Chad L Williams has written a brilliant biography of WEB Du Bois, a civil rights powerhouse widely regarded as America’s most important Black intellectual. Williams speaks and writes with a warmth and authority which have made him a star at Brandeis University, where he is the Samuel J and Augusta Spector professor of history and African and African American studies.
The Guardian caught up with him just after he arrived in his hometown, San Francisco, where he was combining promotion for The Wounded World with a reunion with his sister and his parents, both retired attorneys.
Williams lives in Needham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Madeleine Lopez, who directs the Center for Inclusive Excellence at Regis College, and their three children.
“I thought I was going to go to law school but then I realized I didn’t want to be like my parents,” Williams said. “My first encounter with Du Bois was during my freshman year at UCLA, in a course on African American nationalism when I read [Du Bois’s 1903 classic] The Souls of Black Folks.
“I was blown away. I remember not knowing what to make of this very strange book that had all of these powerful metaphors in it. It was really undefinable as far as discipline. It had history, sociology, philosophy, music. It is truly one of those timeless, classic books.
“I started reading his other books like Black Reconstruction in America and really came to appreciate him as the most significant Black intellectual and scholar activist in American history.”
To Williams, Du Bois was “singular” because of the sheer span of his life: “Ninety-five years; born in 1868 during the presidency of [Andrew] Johnson, during Reconstruction, he dies the day before the March on Washington, in Ghana in 1963. He really encapsulated the struggle for Black freedom and equality throughout the 20th century in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. I never thought I’d write a whole book about Du Bois. But yeah, it did happen.”
Williams was a graduate student at Princeton when he first went to University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where most of Du Bois’s papers are in a library named in his honor. He saw a reference to “Du Bois world war I materials” and asked to see them.
“I figured maybe I’ll get a couple of folders and [the librarian] returned with six microfilm reels. And I think, ‘What could this possibly be?’ I load this first reel and I see this manuscript which I knew nothing about. It was over 800 pages long. In addition to the manuscript, all of his research materials and all of his correspondence related to this book entitled The Black Man and the Wounded World.
“He worked on it for two decades and no scholar had ever talked about it. I was stunned. This was this huge aspect of his life and career and scholarship which had been overlooked. From that moment I was hooked on understanding it. It would have been the definitive history of [Black soldiers] in world war I and one of Du Bois’s most significant works of scholarship – but he never completed it.”
I asked if Williams identified with Du Bois’s seminal idea of double consciousness in every Black American, and how it related to the unfinished work on the war: “Did it mean anything to you as a Black man?”
“I think not. Not initially. When I first read The Souls of Black Folk I was really just trying to understand who Du Bois was and what this book was about.”
But soon, Williams began to reread the book every year. As he learned more about African American history, he “came to appreciate the significance of Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness. And subsequently began to think about it just in terms of my own racial identity.
“But it’s such a powerful metaphor and I really think it sits at the heart of my book, in terms of why Du Bois supported world war I, and how he felt that the war was an opportunity to reconcile that double consciousness that Black people faced. This tension that he described, of being Black on the one hand and being American on the other, this was the opportunity to put that theory into practice and to test it.
“He genuinely thought those warring ideals he talked about could be reconciled … and he genuinely believed the war could serve as that opportunity. And ultimately he was wrong.”
Du Bois fought for the creation of a Black officer corps, even though he had to accept segregated training. When he got to France, to interview Black soldiers, he was appalled by what he learned.
“This is the beginning of him working on his book conducting research and also reckoning with the failed expectations of the war. He was genuinely taken aback by the racism that he was exposed to and Black soldiers told him about.”
White officers spread the libel that Black soldiers were raping French women. French mayors told Du Bois that Black soldiers were much better behaved than white soldiers.
“Getting the first-hand accounts from all these mayors was really important. And when he publishes them in [the NAACP magazine] the Crisis it’s an incredibly bold act, going directly against the narrative the government and the army are putting out about Black troops” being well treated.
Like most great books, The Wounded World is a tribute to persistence. Williams worked on it for 12 years but he started thinking about it when he discovered Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript 23 years ago.
“One of the things that I think us writers can appreciate … is how
difficult it is to write a book,” Williams said. “I wish Du Bois had finished his book. But I can empathize with him. It’s not easy, even when it’s the great Du Bois, who wrote 22 other books.”
The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War is published in the US by Macmillan
