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| W. E. B. Du Bois |
February 23, 2021—This day in 1868 was born W.E.B Du Bois, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
He said he didn't really notice racial discrimination in his virtually all white town—only when people visited from out of town.
He studied at Fisk University in Nashville and then to Harvard, where he was the first Black to earn a Ph.D.
He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and he became known as a serious sociologist when he showed that poverty and crime in black communities resulted from racial barriers in education and employment.
Du Bois under Taft
Republican President Taft found the legacy of Abraham Lincoln to be a burden in the south. He announced in his inaugural address that he would not appoint any Black men to federal jobs, reversing Theodore Roosevelt's policy of supporting Lincoln’s progressive stand in the south. Taft's "Southern Policy" supported whites' protests and he removed most Black office holders in the South.
In 1909, Booker T. Washington argued for training Blacks for industrial work, with only a few seeking higher education. He believed that in due course black people would rise socially and economically. DuBois argued against him, demanding more proactive steps toward equality. Black people in both the North and South began their drift toward the Democratic party that exploded with Roosevelt’s election in 1932.
Du Bois lived at 409 Edgecombe Ave. apartment building, which has a history dating back to the Harlem Renaissance, reported WNYC. https://www.wnyc.org/story/visit-oldest-sidewalk-scaffold-new-york-city/. (The building has the oldest continuous sidewalk shed permit in the city, granted on April 27, 2006. The scaffolding went up to protect people from falling debris during a restoration project. But it stayed up after a lightning strike damaged that work and funds ran dry.)
The Founding of the NAACP
In 1905, Du Bois was a founder and general secretary of the Niagara Movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals. Du Bois founded and edited The Moon (1906) and The Horizon (1907-1910) as organs for the Niagara Movement.
In 1909, Du Bois was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The founding Treasurer was John E. Milholland, a newspaper publisher and editor whose elder daughter was Inez Milholland. Inez wrote a letter to Du Bois asking for space to write in his magazine and offering to serve as a "perpetual volunteer." https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b162-i383
Du Bois identified as a socialist and belonged to the Socialist Party from 1910 to 1912.
The National Negro Committee was first located in John E. Milholland's Constitution League office at 500 Fifth Avenue. After Villard was persuaded to come aboard, the office was moved to space that he provided. The NAACP name was not established at the second annual meeting, on May 12, 1910. It expanded the Committee of Forty to 100, with a requirement that each of them give or raise $100. The Executive Committee was set at 30 members. The first Executive Committee created officers of the NAACP–with Walling as Chairman, Milholland as Treasurer and Villard as Disbursing Treasurer.
On June 28, 1910 six members attended an Executive Committee meeting. Milholland moved and Ovington seconded a motion to hire W. E. B. Du Bois as director of the Department of Publicity and research of the NAACP. Later in life, Du Bois remembers Ovington, Walling and Villard as the founders of the NAACP. But if Ovington was the engine that drove the creation of the NAACP, the fuel to run it was provided by Milholland. The multi-racial NAACP spelled the end of the Niagara Movement. Du Bois saw that an organization with some establishment (white) sponsors could generate more money to pay for staff, starting with himself. By the third and fourth meetings of the NAACP in Boston and Chicago in 1912, the NAACP was well established (Wedin, pp. 120-135).
Until May 18, 2008, the Wikipedia entry for the NAACP omitted Milholland from its description of the founders. The founding was scheduled for February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and this is considered the founding date of the NAACP although it actually took place in May.
On May 8, 2008, the entry read: "On May 30, 1909, the Niagara Movement conference took place at New York City's Henry Street Settlement House, from which an organization of more than 40 individuals emerged, calling itself the National Negro Committee. Du Bois played a key role in organizing the event and presided over the proceedings. Also in attendance was African-American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, co-founder of the NAACP.
At a second conference, on May 30, 1910, members formally called the organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and elected the first officers (as reported by Mary White Ovington): • National President, Moorfield Storey, Boston • Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling • Treasurer, John E. Milholland (Lincoln Republican and Presbyterian from NYC and Lewis, NY) • Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard • Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer • Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois."
In 1910-34, DuBois edited the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. In it, he directed constant, often bitter, invective at white Americans while providing information to Blacks. The magazine published many young Black writers. Racial protest after World War I focused on securing anti-lynching legislation. During this period the NAACP was the leading protest organization and Du Bois its leading figure. The Crisis had more than 100,000 readers.
Milholland's Costly Support of the NAACP
Omitting Milholland's name is unfair because he contributed significantly to the NAACP and it proved to be a costly project for him when Woodrow Wilson became president. Milholland became wealthy because he obtained contracts with the Taft Administration for new pneumatic tubes to deliver mail within Manhattan. (There are 27 miles of these tubes or small tunnels under the roads of Manhattan.)
With his new wealth, Milholland devoted himself to a Presbyterian religion-inspired vision of a world in which wealth was more equally distributed and civil rights were widely respected. He worked first with Booker T. Washington but became impatient with Washington's gradualism. Following critiques of Washington by Du Bois in 1900-01, Milholland shifted his financial resources away from Washington and toward Du Bois.
Milholland's religion-fired activism on behalf of Blacks contributed to a rapid decline in his fortunes. Milholland, a Republican, attacked as a racist Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster-General–the same man with control over lucrative contracts that were the basis for with the Batcheller Company's prosperity. His gifts to, and statements on behalf of, the cause of civil rights had an immediately negative impact on his business. He and his family paid dearly for his support of civil rights. Investors and taxpayers also paid dearly—investors saw the value of Milholland's company decline, while taxpayers did not benefit from the efficiencies that the Post Office had intended to bring to intra-urban mail delivery.
The 1904 edition of Polk's directory shows the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Company as a going concern with Milholland as President and B. C. Batcheller on the board. In 1905, the company had offices in New York City and Philadelphia as well as in London, Paris and Berlin. By the Poor's directory of 1917, John E. Milholland was replaced as President and was no longer on the Board. Instead, Milholland was represented on the board by his son-in-law Eugen Boissevain (my mother's uncle).
Du Bois Resigns, 1934
Du Bois resigned after an ideological rift with the group. In 1935, he published Black Reconstruction, a Marxist interpretation of the post-Civil War era. At Atlanta University, where he later taught, he founded a review of race and culture called Phylon in 1940 and the same year published Dusk at Dawn, in which he examined his own career as a case study of race dynamics.
In 1934, Du Bois resigned from the NAACP board as well as from The Crisis because of his new advocacy of a Black nationalist strategy that ran in opposition to the NAACP’s commitment to integration.
However, he returned to the NAACP as director of special research in 1944-1948. During this period, he was active in placing the grievances of Blacks before the United Nations, serving as a consultant to the UN founding convention in San Francisco in 1945 (my father was also there representing the U.S. Bureau of the Budget) and writing the famed “An Appeal to the World” published in 1947. He broke again with the NAACP permanently after a major disagreement.
He joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he became a naturalized citizen at the age of 95. He died in Ghana in 1963, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington. Du Bois had two children with his wife, Nina Gomer.
The NAACP is still going strong, fighting racism and bridging cultural divides. It was headed by Cornell Brooks for a while. A predecessor of Brooks as an officer of the NAACP was the late former Chairman Julian Bond.
Sources: Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (Wiley, 1998). Mary Ovington, Clare Coss
https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/8826400924894495156/1340986641341498074 John E. Milholland https://inezmb.blogspot.com/2015/11/john-e-milhollands-role-in-founding-of.html https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-w-e-b-dubois/
