Commentary

In American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804, Alan Taylor (2016) discusses the history of the U.S. War of Independence as an underwritten history of several revolutions or multiple revolutionary groups. Taylor seeks to capture the experiences and perspectives of several of those revolutionary actions. In this essay, I remind readers that education can be thought of as a battle in which there are multiple participants. About a year before he died, my friend Lawrence Cremins and I were discussing the need for a history of education that captures the perspectives of several of the variety of its participants. In this commentary concerning the essay by Clayton Pierce, I try to embrace and expand on Pierce’s excellent treatment to provide readers with an extended view of the contribution of one of the unheralded heroes in the struggles for and conceptualization of education, especially as it relates to the education of Black people and incidentally the education of human beings.

The brilliantly developed emphasis in the work of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois on race and the political economy has led many of his readers to misunderstand and underestimate his additional important contributions to and perspectives on education. In addition, some of his work not commonly read by educators as well as his unpublished musings from later life may have left some of his most profound thinking concerning pedagogy less broadly available. I claim to have had access to these Du Bosian resources and to enjoy a privileged perspective based on my extended personal exchanges with him as well as having read just about everything that Du Bois has published.

I knew Dr. Du Bois rather well. He was very much my senior. I had met him while I was a college student. I got to know him when I was 30. In the period 1951 to 1958, which ended when Dr. Du Bois moved from the United States to Ghana, I had the rare privilege to become his younger friend as he became my mentor. At that time, Dr. Du Bois lived in Brooklyn near Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Wortis. Dr. Wortis was chief psychiatrist at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, where I served as a senior child psychologist. Dr. Wortis introduced my wife and me to Dr. and Mrs. Du Bois. Du Bois and I became friends. I had done extensive reading of his writings and had met him casually, but it was in this seven-year period that I grew to know the man. I followed him as he gave lectures around New York and nearby places. Our friends and families often met for dinner. We occasionally sat and talked together in the park. My wife Susan and I purchased his childhood home site, were able to get it designated as a National Historic Site, and gave the property to the University of Massachusetts to be converted into a memorial park honoring our friend. My older son and I became members of the advisory committee to the university’s considerable effort to establish its archive of Du Bois’s papers and to name its university library the Du Bois Library. Professor David Levering Lewis, Dr. Du Bois’ biographer, and I became friends. Professor Doxey A. Wilkerson, my first professor of education, mentor, and personal friend for more than 40 years, was Dr. Du Bois’s very personal friend for even longer.

Du Bois certainly saw education through the lens of a society dominated by racism and racial capitalism thought. He documented some of the more severe distortions, abuses, and neglects suffered by education, people of color, and populations marginalized from access to resources and power. Pierce correctly calls attention to many of the ways in which preoccupation with race and racism and the demands of capitalist interests have shaped what is taught in our schools, access to education and models of good education, the quality of education made available to different school populations, and even the nature of the value assigned to education by learners from different social divisions. Pierce shares the Du Bois perspective concerning the manner in which capitalism further negatively influenced by racism limited opportunity to learn and to utilize the benefits of learning for Negro people who were the major focus of Du Bois’s studies.

The “good Doctor” is well known for his famous debates with Booker T. Washington concerning the nature of the education that should be available to the Negro. This is a debate that Washington won and from which people of color still suffer. As is widely understood, Washington promoted the training of Blacks in the manual arts and skills for which there was at that time a market. Du Bois reminded us that while such training provided employment and modest income for Blacks, that modestly trained but marginalized labor force was part of the backbone of a rapidly industrializing capitalist economy. That marginalized population was nonetheless crucial to the provision of cheap labor and was thought to play much the same role in the continuing development of modern capitalism as that played by the enslavement of Black people in the agricultural era. To disrupt the continued demeaning and exploitation of Black people and to sabotage the advance of capitalism (Du Bois was not a supporter of capitalist economics), Du Bois advocated for what he sometimes referred to as the study of the “liberating arts and sciences” because he thought that persons who have been so broadly educated could not easily be enslaved. Du Bois associated the miseducation of Negro and other marginalized people with the needs of an expanding capitalist political economy to produce and maintain a growing cheap and unsophisticated labor pool. He recognized the manner in which schooling was used to under-educate Black learners and advance racist values in Whites as well as in Blacks, demonize Blacks in the eyes of both, and cultivate a sense of inferiority in Blacks. This is an important conceptualization of the manner in which public education in the United States has developed a subpopulation—inferior, inadequate, and instrumental to the needs of a racist and capitalist political economy. Du Bois thought that this negative perspective was able to gain traction among the sponsors of education as well as with many teaching and learning persons.

But Du Bois also advocated for a broader and more substantive education for formerly enslaved people and the cultivation of a talented subset (talented tenth) of the underdeveloped population as the yeast and developers of this neglected population. Recognizing the complexities of human social organization and the creativity of human adaptation and productivity, Du Bois had great appreciation for the malleability and potential for development that resides in human intellect. As captured brilliantly in the work of the late Michael Martinez (2000), writing some years after the death of W.E.B. Du Bois, “the good Doctor” saw education as a process by which intellect is cultivated. Rather than use education as training to develop skills, Du Bois saw education as the process by which human beings cultivate intelligence and intellective competence in other humans.

Du Bois had still more to say about education beyond his brilliant analysis that its underdevelopment reflects the influence of racial capitalism. Without backing away one iota from that indictment, his thinking was prescient of 21st-century pedagogical thought. His conceptualization of what it means to be intelligently educated and his notions concerning how educated and intellectively competent persons function map well into modern thought concerning education of the first order. His standards were far in advance of what some refer to as the Common Core. He did not use the term critical thinking, but when I first heard the construct, I recognized that I had learned the process of such thought at the feet of my friend and mentor, Dr. Du Bois. I wish that I could claim that he significantly influenced contemporary notions of what education can and should be. However, much of his thinking was marginalized and ignored, perhaps because of his emphasis on and critique of racism and capitalism. What he was writing and talking about at the turn of the 20th century was treated as marginal scholarship at odds with the values privileged by the dominant forces in the nation. However, Du Bois was globalist and universalist in much of his thinking. He had studied at the universities in Germany. When the Germans let racism stop them from awarding him the PhD, my friend had to settle for a PhD from Harvard. He was becoming a citizen of the world.

While he had high aspirations for Negro people, as a humanist, Dr. Du Bois recognized the rapidly increasing complexity of human awareness and identities. He was sensitive to the shifting of epistemological frames by which knowledge is understood. He was aware of the diversity that resides in humankind and the stupidity of the separations and hierarchical ordering of artificial social divisions. Even though Du Bois’s ideas were not celebrated and embraced by mainstream U.S. institutions, those ideas foretold the direction in which the mainstream was moving. From my very fortunate position as a student of this brilliant man, from that of a Black man who has been a participating citizen of both the Caucasian and capitalist worlds, and as the beneficiary and a recipient of the kind of education for which Du Bois advocated, I have come to believe that DuBois was correct as he saw: