helps to explain sociology’s own long denial of Du Bois’s contributions. This history is a reminder that “the scholar denied” (Morris 2015) was also the teacher denied, which resists sidelining Du Bois’s pedagogy as his research is increasingly embraced (or rather, it is impossible to take seriously his research agenda without taking seriously Du Bois’s teaching). The title of my article, “Of the Meaning of Pedagogy,” is adapted from “Of the Meaning of Progress.” I view Du Bois as preeminently a pedagogue who was guided by the mission to impart the “Truth” of humanity, a mission that linked the many hats he wore (as researcher, activist, teacher, and mentor) and the genres he embraced (art, science, fiction, poetry, editorials, historiography, empiricist sociology, and more) with the goal of Black freedom.

For Du Bois, teaching encompassed the art of instruction, the science of good scholarship, and the desire for social change. And what links science, art, and praxis is propaganda. Smith (2004) calls Du Bois’s use of visualization and photographs in his work the “art of scientific propaganda,” and I adopt it here as the principle for a Du Boisian pedagogy. It builds on the well-known phrase the “art of teaching”—the unquantifiable experience of learning with others, often creative and emotionally charged, where the teacher’s and students’ unique personalities and life experiences shape the learning experience—as distinct from the “science of teaching,” or evidence-based learning that informs student evaluation and all the ways that instruction is standardized. Du Bois’s own pedagogy intentionally blurred these lines. It is both radically political and radically creative. Du Bois himself reflected on his own experiences teaching Black children, but the pedagogy I have in mind can be adopted in a range of college classrooms serving various demographic populations. This pedagogy, however, is an ethical practice that urges non-Black teachers and students to think carefully about their social locations and the power relations that structure schooling systems and commit to elevating and dignifying Black voices and histories.

Of the Meaning of Propaganda

Positive Propaganda

If progress is ugly and teaching is political, then a Du Boisian pedagogy means rethinking the meaning of and uses of propaganda for the sociology classroom. The idea of “propaganda” dates to the 17th century, when the Vatican, in observing the rising tide of Protestantism, called for a “propagation” of the Catholic Faith (Bernays [1928] 2005). Du Bois became an active propagandist in the early 1900s just as the idea of propaganda went mainstream. While emerging as a more neutral idea, by the close of World War I it had taken on a sinister tenor as governments had embraced mass manipulation as a crucial state objective. This history has informed the now dominant view of propaganda as demagoguery, in which mass media and elites corrupt the public sphere through a campaign of indoctrination (Stanley 2015). When Edward Bernays’s controversial book Propaganda was published in 1928—which looked to a future after World War I that treated propaganda as an object of science and a requirement of functioning democracies—Du Bois (1935) was several years away from publishing Black Reconstruction in America. In his magnum opus, Du Bois looked to the period after the Civil War as when White historians had written a counterfeit history—perpetuating what Du Bois called “the propaganda of history”—by claiming that Black people were responsible for the failure of Reconstruction. On the eve of another world war, Du Bois (1939) warned that a “period of propaganda” had finally gripped the United States.

Du Bois viewed propaganda as an object of great scientific, artistic, political, and pedagogical interest. For Du Bois, “Propaganda at its best translated qualitative social science, scholarship, and historical interpretation into creative, innovative, aesthetic expressions accessible to public audiences” (Sinitiere 2019:158). Out of this vision emerges a pedagogy of positive propaganda. In the narrower sense of teaching in a college classroom, Du Bois’s pedagogy was irrefutably propagandist—especially when he was teaching Black children and adults. In reflecting on his time teaching at Atlanta University, he offered plainly, “I was fortunate with this teaching in having vivid in the minds of pupils a concrete social problem of which we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve. There was little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becoming purely theoretical” (Du Bois [1920] 1999:48). ⁵

I am more concerned with Du Bois as a teacher in an expansive sense: as a pedagogue who in and out of the classroom fought to impart lessons on racial truths. To help establish this Du Boisian pedagogy, my article proceeds next in these ways. First, I discuss an enduring, often frustrating tendency within sociology to view research and activism as being in tension with one another. Du Bois’s own pedagogy viewed this relationship between scholarship and change as mutually inclusive, a relationship that overlays two other relationships: between art and agitation and between science and art. A pedagogy of positive propaganda encourages instructors to help their students navigate the “rays” animating the poles between science, art, and agitation. Du Bois ([1940] 2007) used this language when he described how the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose motivated him to struggle more forcefully for social reform. As he wrote, “At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored” (Du Bois [1940] 2007:38). Once connoting a violent history, I follow Du Bois in “transfiguring” (Webster 2021) the imagery of rays to describe the multidirectional movement of science, art, and agitation in a pedagogy of positive propaganda (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s pedagogy of positive propaganda.

Print Propagandists

This section shows positive propaganda in action in the sociology classroom. In Fall 2019, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois at my home institution, a selective, midsized university on the East Coast. The course enrolled 15 third- and fourth-year students, a majority of whom were White or Asian and two students who were African American. The class composition mirrored the demographics among declared majors in my department and in the wider discipline. ¹⁰

The year 2019 marked the 100-year anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919—the deadly race riots around the country that began when a Black child was murdered in Chicago—and that was the tragic backdrop to Du Bois’s volume Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, published in 1920 and an important text for the course. That semester was just a few months off from the extraordinary events of 2020: the global COVID pandemic and the nationwide racial protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the extrajudicial police killings of other Black Americans. In spring 2020, after COVID had shut down my campus, I had a chance to catch up (virtually) with several students who had taken the seminar and were graduating. We returned to the themes of Darkwater, understanding it anew as a “red record” where Du Bois was writing during the “bloodletting of the Red Summer” as it intersected with Du Bois’s own pandemic moment of the Spanish Flu of 1918 (Hartman 2020). We had new language to understand such antiblack violence as not an event but as an ongoing pandemic.

A Du Boisian pedagogy has never been more urgent as a wave of revanchist, conservative policies attempt to bar and censor anti-racist curricula, from the 1619 Project and critical race theory to AP African American Studies, as “woke” propaganda. Although K–12 curricula have been especially threatened by conservative legislation and backlash, higher education has not been immune, with attacks on critical teaching as part of a larger, dangerous “anti-woke” campaign (Thakore 2023). A Du Boisian pedagogy recognizes the vital role that postsecondary education plays in resisting these vengeful tactics while at the same time is aware of how “[b]eyond its linkages to historical injustice, the university has regenerated its patterns of enslavement and dispossession” (Flipper 2021:159).

The Crisis magazine, the major organ of the NAACP, for which Du Bois served as editor beginning in 1910, personified Du Bois’s propagandist efforts (Kirschke and Sinitiere 2019). For an assignment in class, my students and I worked together to create a class issue of The Crisis magazine, which we titled Today’s Crisis ¹¹ (see Figure 2). Each student created a one-page feature or column, offering commentary on a relevant contemporary political topic of their choice, inspired by or modeled after a column that appeared in The Crisis or The Brownies’ Book. The latter, the first major magazine for Black children, which Du Bois coedited with Jessie Redmon Fauset and Augustus Granville Dill, ran from 1920 to 1921 (Blume Oeur 2021; Harris 1989). This periodical grew out of the annual “Children’s Number” special issues of The Crisis, and our class reflected on the magazine’s continuing relevance on the eve of its centennial.

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Figure 2.

Cover of student publication reimagining the NAACP magazine The Crisis.

Many students were inspired to think about race relations in the United States a century after the violence of the Red Summer. I encouraged students to be creative and to take risks and to be clear about how their creations traveled between the poles of science, art, and agitation. Following Du Bois’s (1926) proclamations in “Criteria,” in preparation for their features, the students studied the Black writers, artists, and scholars who inspired their own creations—their histories, motives, and messages—and how their work resonated today. This was similar to the practice of “critical reappraisal,” where students consider the contemporary relevance of ideas that emerged in specific historical situations (Scoville and Mooney 2023). Given that many students in class were not African American and were engaging a publication produced by Black people, it was especially important for us to consider the ethics involved in doing this work and the obligations they create for us as practitioners. I urged the students to think critically about their own social locations and to listen carefully to what the Black creatives writing in and beyond The Crisis were saying. Later, McKittrick’s (2021:16) writings on radical Black methodologies gave me the language to understand this as a practice where “we read outside ourselves . . . to actively unknow ourselves.”

I offer here descriptions of six student features. One student wrote a work of fiction that combined themes from science fiction with insights from editorials on unions and the rights of Black workers from The Crisis. Titled “The Visionary,” this story is loosely based on the experiences of Sarah Richardson, the CEO of the biotech company MicroByre, and chronicles a Black woman who is navigating discrimination in the historically White field of engineering. As the student wrote in their reflection paper, the story “represents hope for revolution in a world where incremental change has failed.” In another feature, a student wrote a fictionalized account of Jun Fujita, the Japanese American photojournalist responsible for many of the better known photographs of the Red Summer race riots. Titled “1943,” the story finds Fujita taking a streetcar through Chicago’s Black Belt neighborhood, reflecting on the grim memories of that summer against the backdrop of World War II, which saw a sharp rise in the number of Japanese people in the city because many had been displaced from the West Coast. Ultimately, this story uses the remarkable place of Fujita in Chicago’s history to reflect on Du Bois’s global vision of building solidarity between Black and Asian peoples. In a third column, a student penned a counternarrative to the Du Bois-led Crisis itself by highlighting essays from two magazines, The Crusader (1918–1922) and The Messenger (1917–1927). These short-lived, radical periodicals promoted responses to antiblack violence that were more militant than the reactionary politics of the NAACP at the time.

I provide visual examples for the next three student features. For the first (Figure 3), a student recreated the column “The Judge” from The Brownies’ Book, overseen by the periodical’s coeditor Jessie Fauset. In this fictional story, a group of children are speaking with an adult (“the Judge”) about the death of Eugene Williams, the Black child whose death (a group of White people had pelted Williams with rocks when Williams swam in the de facto whites-only area of Lake Michigan) had sparked the violence of the Red Summer. The youngest child, Billikens, wonders if his own rocks will awaken the ghost of Eugene. In the story, the imagery of “skipping stones” represents the repetition of racial violence over time and how Black children are historically denied opportunities for joyful play.

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Figure 3.

Student’s fictional story, “Skipping Stones on Halloween,” adapted from The Brownies’ Book column “The Judge.”

Another student created a political cartoon (Figure 4) titled “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave . . . .” This feature offers a graphic illustration of the hypocrisy of American democracy, taking inspiration from political cartoons in the early years of The Crisis that used patriotic symbols to express tragic irony (while intentionally avoiding images of Black suffering). Lady Liberty unites two images across time: On the left, a man reads newspaper coverage about discrimination against Black soldiers returning home after World War I (antiblackness gets “back to work,” as it were), which had angered Du Bois, and on the right, a man reads a tweet from Donald Trump (based on one the former president had written earlier that year), a thinly veiled racist statement about rodent-infested, majority-Black cities.

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Figure 4.

Student’s political cartoon, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave . . . ,” inspired by early political cartoons in The Crisis.

In the final feature (Figure 5), a student wrote in their reflection,

Although Du Bois’s ideas would change greatly over the course of his long career, his conviction that racial uplift would come from the education of leaders, educators, and artists from within the Black community remained relatively constant. The Crisis magazine’s “Men of the Month” column exemplifies both the progressiveness and the elitism of this element of Du Bois’s scholarship and activism.

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Figure 5.

Student’s “Person of the Month” feature on Eve L. Ewing, an adaptation of The Crisis column, “Man of the Month.”

The student revised this column as “The Person of the Month” and spotlighted the sociologist Eve L. Ewing. Ewing (2019) is not only a social scientist but also a public intellectual and artist who has written poems, including the collection 1919, which chronicles the lives of those who bore witness to the violence of the Red Summer.

Today, we consume much of our knowledge digitally, and so the creation of a “limited run” of hard copies of the issue of Today’s Crisis allowed our class to take part in the collective labor and enjoyment of making a physical magazine from start to finish. This process acknowledged an important history of Black authors, publishers, editors, and more who have fought for self-determination in the “infrastructures” of American print (Fielder and Senchyne 2019). We used a unique stencil-based printer called a Risograph, an alternative to standard digital printers and a popular choice of radical outlets using DIY, self-publishing methods. Working together to lay out and order the physical magazine was a kind of “visuospatial” work (Estefan and Seim 2022) that allowed us to see how our individual works fit together and thus deepen appreciation for our collective knowledge and labor. Given the ubiquity of social media today, we also reflected on how a Du Boisian pedagogy and its fugitive methods would encourage people today to be “digital propagandists,” as it were.

We debriefed as a class after the assignment was completed. Students also shared observations in the anonymous course evaluations. Students described how the assignment had inspired them to find ways to write for public audiences, to think about patterns of antiblack violence across time and efforts to silence those histories, and to consider the marginalization and exploitation of Black authors and their creative work. The assignment had ignited conversations about what counts as real racial progress. At the same time, there was a strong feeling that dangerous disinformation proliferated on digital media platforms and a sense of helplessness in combatting it. Students also voiced important concerns regarding positionality and the ethics around authorship in a magazine founded to advance the Black people’s causes and for the need to approach this work with attentiveness and care.

Bitter Hard

Du Bois (1950) reflected once more on the meaning of progress in his unpublished story “A.D. 2150” (for a discussion, see Warren 2016). In it, progress is delayed. When he began writing the story in 1924, Du Bois imagines awaking from the dead in the year 2000, in New York City, to find a fading color line. In the final iteration of the story from 1950, Du Bois has postponed his awakening 200 years to 2150. There is a final postponement at story’s end, as the protagonist is “willing to take another nap of seventy-five 200 years for the sake of seeing Progress.” In the cycle of birth and rebirth, consciousness and slumber, there are “freedom dreams” deferred (Kelley 2002). But the dreams endure.

For the sake of racial progress, my article has articulated a pedagogy in the spirit of the teacher denied. Beyond its uses for teaching students “a critical perspective on the relentless bombardment of political, commercial, and educational messages with which they are saturated daily” (Churchill and Fellman 2018:101), my hope also is that my article will help reinvigorate more broadly research into a sociology of propaganda. In laying out this agenda, I am careful to say that Du Bois’s evolving and critical stance on propaganda is but one important starting point. I hope that instructors considering adopting a pedagogy of positive propaganda are mindful of intersections of gendered racism that are admittedly less evident in this article and that are weaker spots in Du Bois’s body of work (Collins 2016).

Teaching race and racism has become especially precarious just as it is more important than ever. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize the unequal relations among teaching faculty. Many of our colleagues hold contingent positions and are at institutions where they and the subjects they teach are especially vulnerable (e.g., in states where the protections of tenure are under attack). In these circumstances, teaching propaganda (and more generally, teaching race and racism from a critical perspective) can carry great risks. If Du Bois’s pedagogy insists that instructors agitate for change, then those faculty with more stable and secure positions should mobilize to support their colleagues. ¹² A Du Boisian pedagogy does more than guide instruction inside the classroom and insists on a general practice of seeing our relations to others across unequal educational systems and the collective action necessary to support vulnerable students and faculty (Thakore 2023).

In an anonymous course evaluation, one student asked: What hope is there that change is possible? Du Bois ([1920] 1999:47) wrestled with this dilemma as a teacher, noting how “bitter hard” it was to project optimism while hiding his own cynical beliefs regarding White people and whiteness. A pedagogy of positive propaganda presses forward amid uncertainty. It neither forsakes hope nor shies away from the reality of social devastation and marshals the full artistic, scientific, and creative talents of students in the service of Truth and social change.