The Social Equality of Whites and Blacks

Magazine article

By: W.E.B. Du Bois

Date: November, 1920

Source: Du Bois, W.E.B. "The Social Equality of Whites and Blacks." The Crisis. 21(1920):16.

About the Author: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was one of the most controversial and influential African-American intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Born in 1868 and raised in a small town in western Massachusetts, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He earned another B.A. from Harvard in 1890, studied at the University of Berlin from 1892–1894, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1891 and 1895. In addition to teaching and research jobs at Wilberforce University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University, Du Bois was a prolific speaker, activist, author, and editor. He published over twenty books and many hundreds of articles, both fiction and non-fiction. His work is acclaimed as seminal work in sociology, anthropology, and history. A few of his better-known books include Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Darkwater (1920), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and Dusk of Dawn (1940). Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1909 and served as the editor of its magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, when he left following political and personal conflict in the organization. He returned to the NAACP for four years in the mid 1940s, but again left in a whirl of political controversy. At the age of eighty-three, Du Bois was indicted as a foreign agent by a federal grand jury displeased by his leftist political views. After charges were dropped and he regained his passport, in 1958 Du Bois emigrated to Ghana, where he joined the Communist Party and continued to write until his death in 1963.

INTRODUCTION

W.E.B. Du Bois was undoubtedly the "premier architect of the civil rights movement in the United States," as Lewis describes him in his 1993 biography. Du Bois founded The Crisis in 1910, and by 1920 it was the most influential African-American publication in the United States. Du Bois personally controlled the magazine's content for twenty-four years, and used it to showcase his passionate, often controversial editorials, highlight current events affecting African Americans, and document the NAACP's legal battles for civil rights. The Crisis also promoted the work of many of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

Du Bois's essay in the November 1920 issue of The Crisis may not seem particularly contentious to modern readers, but in 1920 the concept of social equality was a radical one. It challenged Jim Crow laws in numerous states and defied legal conventions of racial segregation. For the fifty years after Reconstruction, the term "social equality" had been used negatively. White audiences in this period were assured that social equality led to miscegenation (the mixing of races) and the eventual downfall of the social order. In his essay, Du Bois addressed the meaning of social equality, the underlying fear of intermarriage, and the violence done to Black Americans perceived as attempting or advocating any form of social equality.

PRIMARY SOURCE

When The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was organized it seemed to us that the subject of "social equality" between races was not one that we need touch officially whatever our private opinions might be. We announced clearly our object as being the political and civil rights of Negroes and this seemed to us a sufficiently clear explanation of our work.

We soon found, however, certain difficulties: Was the right to attend a theatre a civil or a social right? Is a hotel a private or a public institution? What should be our stand as to public travel or public celebrations or public dinners to discuss social uplift? And above all, should we be silent when laws were proposed taking away from a white father all legal responsibility for his colored child?

Moreover, no matter what our attitude, acts and clear statements have been, we were continually being "accused" of advocating "social equality" and back of the accusations were implied the most astonishing assumptions: our secretary was assaulted in Texas for "advocating social equality" when in fact he was present to prove that we were a legal organization under Texas law. Attempts were made in North Carolina to forbid a state school from advertising in our organ The Crisis on the ground that "now and then it injects a note of social equality" and in general we have seen theft, injustice, lynchings, riot and murder based on "accusations" or attempts at "social equality."

The time has, therefore, evidently come for The Crisis to take a public stand on this question in the interest of Justice and clear thinking. Let us openly define our terms and beliefs and let there be no further unjustifiable reticence on our part or underground skulking by enemies of the Negro race. This statement does not imply any change of attitude on our part; it simply means a clear and formal expression on matters which hitherto we have mistakenly assumed were unimportant in their relation to our main work.

We make this statement, too, the more willingly because recent events lead us to realize that there lurks in the use and the misuse of the phrase "social equality" much of the same virus that for thousands of years has separated and insulted and injured men of many races and groups and social classes.

We believe that social equality, by a reasonable interpretation of the words, mean moral, mental and physical fitness to associate with one's fellowmen. In this sense The Crisis believes absolutely in the Social Equality of the Black and White and Yellow races and it believes too that any attempt to deny this equality by law or custom is a blow at Humanity, Religion and Democracy.

No sooner is this incontestable statement made, however, than many minds immediately adduce further implications: they say that such a statement and belief implies the right of black folk to force themselves into the private social life of whites and to intermarry with them.

This is a forced and illogical definition of social equality. Social equals, even in the narrowest sense of the term, do not have the right to be invited to, or attend private receptions, or to marry persons who do not wish to marry them. Such a right would imply not mere equality—it would mean superiority. Such rights inhere in reigning monarchs in certain times and countries, but no man, black or white, ever dreamed of claiming a right to invade the private social life of any man.

On the other hand, every self-respecting person does claim the right to mingle with his fellows if he is invited and to be free from insult or hindrance because of his presence. When, therefore, the public is invited, or when he is privately invited to social gatherings, the Negro has a right to accept and no other guest has a right to complain; they have only the right to absent themselves. The late Booker T. Washington could hardly be called an advocate of "social equality" in any sense and yet he repeatedly accepted invitations to private and public functions and certainly had the right to.

To the question of intermarriage there are three aspects:.

1. The individual right
2. The social expediency
3. The physical result

As to the individual right of any two sane grown individuals of any race to marry there can be no denial in any civilized land. The moral results of any attempt to deny this right are too terrible and of this the southern United States is an awful and abiding example. Either white people and black people want to mingle sexually or they do not. If they do, no law will stop them and attempted laws are cruel, inhuman and immoral. If they do not, no laws are necessary.

But above the individual problem lies the question of the social expediency of the intermarriage of whites and blacks today in America. The answer to this is perfectly clear: it is not socially expedient today for such marriages to take place; the reasons are evident: where there are great differences of ideal, culture, taste and public esteem, the intermarriage of groups is unwise because it involves too great a strain to evolve a compatible, agreeable family life and to train up proper children. On this point there is almost complete agreement among colored and white people and the strong opinion here is not only that of the whites—it is the growing determination of the blacks to accept no alliances so long as there is any shadow of condescension; and to build a great black race tradition of which the Negro and the world will be as proud in the future as it has been in the ancient world.

The Crisis, therefore, most emphatically advises against race intermarriage in America but it does so while maintaining the moral and legal right of individuals who may think otherwise and it most emphatically refuses to base its opposition on other than social grounds.

The Crisis does not believe, for instance, that the intermarriage of races is physically criminal or deleterious. The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion and human experience is against this assumption and it is a cruel insult to seek to transmute a perfectly permissible social taste or thoughtful social advice into a confession or accusation of physical inferiority and contamination.

To sum up then: The Crisis advises strongly against interracial marriage in the United States today because of social conditions and prejudice and not for physical reasons; at the same time it maintains absolute legal right of such marriage for such as will, for the simple reason that any other solution is immoral and dangerous.

The Crisis does not for a moment believe that any man has a right to force his company on others in their private lives but it maintains Just as strongly that the right of any man to associate privately with those who wish to associate with him and publicly with anybody so long as he conducts himself gently, is the most fundamental right of a Human Being.

SIGNIFICANCE

Du Bois's uncompromising essay on social equality—one of a series on this topic in The Crisis from 1911–1925—was controversial, even amongst members of the NAACP. The essay itself defied a 1920 Mississippi code, stating:

[a]ny person … presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court.

Du Bois's insistence on "the right to mingle with his fellows" also ran counter to goals of some other leaders. In 1920, the charismatic Jamaican Marcus Garvey was the leader of the recently formed UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), which shared many objectives with the NAACP. Although Garvey and Du Bois were both dedicated to an international Pan-African ideology, Du Bois's emphasis on social equality and integration differed sharply from Garvey's call for Black separatism. Garvey's response to Du Bois's essay took the form of a resolution submitted to the League of Nations in August 1921, followed a month later by an editorial in the New York World denouncing Du Bois and stating that any amalgamation of races was a "crime against nature."

Almost twenty years previously, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had argued that Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute emphasized economic gains at the expense of civil rights. In his 1920 essay, Du Bois reiterated that equality was the only moral and just choice, and again repudiated (the now deceased) Washington's more politically expedient, less socially threatening plans as "unjustifiable reticence."

Some white Americans, including President Warren G. Harding, did advocate some degree of legal and political equality for Black Americans. Harding emphasized this in an October 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, which Lewis suggests was an "explicit rebuttal of Du Bois's Crisis editorial". Although the Republican Harding called for "an end to prejudice" and voting rights for Black men, he also proclaimed himself against racial amalgamation, and affirmed his belief that "men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of Social Equality."

Historian Nell Painter examines the symbolic (largely psychological and sexual) implications of social equality as well as the material consequences, which provides further insight into why Du Bois's essays were so inflammatory. Although many of the Jim Crow laws supported by Plessy vs. Ferguson were overturned in the 1950s, it is worth noting that anti-miscegenation laws (laws against racial intermarriage) in sixteen states were not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1967.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Lewis, David L. W.E.B. Du Bois-Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

――――――. W.E.B. Du Bois-The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

Painter, Nell I. Social Equality, Miscegenation and the Maintenance of Power In The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. by Numan V. Bartley. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988. pp. 47-67.

――――――. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.