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Forbes
24-05-2025
- General
- Forbes
5 Notable W.E.B. Du Bois Books And Literary Works
W.E.B. Du Bois poses for a portait on May 31, 1919. ( William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a forward-thinking scholar whose intellect and writings bravely challenged America's racial hierarchy. As Harvard's first African American Ph.D. graduate in 1895, he established himself as an undeniable intellectual force during an era when segregation defined American society. Du Bois began publishing scholarly work in 1896 and soon became renowned for his distinct writing style, which spanned multiple genres, including scholarly monographs, essays, autobiography, fiction and poetry. On February 12, 1909, Du Bois helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as editor of its influential magazine, The Crisis, for over two decades, using this platform to publish important journalism, critique racial injustice and elevate Black literary talent during the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, Du Bois remains one of the most influential Black intellectuals in history. His scholarly precision and moral urgency continue to shape our understanding of race, power and identity in American society. During his lifetime, Du Bois published 21 books and several journals. His seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), introduced 'double consciousness,' an idea that articulated the "split" nature of Black American identity in a predominantly white and racially segregated America. This concept, along with his critique of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach, helped to establish him as a leading voice on race in America. Below are five of his must-reads, selected for their relevance and sociological impact. In the first chapter, 'Of Our Spiritual Strivings,' Du Bois introduces the idea of 'double consciousness,' which he describes as the 'sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.' The concept goes beyond academic speculation to offer a credible explanation for how Black Americans reconcile the tension between their self-perception and the distorted images imposed by a white supremacist society. This explanation continues to carry a lot of weight in present-day discussions around how racial identity presents itself within American society. Arthur E. McFarlane II, the great-granson of the African-American hero—civil rights pioneer W.E.B. ... More DuBois reaches for "The Souls of Black Folk" one of the collection of DuBois books in his home. The Souls of Black Folk is generally considered one of the earliest works of sociology and uses both history and memoir to analyze and then expose the contradictions of post-Reconstruction America. The narrative structure of the book is sharpened with scholarly analysis and lyrical meditation, with each chapter containing paired epigraphs: one from canonical Western literature and the other a bar from Negro spirituals (which Du Bois called 'sorrow songs'). In the third chapter titled 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,' the scholar presents a measured critique of Washington's accommodationist philosophy while also voicing his concerns about Washington's philosophy. Here, Du Bois firmly asserts that Washington's philosophy would do nothing more than harm Black people in the long run and keep them in a constant state of subservience and deference to white supremacy. Who should read this?: Anyone interested in Black American history, race relations and the convoluted nature of Black experiences and identities in America. Where to buy this book: Simon & Schuster W.E.B. Dubois, with Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and Lincoln University President Dr. Horace Mann Bond, ... More after receiving the University's Alpha Medallion Awards. In Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois delivers a magisterial reassessment of the post-Civil War era that essentially disassembles the racist historiography that dominated American academic discourse for generations. Published in 1935 and during the Jim Crow era and resurgent white nationalism, this 768-page opus represents both rigorous historical scholarship and an act of intellectual defiance. Du Bois begins by framing the Civil War as fundamentally about slavery rather than states' rights, a perspective that is now accepted but was initially controversial. Du Bois also discusses how four million freed people became active pioneers of democracy rather than passive recipients of Northern benevolence. His exceptional research here is both thought-provoking and important. Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the ... More organization's 20th Annual Session in Cleveland, Ohio, June 26, 1929. Pictured sitting are NAACP staff including W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, William Pickens, Arthur Spingarn, Daisy Lampkin, and Robert Bagnall. He also discusses the idea of the 'general strike,' which is a reinterpretation of the mass enslaved people's flight to Union lines as a deliberate political action that sabotaged the Confederacy's war effort. One of the most radical concepts in this book is Du Bois's rendering of the postwar period. Where the then-dominant Dunning School historians saw tragic chaos and Negro incapacity, Du Bois demonstrates that this was an exceptional democratic experiment. Thanks to his archival-style research, Du Bois shows readers how Black legislators established the South's first public education systems, expanded voting rights and modernized state constitutions. These achievements, Du Bois demonstrates, were systematically erased from historical memory through what he terms 'propaganda posing as history.' Who should read this?: Historians, scholars and serious readers who are interested in historical revisionism. Where to buy this book: Labyrinth Books The Philadelphia Negro is credited with being the first sociological case study of a Black American community. In this University of Pennsylvania-commissioned study, Du Bois combines rigorous empirical research with compassionate observation to study the lives, struggles and social structures of Philadelphia's Black community, all while establishing urban ethnography as a legitimate academic field. Du Bois conducted this research while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where he interviewed thousands of Black Philadelphians in the Seventh Ward. The resulting work provides unprecedented demographic data alongside nuanced analysis of the community's social stratification, economic conditions and the systemic barriers that discrimination creates. His methodology was pioneering as he used door-to-door surveys, statistical analysis and participant observation decades before these research practices became standard. The book denies popular ideas that Black poverty is a consequence of moral failure or inferiority; instead, it outlines the impact of structural racism, limited opportunities and systemic roadblocks that the average Black person experiences as a cause. Who should read this?: Sociologists, urban historians and students of research methodology. Where to buy this book: University of Pennsylvania Press This future-facing collection uses autobiographical essays, poems, short stories and sociological analyses to create a vignette of Black life during World War I and its aftermath. It is one of the most revealing pieces of evidence regarding Du Bois's evolving radicalism and global perspective. Du Bois wrote the book during the violent 'Red Summer' of 1919, and it has since come to represent his most experimental and politically radical body of work. He also wrote a powerful essay called 'Returning Soldiers' in May of that year. A major theme of this work is the emphasis and study of labor, and he examines this by looking at the connections between racism, capitalism and imperialism while expanding his analysis to include gender through essays like 'The Damnation of Women.' In that essay, he validates the roles of women in society, inside the home, at work and in the Black church in a way that reads as feminist for its era. Du Bois acknowledges the double burden faced by Black women who have to endure both racial and gender oppression by arguing that 'the uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause.' Dr. W.E.B. DuBois speaking at the World Peace Conference. He basically critiques how white supremacy and patriarchy have denied Black women economic independence, educational opportunities and political voice while celebrating their grit and central role in community preservation. Another aspect of this book that was ahead of its time is Du Bois's insistence that sexual autonomy for women is important for their freedom. By asserting this, he challenged Victorian ideas of propriety that constrained discourse around gender. This proto-intersectional analysis anticipated feminist theoretical frameworks by decades while also proving yet again that Du Bois had never-before-seen intellectual foresight for his time and understood social justice through the lens of several overlapping systems of oppression. Who should read this?: Readers interested in Black radicalism, intersectionality and literary innovation. Where to buy this book: Verso Books In this innovative 'autobiography of a concept,' Du Bois uses his personal journey to explain how race operates as a social construct. The book is a combination of memoir, social theory and historical analysis, complete with Du Bois's signature intellectual dexterity. Unlike conventional autobiography, Dusk of Dawn uses Du Bois's life experiences primarily as windows into broader social transformations while following his intellectual journey from Harvard through his NAACP years and growing disillusionment with American liberalism. Du Bois was 72 when he wrote this book, which is one of his most important works due to its reflective, scholarly wisdom. It sees Du Bois speak from the perspective of someone who experienced significant shifts ranging from Reconstruction through the Great Depression. He also critically reassesses his earlier positions, including his conception of the 'Talented Tenth,' while developing more economically radical approaches to racial justice. His chapter 'The Concept of Race' also challenges and deconstructs biological notions of race, while anticipating later theoretical developments by decades. Who should read this: Anyone interested in intellectual history, racial theory and political autobiography. Where to buy this book: Oxford University Press Bottom Line W.E.B. Du Bois was a preeminent Black intellectual and a revolutionary thinker whose work, especially his written works, permanently altered our national zeitgeist. Thanks to his sociological innovation, historical revision and intellect, his 21 books challenged white supremacy while offering a reliable blueprint for understanding race that remains startlingly relevant a century later.
Washington Post
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
5 new historical novels that whisk you away to another century
The 20th century looms large in this selection of five new historical novels. Momentous events — the sinking of the Titanic, life after World War I, the Hollywood blacklists — shape the lives of protagonists in stories that are both relatable and enlightening. As literary editor of the NAACP's magazine 'The Crisis,' Jessie Redmon Fauset was pivotal in championing the poets and authors of the Harlem Renaissance, nurturing the works of authors whose names remain familiar to us today: Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen among them. Murray's fictionalized account of Fauset's life shows that she was battling not only racism and misogyny but also rumors about her love life and relationship with the magazine's founder and editor, W.E.B. Du Bois. In tracing Fauset's journey, Murray artfully re-creates the excitement and exhilaration of Harlem at the blossoming of its literary and cultural heyday. As literary editor of the NAACP's magazine 'The Crisis,' Jessie Redmon Fauset was pivotal in championing the poets and authors of the Harlem Renaissance, nurturing the works of authors whose names remain familiar to us today: Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen among them. Murray's fictionalized account of Fauset's life shows that she was battling not only racism and misogyny but also rumors about her love life and relationship with the magazine's founder and editor, W.E.B. Du Bois. In tracing Fauset's journey, Murray artfully re-creates the excitement and exhilaration of Harlem at the blossoming of its literary and cultural heyday. Elinor Coombes, an unhappily married British aristocrat, finds a new life in a most unusual way. She and her infant son survive the sinking of the Titanic, and taking on new identities, start over in New York. Quinn's third novel, the first to be published in the United States, skillfully contrasts the claustrophobic world of Britain's upper classes with the bustle of New York City in the early 20th century. Despite its crowds, hubbub and packed tenements, the city proves a place where secrets and lies all too easily come bubbling to the surface as Elinor tries to build her new existence. Elinor Coombes, an unhappily married British aristocrat, finds a new life in a most unusual way. She and her infant son survive the sinking of the Titanic, and taking on new identities, start over in New York. Quinn's third novel, the first to be published in the United States, skillfully contrasts the claustrophobic world of Britain's upper classes with the bustle of New York City in the early 20th century. Despite its crowds, hubbub and packed tenements, the city proves a place where secrets and lies all too easily come bubbling to the surface as Elinor tries to build her new existence. In mid-1950s California, actress Melanie Cole finds herself in exile in Malibu, her reputation tarnished by recent association with a blacklisted Hollywood star. Hiding out in her rented mansion, Melanie's only company is her reticent Eastern European housekeeper Eva, her agoraphobia screenwriter neighbor Elwood and his sister-in-law June. But Eva and June harbor secrets of their own, the truth of which could shatter the lives of all three women. Set over the course of three sultry December weeks, Meissner's fast-paced story deftly captures how the Red Scare unsettled Hollywood and beyond. In mid-1950s California, actress Melanie Cole finds herself in exile in Malibu, her reputation tarnished by recent association with a blacklisted Hollywood star. Hiding out in her rented mansion, Melanie's only company is her reticent Eastern European housekeeper Eva, her agoraphobia screenwriter neighbor Elwood and his sister-in-law June. But Eva and June harbor secrets of their own, the truth of which could shatter the lives of all three women. Set over the course of three sultry December weeks, Meissner's fast-paced story deftly captures how the Red Scare unsettled Hollywood and beyond. Fact and memory are woven with imagination in this work of memoir-come-fiction. Peggy, a woman in her 60s, lies in her bedroom, cancer ravaging her body but not her mind. Summoning up her memories of the final tragic year of World War I, Peggy longs to share with her granddaughter what she remembers from the cataclysmal year of 1918, when the boy she loved was sent to fight in Europe and her city succumbed to savagery, followed shortly by sickness. Kephart approaches her grandmother's story with compassion, patching over the gaps in the history with her own interpretations to create a tender story of one woman's life. Fact and memory are woven with imagination in this work of memoir-come-fiction. Peggy, a woman in her 60s, lies in her bedroom, cancer ravaging her body but not her mind. Summoning up her memories of the final tragic year of World War I, Peggy longs to share with her granddaughter what she remembers from the cataclysmal year of 1918, when the boy she loved was sent to fight in Europe and her city succumbed to savagery, followed shortly by sickness. Kephart approaches her grandmother's story with compassion, patching over the gaps in the history with her own interpretations to create a tender story of one woman's life. It may seem hard to believe, but Oxford University only began awarding women degrees in 1920. Miller's debut novel, set in this pivotal year, follows four young women housed on Corridor Eight of the university's St. Hugh's College as they navigate life away from home. Despite their enthusiasm for their studies, they encounter an Oxford that isn't always welcoming and where they must learn to navigate the university's sometimes archaic rules and misogynistic encounters with male students. Miller, an Oxford graduate, takes a sympathetic hand in crafting these four equally compelling women. Marianne, Otto, Dora and Beatrice are each hampered by pasts that loom over their present — and threaten to overshadow their futures. Kat Trigarszky writes historical fiction under the pen name of Katharine Rogers. It may seem hard to believe, but Oxford University only began awarding women degrees in 1920. Miller's debut novel, set in this pivotal year, follows four young women housed on Corridor Eight of the university's St. Hugh's College as they navigate life away from home. Despite their enthusiasm for their studies, they encounter an Oxford that isn't always welcoming and where they must learn to navigate the university's sometimes archaic rules and misogynistic encounters with male students. Miller, an Oxford graduate, takes a sympathetic hand in crafting these four equally compelling women. Marianne, Otto, Dora and Beatrice are each hampered by pasts that loom over their present — and threaten to overshadow their futures. Kat Trigarszky writes historical fiction under the pen name of Katharine Rogers.
Time Magazine
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice
Larcenia Floyd died in 2018, two years before George. But when her son was being asphyxiated to death by Derek Chauvin, he screamed for her. It was the 'Mama!' heard around the world, an anguished incantation that called millions into the streets to protest. That wail of loss—the sound of a ripped-apart parent and child—to the cold hands of premature death has been a commonplace of Black American life throughout history. Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described it this way: 'Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.' Poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks put the same thought in these terms: 'we jazz June/we die soon,' she wrote in her seminal poem 'We Real Cool.' In 2010, fine artist Titus Kaphar completed the painting Father and Son. It depicts scholar W.E.B. DuBois—arguably the greatest thinker of the 20th century—with a cutout where his son might have been, lying across his lap. Kaphar's piece is a contemporary pieta, one not based in the story of Mary cradling the body of Jesus after his descent from the cross, but instead, one from Black history. In DuBois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, he included the autobiographical essay 'Of the Passing of the First Born' about the death of his toddler son Burghardt, a death that might have been avoided had the diphtheria vaccine been made available to Black people in Atlanta where DuBois was working as a professor at Atlanta University. DuBois carried that grief with him as he wrote essays, fiction, and pageants, as he edited The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, as he rose and fell as a leader when the nation and many of his peers grew to consider him too strident, too far left, too unflinching. Kaphar's stirring portrait was completed 107 years after Souls and 47 years after DuBois' death. It followed, but it also foretold. Father and Son preceded what we think of as the beginning of the Black Lives Matter era by three years, which we tend to date to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in 2013. Kaphar continued to paint portraits of parents without children in the second decade of this century as we saw the parade of sonless mothers who came to be known as 'Mothers of the Movement,' a chilling redux of images of the 1960s. These repetitions reveal a harrowing truth. Such a portrait is timeless as long as racial inequality far too frequently sinks life and chances of life in this country. And despite the shrill denials heard in anti-DEI and anti-'woke' platforms, the evidence is clear: Racial inequality is as it ever was in the United States. Art is a particularly powerful tool in this moment because it can offer more than just points for debate. Art can engage not just the intellect, but the soul, hence the aptly titled DuBois classic. It resonates with our greatest hopes and deepest frustrations. Above all, it buoys the spirit, enabling us to continue to press for a better future, but also to imagine what that future might be by refusing the idea that our bodies are fated for abuse and destruction. I have often attested to the beauty of raising Black children because I believe we deserve to feel something more than the fear of raising children in a dangerous and unequal world. I want to affirm that joy keeps us going when terror feels overwhelming using my art—writing—and my intellect as the vehicle for truth. But, having lived through the mass death of COVID-19 and now living in the age of backlash against everything that made my life possible as a Black woman professor, it is undeniable that notwithstanding the multimillion-strong season of protest in honor of George Floyd's life, we aren't on more solid ground. In fact, we have been pushed off land and find ourselves treading water. Ours is a living inside a cascade of crises that have compounded over the past 15, 10, five years, despite the moments of respite and promises of transformation. We have marched and sung. We have voted, protested, and pleaded. And yet, suffering persists, the water deepens. It makes you wanna holler a 'mama' of your own. (And perhaps you heard the echo of Marvin Gaye's 1971 track 'Inner City Blues.') It is no wonder, then, that in African American culture, art has flourished in the worst of times. In 1900, for instance, three years before DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk, civil rights leader and poet James Weldon Johnson and musician J. Rosamund Johnson composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing'—the song we now know as the Black National Anthem. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, 500 Black schoolchildren in Florida first sang it to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The song became incredibly popular with Black Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. It resonated because it told the story of Black Americans' struggle in epic terms, detailing endurance and fostering hope and collective responsibility. In 1926, when Carter G. Woodson formally declared 'Negro History Week' in February (a ritual that would grow to become Black History Month in the 1970s), the song became an integral part of that annual ritual celebrated in school, religious, and civic life. The effect of singing that anthem together deepened the faith of students and their communities in the possibility of justice and strengthened the conviction that each one had a hand in transformation. A noble inheritance demanded as much. 1926 was also the year in which DuBois published the article 'Criteria of Negro Art' in which he famously said 'all Art is propaganda' speaking directly to Black American artists. The message was that artists had a hand in the struggle for human and civil rights, and therefore, should put their gifts in service to that duty. Though I would not be as heavy-handed as DuBois—I don't believe all art must be propaganda—it is certainly clear to me that art (visual art, music, literature, and dance) is essential for freedom dreaming. This is no less true in 2025 than it was in 2020, 1926, or 1903. Still, like many I suspect, I wonder if my words work—if my art matters in these moments of struggle. I need only look to others to be reminded. Mario Moore's painting Henry Bibb and/or Mary Ann Shadd hangs on my wall. In it, a Black woman in a purple embroidered robe faces the water. The title is powerful. Mary Ann Shadd was an abolitionist, a suffrage activist, the first Black woman publisher in North America and the second Black American woman to graduate from law school. Henry Bibb was born into slavery, escaped, and made his way to freedom through Detroit (Moore's hometown) to reach Canada. After emancipation, he would write an important abolitionist narrative. The woman in Moore's painting gazes at the Detroit River. In the antebellum era, crossing that watery border was a near-certain passage to freedom. The painting is for me, and I think for many who see it when it circulates in museums or on computer screens, a reminder of the once treacherous and even deadly pathways to freedom. Even more, it begs us to seek inspiration from those who traveled them as we face treachery today. I learned this implicitly in my own life course, too. I frequently say that as a writer I haunt the past. By that I mean I gaze into it to find the content through which we might craft our moral imaginations today. So many of the neglected and abused of generations past have a great deal to teach us. And if we can recognize the full ugliness in our past, we might be better at creating beauty in its stead for the future. It wasn't only in my studies that I learned this, but also in my encounters with art. Like so much of Generation X, I grew up on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life double album. His song 'Love's in Need of Love Today' was a particularly potent teacher. It gave credence to the ever-present terror that existed in a world filled to the brim with disasters. And yet, it also issued a belief that a disposition toward love—a discipline of hope, to borrow words from abolitionist Mariame Kaba—makes the difference. Recently, I have spent a lot of time listening to Milton + Esperanza, an album pairing octogenarian Brazilian jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist Milton Nascimiento and American bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding. Nascimiento has influenced generations of musicians across the globe. spalding is a contemporary phenom. Watching their NPR Tiny Desk Concert, I was as moved by the lush, exhilarating music as I was by their obvious deep friendship and love across generations. From Nascimiento to spalding there is inheritance, from spalding to Nascimiento there is homage. They are, like me, both descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, and generations turned from centuries of racial violence and injustice. And through the current hysteria-inducing political chaos that engulfs us, I reach for the space they create, one where love and care are apparent. It is a salve and also a reminder of who we are and what we come from. It is hard to avoid cynicism, especially now. Especially with so much behind us and possibly even more before us. To bolster ourselves, many of us who do creative and intellectual work have been holding fast to a quote from Toni Morrison. It seems to be in constant circulation on social media platforms: '…This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!' What too often is left out in the meme-ing, however, is that Morrison attributed those words to a friend of hers. This friend was responding to Morrison's depression about national politics in 2004. That friend's words reminded Morrison of the dangerous conditions in which so much great art has been made. Morrison concluded the essay she wrote for the Nation that described this interaction by saying, 'I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.' Indeed, she kept creating until her final days, like DuBois, through war and injustice and even after the passing of her second-born son, Slade. Morrison's remarkable courage is a reminder that the value of art in these times is much greater than how it might inspire people to action alone. It exists in art's power to allow us to find meaning notwithstanding mourning, to imagine our way out of the morass of our present moment or personal challenges, and to keep us living rather than frozen in fear and anguish. Take, for example, the Blues—that foundational American music born on plantations and in penitentiaries—and how it insisted upon the full humanity of Black people in the harshest of conditions. Indeed, the Blues tradition might explain why George Floyd himself turned to one of Blues' musical descendants, hip-hop, when he was trying to turn his life around, an effort that ultimately brought him to Minneapolis, where he was killed. Art does not forestall injustice. It does not shape policy or create law. It is not the same work as political organizing or protest. But it is indispensable. One need only to look at the joy of line dancing on social media and the majesty of Mardi Gras krewes in New Orleans for current examples. Each season we find new iterations of old habits, ones that refresh culture but also keep tradition alive. That combination allows us to more deeply contemplate our condition— to meditate on that which would be right and good. Most of all, it helps us find and nourish love. Love is indeed in need of love today. For our children. For all of us. Over 20 years ago, when I first embarked on parenthood, I thought of all the music, all the dancing, all the literature, all the museum exhibitions, all of the folk wisdom, the seeds of folklore, and the creative language that I had to offer my children from my tradition. My heart was full with gifts. Despite the inevitability of racism, they were born to an abundant inheritance that I insisted upon affirming at every turn. That is what I was given, that is what I gave, that is what we must continue to give, even as our hearts are broken. Again. There are and will be more empty-armed parents and children. In my own family, we've embraced the empty-armed and felt empty-armed in the past two years with the deaths of two of my cousins who are survived by parents and children. I believe that, albeit indirectly, losing them, both men under age 60, is a legacy of the persistent seeping force of racial injustice, snaking like smoke through our lives. The question is not whether we will grieve (we are, mightily) but whether we will find the means to survive the grief and live to fight the injustice. Art is a way.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice
Credit - FATHER AND SON, 2010, OIL ON CANVAS 59.5 × 48 IN. (152 × 122 CM) © TITUS K APHAR; PHOTO: JON LAM PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY FRIEDMAN BENDA Larcenia Floyd died in 2018, two years before George. But when her son was being asphyxiated to death by Derek Chauvin, he screamed for her. It was the 'Mama!' heard around the world, an anguished incantation that called millions into the streets to protest. That wail of loss—the sound of a ripped-apart parent and child—to the cold hands of premature death has been a commonplace of Black American life throughout history. Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described it this way: 'Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.' Poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks put the same thought in these terms: 'we jazz June/we die soon,' she wrote in her seminal poem 'We Real Cool.' In 2010, fine artist Titus Kaphar completed the painting Father and Son. It depicts scholar W.E.B. DuBois—arguably the greatest thinker of the 20th century—with a cutout where his son might have been, lying across his lap. Kaphar's piece is a contemporary pieta, one not based in the story of Mary cradling the body of Jesus after his descent from the cross, but instead, one from Black history. In DuBois' 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, he included the autobiographical essay 'Of the Passing of the First Born' about the death of his toddler son Burghardt, a death that might have been avoided had the diphtheria vaccine been made available to Black people in Atlanta where DuBois was working as a professor at Atlanta University. DuBois carried that grief with him as he wrote essays, fiction, and pageants, as he edited The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, as he rose and fell as a leader when the nation and many of his peers grew to consider him too strident, too far left, too unflinching. Kaphar's stirring portrait was completed 107 years after Souls and 47 years after DuBois' death. It followed, but it also foretold. Father and Son preceded what we think of as the beginning of the Black Lives Matter era by three years, which we tend to date to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in 2013. Kaphar continued to paint portraits of parents without children in the second decade of this century as we saw the parade of sonless mothers who came to be known as 'Mothers of the Movement,' a chilling redux of images of the 1960s. These repetitions reveal a harrowing truth. Such a portrait is timeless as long as racial inequality far too frequently sinks life and chances of life in this country. And despite the shrill denials heard in anti-DEI and anti-'woke' platforms, the evidence is clear: Racial inequality is as it ever was in the United States. Art is a particularly powerful tool in this moment because it can offer more than just points for debate. Art can engage not just the intellect, but the soul, hence the aptly titled DuBois classic. It resonates with our greatest hopes and deepest frustrations. Above all, it buoys the spirit, enabling us to continue to press for a better future, but also to imagine what that future might be by refusing the idea that our bodies are fated for abuse and destruction. I have often attested to the beauty of raising Black children because I believe we deserve to feel something more than the fear of raising children in a dangerous and unequal world. I want to affirm that joy keeps us going when terror feels overwhelming using my art—writing—and my intellect as the vehicle for truth. But, having lived through the mass death of COVID-19 and now living in the age of backlash against everything that made my life possible as a Black woman professor, it is undeniable that notwithstanding the multimillion-strong season of protest in honor of George Floyd's life, we aren't on more solid ground. In fact, we have been pushed off land and find ourselves treading water. Ours is a living inside a cascade of crises that have compounded over the past 15, 10, five years, despite the moments of respite and promises of transformation. We have marched and sung. We have voted, protested, and pleaded. And yet, suffering persists, the water deepens. It makes you wanna holler a 'mama' of your own. (And perhaps you heard the echo of Marvin Gaye's 1971 track 'Inner City Blues.') It is no wonder, then, that in African American culture, art has flourished in the worst of times. In 1900, for instance, three years before DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk, civil rights leader and poet James Weldon Johnson and musician J. Rosamund Johnson composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing'—the song we now know as the Black National Anthem. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, 500 Black schoolchildren in Florida first sang it to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The song became incredibly popular with Black Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. It resonated because it told the story of Black Americans' struggle in epic terms, detailing endurance and fostering hope and collective responsibility. In 1926, when Carter G. Woodson formally declared 'Negro History Week' in February (a ritual that would grow to become Black History Month in the 1970s), the song became an integral part of that annual ritual celebrated in school, religious, and civic life. The effect of singing that anthem together deepened the faith of students and their communities in the possibility of justice and strengthened the conviction that each one had a hand in transformation. A noble inheritance demanded as much. 1926 was also the year in which DuBois published the article 'Criteria of Negro Art' in which he famously said 'all Art is propaganda' speaking directly to Black American artists. The message was that artists had a hand in the struggle for human and civil rights, and therefore, should put their gifts in service to that duty. Though I would not be as heavy-handed as DuBois—I don't believe all art must be propaganda—it is certainly clear to me that art (visual art, music, literature, and dance) is essential for freedom dreaming. This is no less true in 2025 than it was in 2020, 1926, or 1903. Still, like many I suspect, I wonder if my words work—if my art matters in these moments of struggle. I need only look to others to be reminded. Mario Moore's painting Henry Bibb and/or Mary Ann Shadd hangs on my wall. In it, a Black woman in a purple embroidered robe faces the water. The title is powerful. Mary Ann Shadd was an abolitionist, a suffrage activist, the first Black woman publisher in North America and the second Black American woman to graduate from law school. Henry Bibb was born into slavery, escaped, and made his way to freedom through Detroit (Moore's hometown) to reach Canada. After emancipation, he would write an important abolitionist narrative. The woman in Moore's painting gazes at the Detroit River. In the antebellum era, crossing that watery border was a near-certain passage to freedom. The painting is for me, and I think for many who see it when it circulates in museums or on computer screens, a reminder of the once treacherous and even deadly pathways to freedom. Even more, it begs us to seek inspiration from those who traveled them as we face treachery today. I learned this implicitly in my own life course, too. I frequently say that as a writer I haunt the past. By that I mean I gaze into it to find the content through which we might craft our moral imaginations today. So many of the neglected and abused of generations past have a great deal to teach us. And if we can recognize the full ugliness in our past, we might be better at creating beauty in its stead for the future. It wasn't only in my studies that I learned this, but also in my encounters with art. Like so much of Generation X, I grew up on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life double album. His song 'Love's in Need of Love Today' was a particularly potent teacher. It gave credence to the ever-present terror that existed in a world filled to the brim with disasters. And yet, it also issued a belief that a disposition toward love—a discipline of hope, to borrow words from abolitionist Mariame Kaba—makes the difference. Recently, I have spent a lot of time listening to Milton + Esperanza, an album pairing octogenarian Brazilian jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist Milton Nascimiento and American bassist and vocalist esperanza spalding. Nascimiento has influenced generations of musicians across the globe. spalding is a contemporary phenom. Watching their NPR Tiny Desk Concert, I was as moved by the lush, exhilarating music as I was by their obvious deep friendship and love across generations. From Nascimiento to spalding there is inheritance, from spalding to Nascimiento there is homage. They are, like me, both descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, and generations turned from centuries of racial violence and injustice. And through the current hysteria-inducing political chaos that engulfs us, I reach for the space they create, one where love and care are apparent. It is a salve and also a reminder of who we are and what we come from. It is hard to avoid cynicism, especially now. Especially with so much behind us and possibly even more before us. To bolster ourselves, many of us who do creative and intellectual work have been holding fast to a quote from Toni Morrison. It seems to be in constant circulation on social media platforms: '…This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!' What too often is left out in the meme-ing, however, is that Morrison attributed those words to a friend of hers. This friend was responding to Morrison's depression about national politics in 2004. That friend's words reminded Morrison of the dangerous conditions in which so much great art has been made. Morrison concluded the essay she wrote for the Nation that described this interaction by saying, 'I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.' Indeed, she kept creating until her final days, like DuBois, through war and injustice and even after the passing of her second-born son, Slade. Morrison's remarkable courage is a reminder that the value of art in these times is much greater than how it might inspire people to action alone. It exists in art's power to allow us to find meaning notwithstanding mourning, to imagine our way out of the morass of our present moment or personal challenges, and to keep us living rather than frozen in fear and anguish. Take, for example, the Blues—that foundational American music born on plantations and in penitentiaries—and how it insisted upon the full humanity of Black people in the harshest of conditions. Indeed, the Blues tradition might explain why George Floyd himself turned to one of Blues' musical descendants, hip-hop, when he was trying to turn his life around, an effort that ultimately brought him to Minneapolis, where he was killed. Art does not forestall injustice. It does not shape policy or create law. It is not the same work as political organizing or protest. But it is indispensable. One need only to look at the joy of line dancing on social media and the majesty of Mardi Gras krewes in New Orleans for current examples. Each season we find new iterations of old habits, ones that refresh culture but also keep tradition alive. That combination allows us to more deeply contemplate our condition— to meditate on that which would be right and good. Most of all, it helps us find and nourish love. Love is indeed in need of love today. For our children. For all of us. Over 20 years ago, when I first embarked on parenthood, I thought of all the music, all the dancing, all the literature, all the museum exhibitions, all of the folk wisdom, the seeds of folklore, and the creative language that I had to offer my children from my tradition. My heart was full with gifts. Despite the inevitability of racism, they were born to an abundant inheritance that I insisted upon affirming at every turn. That is what I was given, that is what I gave, that is what we must continue to give, even as our hearts are broken. Again. There are and will be more empty-armed parents and children. In my own family, we've embraced the empty-armed and felt empty-armed in the past two years with the deaths of two of my cousins who are survived by parents and children. I believe that, albeit indirectly, losing them, both men under age 60, is a legacy of the persistent seeping force of racial injustice, snaking like smoke through our lives. The question is not whether we will grieve (we are, mightily) but whether we will find the means to survive the grief and live to fight the injustice. Art is a way. Perry is the National Book Award–winning author of South to America, as well as seven other books of nonfiction. Her latest book is Black in Blues How a Color Tells the Story of My People This project was supported by funding from the Center for Policing Equity. Contact us at letters@
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Letter to the Editor: What Ukraine reminds us about freedom
When the cause of liberty seemed most fragile, and its defenders most alone, a man named Thomas Paine picked up his pen and wrote: 'These are the times that try men's souls.' It was December 1776, one of the bleakest moments in the American War of Independence. Washington's army was in retreat. Winter was biting. Desertions soared. Hope was fading. Many believed the cause of American independence was already lost. But Paine's pamphlet, 'The Crisis,' helped turn the tide. Gen. Washington ordered it read aloud to his soldiers before a desperate assault across the ice-choked Delaware River. The attack succeeded. The war did not end that night. But something far more enduring was rekindled: morale. Resolve. A sense that liberty, even on the brink, was still winnable — and still worth everything. Paine's words still ring true — because truth endures. Words do matter. As an American, I believe deeply in the cause of liberty and in the price it exacts. Not in slogans. Not in partisan posturing. In principle. In practice. In cost. I have wrestled with what liberty truly demands. And I can tell you with certainty: Millions of Americans recognize your struggle not as foreign, but as familiar. Liberty is not a matter of geography. It is a matter of choice and will. Ukraine is not a proxy. Ukraine is not a chess piece. Ukraine is a sovereign nation defending itself against naked aggression. That matters not just for Europe's stability, but for the global conscience. It matters to all of us who believe that freedom is not a gift granted by empires, but a right inherent to all people. Yes, some in my country have grown weary. Others have been misled or distracted. But fatigue is not the same as apathy, and distraction is not the same as abandonment. Many of us are still watching. Still listening. Still believing. Still acting. We understand that Ukraine stands at the front line of a larger, global struggle: not East versus West, but tyranny versus liberty. As Paine warned in 'The Crisis,' 'The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.' "Dear Ukrainian friends and patriots, you are not just defending your land. You are reminding us, the world, what choosing freedom looks like when the choice comes with consequences, not comfort." Because here is the hard truth: Freedom is not self-sustaining. It erodes when ignored. It vanishes when taken for granted. It must be renewed by each generation — through vigilance, sacrifice, and the courage to confront evil when it appears. Paine offered a generational challenge when he wrote: 'If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.' That is why Ukraine's resistance matters. The test of freedom is not whether it survives prosperity, but whether it survives persecution. Dear Ukrainian friends and patriots, you are not just defending your land. You are reminding us, the world, what choosing freedom looks like when the choice comes with consequences, not comfort. This is not just Ukraine's test alone. It is ours — everyone, everywhere — now. The world is not merely witnessing a war. It is deciding, in real time, what it will tolerate and what it will become. Silence is no longer neutral. Indifference is no longer safe. And delay is no longer benign. Paine did not offer comfort to his readers. He offered conviction. He didn't promise ease; he insisted on endurance: 'Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,' he declared. 'Yet we have this consolation: that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.' I do not know how or when this war will end. But I do know this: History will remember the moral courage the Ukrainian people have shown — not just the courage to fight, but the courage to keep fighting when the world's attention drifts. As Paine wrote, 'I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection.' You are not only resisting oppression. You are bearing witness, for all who choose to see, to what true liberty demands: sacrifice, unity, grit, and an unbreakable will. And for those of us in America who still believe liberty is not a posture but a duty: we see you. We admire you. We stand beside you. 'Though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine,' Paine reminded us, 'the coal can never expire.' And we will not forget you — not in word, not in deed, not ever. Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent. Submit an Opinion Read also: Kyiv's fate is shaping how Tehran plays the nuclear game We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
