W.E.B. Du Bois, Alexander Crummell and Martin Luther King, Jr.-‘The Negro Ghandi’

“Our religion with all of its dogma, demagoguery and showmanship can be a center to teach character, right conduct and sacrifice. Therein lies a career for a Negro Ghandi and a host of earnest followers.”-W.E.B. Du Bois, Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth: Memorial Address,” Boule Journal (Wilberforce, Ohio) 15 (October 15, 1948): 7.

In a rare commendation of the possibilities of African American religion, Du Bois offers an almost prophetic pronouncement about the coming of someone like King where he actually suggested that a Ghandi-like figure might secure a place as an African American religious leader worth following.Yet, it did not come without Du bois’s deep reservations.

In a February 11, 1957 article titled “Will the Great Ghandi Live Again?” appearing in the National Guardian, Du Bois mockingly reproves the effort of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, implying that it lacked sustainability and “moral courage.” Two years later, Du Bois does much the same in “Crusader Without Violence,” dated November 9, 1959 and also appearing in the National Guardian. (Even before King’s participation within the movement, he decried the possibility of such a national program in the aforementioned March 13, 1943 article.)

Though historians and literary theorists alike have pointed out the sheer poignancy and profundity of Du Bois’s passing occurring in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963-the eve prior to the Martin Luther King Jr.-led March on Washington for civil rights-not many have offered commentary about those criticisms Du Bois leveled toward King and the civil rights movement in light of Du Bois’s then deeply-ensconced agnosticism. (Although the man King himself passed over any such remonstrations and gave his due reverence to Du Bois in his remarks on the elder sage’s passing at age 95.)

Nevertheless, Du Bois’s demise on the eve prior to the 1963 March on Washington represented much more than the passing of the baton to the next generation of African American leadership. In many ways it represented the national African American community’s return to its religious leadership-a leadership Du Bois had seemingly fought his entire life to supplant and replace. And the symbolism of this return to its religious leadership (if only during King’s brief life) extends much further when one considers Du Bois alongside of King.

Whereas Du Bois’s appearance as a national African American leader came largely as a result of his being the first African American Ph.D. recipient from Harvard University, King’s mantle of leadership appears to have been the long-awaited manifestation of Alexander Crummell’s ambition-an intelligent African American religious leader possessing verifiable morality, ethics, and, with King’s receipt of the Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University, an academically respectable degree. This ambition-becoming the incarnate ideal of Crummell’s desire for moral, ethical and intellectual leadership-was probably both Du Bois’s and Crummell’s euphoric intention when they co-founded the American Negro Academy in 1897.

Here one has to pause and wonder what might have happened if Du Bois’s youthful idealism about the possibilities of a practical and intelligent Christian orthodoxy had been able to submit under Crummell’s tutelage beyond a year’s time and beyond their brief time together within The American Negro Academy. But needless to say, Du Bois’s growing disdain for organized religion coupled with the death of Crummell not one year after the Academy’s inception permanently—as well as the quasi-religious organizations vote to disallow the use of academic pedigrees within the American Negro Academy in the interests of solidarity-quelled such hope for Du Bois.

In view of such reasons, it is not at all difficult to view Du Bois’s reticence to applaud the youthful King’s successful leadership within the movement as a conscious-panged, guilt-ridden reminder of what role he might have played in the national African American community had he bore both the cross and the gospel that Alexander Crummell passed on to him in 1898 after their co-founding of the American Negro Academy.