W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a renowned Black American academic, Pan-Africanist, socialist, and cofounder of the NAACP. A prolific author of Black literature and sociology, he wrote famous histories on__Reconstruction__,__abolitionist movements__, and__Africa__, and pioneered works in the fields of__data visualization_ _and__speculative fiction__. Although he was one of the most prominent leaders of the NAACP, he was eventually forced to resign over his refusal to disavow communism during the height of McCarthyism. Du Bois was eventually targeted by the FBI and had his passport confiscated for nearly a decade. A lifelong anti-imperialist, Du Bois worked with national liberation movements throughout the so-called Third World, including the West Indies, China, Korea, and Kenya, before his death in Ghana, the first nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to become independent from colonial rule.

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Africans imported to America regarded themselves as temporary settlers destined to return eventually to Africa. Their increasing revolts against the slave system which culminated in the eighteenth century, showed a feeling of close kinship to the motherland and even well into the nineteenth century they called their organizations "African," as witness the "African Unions" of New York and Newport, and The African Churches of Philadelphia and New York. In the West Indies and South America there was even closer indication of feelings of kinship with Africa and the East.

The planters' excuse for slavery was advertised as conversion of Africa to Christianity; but soon American slavery appeared based on the huge profits of the "sugar empire" and the "cotton kingdom." As plans were laid for the expansion of the slave system, the slaves themselves sought freedom by increasing revolt which culminated in the eighteenth century. In Haiti they won autonomy; in the United States they fled from the states in the south to the free states in the north and to Canada. Here the Free Negroes helped form the Abolition Movement, and when that seemed to be failing, the Negroes began to plan for migration to Africa, Haiti and South America.

Civil war and emancipation intervened and American Negroes looked forward to becoming free and equal citizens here with no thought of return to Africa or of kinship with the world's darker peoples. However, the rise of the Negro was hindered by disenfranchisement, lynching, and caste legislation. There was some recurrence of the "Back To Africa" idea and increased sympathy for darker folk who suffered the same sort of caste restrictions as American Negroes.

This brought a curious dichotomy. In our effort to be recognized as Americans, we American Negroes naturally strove to think American and adopt American folkways. We began to despise all yellow, brown and black peoples. We especially withdrew from all remembrance of kinship with Africa and denied with the white world that Africa ever had a history or indigenous culture. We did not want to be called "Africans" or Negroes and especially not "Negresses." We tried to invent new names for our group. We began to call yellow people "chinks" and "coolies"; and dark whites "dagoes." This was natural under our peculiar situation. But it made us more easily neglect or lose sight of the peculiar change in the world which was linking us with the colored peoples of the world not simply because of the essentially unimportant fact of skin color, but because of the immensely important fact of economic condition.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Europe had begun to expand its trade and to import raw materials to be transformed into consumer goods. Machines and methods for manufacture of goods increased tremendously.

When the revolt of the slaves, especially in Haiti, and the moral revolt in England and America, led to the emancipation of slaves, the merchants who had invested in slave labor began to change the form of their investment; they seized colonies in Asia and Africa and instead of exporting native labor used the land and labor on the spot and exported raw materials to Europe for consumption or further manufacture. Immense amounts of wealth for capital were seized by Europeans in India and China, in South America and elsewhere; and thus colonial imperialism arose to dominate the world. Most of the exploited peoples were colored, yellow, brown, and black. A scientific theory arose and was widely accepted which taught that the white people were superior to the colored and had a right to rule the world and use all land and labor for the benefit and comfort of Europeans.

While the emancipation of slaves in America involved great losses for European investors, the simultaneous seizure of wealth in Asia and the new control of colonial labor enabled new rich employers in Europe and North America to accumulate vast sums of capital in private hands and to start the factory system. This method of conducting industry used new inventions and sources of power so as to drive laborers off the land, herd them in factories and reduce them to semi-slavery in Europe, by a wage contract.

This brought the labor movement. In the more advanced European countries labor and its friends fought for more political power, public school education, higher wages and better conditions. These things they gradually secured by union organization and strikes. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe there was little education and wages remained very low. Political power rested in the hands of an aristocracy which became rich through encouraging and protecting western investment. This semi-colonial status of labor was even worse in South and Central America and in the West Indies, while in most of Asia and Africa the condition of colonial labor approached slavery.

Thereupon, arose the doctrine of socialism which demanded that the results of the manufacture of goods and the giving of services go to the labor involved and not mainly to the capitalists. This doctrine was in essence as old as human labor. Primitive labor got all the results of what it did or made. Many early societies like the first Christians and tribes in Africa lived as communal groups, sharing all results of work in common.

Slavery intervened, so that some workers were owned by others; then came aristocracy where a few took the results of the work of the many and the nation became the abode of a rich idle and privileged class who were served by the mass of laborers. Protest against this and the doctrine that income should in some degree become the measure of effort became an increasing demand from the ancient world through the mediaeval world and was studied and scientifically stated by Karl Marx in the first half of the nineteenth century. He proposed that capital belongs to the state and that workers run the state. Capitalists vehemently opposed this but were compelled partially to meet the demands of labor by raising wages. In the capitalist nations this raise was more than compensated for by increased profits due to exploitation in colonial and semi-colonial lands. Also, the spread of Democratic control was counterbalanced by hiring white labor to war on colonial labor, and using public taxation for war rather than social purposes.

From the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 to the first world war there was continuous struggle led by white troops armed with the most ingenious weapons to keep colonial peoples from revolt, and most of the peoples of the world in subjection to Western Europe.

This was the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. British, French, and American capitalists owned the colonies, with the richest natural resources and the best controlled and lowest paid labor. By 1900, they were reaching out for other colonies elsewhere: other nations with fewer or no colonies, led by Germany, demanded a reallotment of colonial wealth. This brought on the First World War.

But, it brought more than this; the assault of Germany and her allies was so fierce that Britain and France had to ask for help from their colored colonies. They needed black manpower and without it, France would have been overthrown by Germany in the first few months of war. Britain needed food and materials from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. The United States needed American Negroes who formed an inner labor colony as laborers and stevedores. This meant an increase of wages and rights for colonial peoples. In the United States, it brought the first recognition since 1876 of the equal citizenship of Negroes.

The workers of Eastern Europe, South and Central America were not as badly off as the American serf and Chinese and Indian coolies, but they were sunk in poverty, disease, and ignorance. They were oppressed by their own rich classes working hand in glove with white western investors. When war came they starved and died. The situation became so desperate that Russians and Hungarians refused to fight. Their rulers sought compromise by trying to replace imperial rule with Western European democracy. But the Russian leaders, students of Karl Marx and led by Lenin, demanded a socialist state.

The western world united to forestall this experiment. It said that no socialist state could succeed, but lest it should and lower the profits of capitalists, the effort must be stopped by force of arms. Sixteen capitalist nations, including Britain, France, Germany, the United States, and Japan, invaded Russia and fought for ten years by every means, civilized and uncivilized, to overthrow the plans of the Soviet Union. However, the worldwide collapse of capitalism in 1930, made this attack fail and the world witnessed the founding of the first socialist state.

Then came a new and even more unexpected diversion. The depression which was the partial collapse of capitalism, was so bad in Germany, Spain, and Italy that those states fell into the hands of two dictators, Hitler and Mussolini. Backed by capitalists, they seized power and demanded control not only of the colonial world then dominated by Britain, France, and North America, but domination of the whole world. The west tried to compromise, and offered practically everything demanded, but Hitler's greed and German ambition grew by what they fed upon. They were so convinced of their superior power over the west that Hitler started a Second World War; like the first aimed at control by part of the white race over resources, land, and labor of the rest of the world, he began a wild career. He killed six million Jews, accusing them of being the main cause of the depression and of being an inferior race. He conquered France, and chased the British off the continent. They huddled on their own small island to make a last stand. But, here Hitler paused. He had a new vision. If instead of wasting his power on a desperate England he turned east and seized the semi- colonial lands of the Soviet Union and the Balkan states, then from this central heartland he could win Asia and Africa and after that turn back to deliver the coup de grâce to Britain and America. Hitler thereupon scrapped his treaty with the Soviets, which they, spurned by the west, had been forced to accept; and to the relief of Britain and the United States, Hitler turned to conquer Russia. Englishmen and Americans said with Truman, "Let them kill as many of each other as possible." So, although Hitler's rear was exposed, the western powers held off attack for a year and when they did attack went to the defense of their African colonies and not to aid the Soviet Union. The west was sure that the Soviets would fall in six weeks and thus rid the world of socialism and Nazis at one stroke.

The result was astonishing. The Soviet Union, almost unaided, conquered Hitler, saved the Baltic states and the Balkans. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin faced a world in which the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the United States must go forward toward a world in which socialism would grow; not perhaps as complete communistic states like the Soviet Union, but in states like the United States and England where social progress under the New Deal and Labor government would advance together along paths leading to the same ultimate goal.

This co-operation American business repudiated when it invented the atom bomb. After Roosevelt died, our capitalists determined to drive communism from the world and push socialism back. This crusade failed. India became independent and adopted modified socialism; China conquered the stool-pigeons whom we paid to stop her revolution and became a communist state. The Soviet Union, instead of failing as we predicted, became one of the foremost nations of the earth, with the best educational system and freedom from church domination and second only to this nation in industry. Also the Soviet Union took a legal stand against the color line and stood ready to oppose colonialism. We tried to re-conquer China during the war in Korea and to help France retain Indo-China. But again we failed. Meantime we formed the greatest military machine on earth and spent and are still spending more money preparing for war than ever any other nation on earth at any time has spent.

The excuse for our action is that communism is a criminal conspiracy of evil- minded men and that private capitalism is so superior to socialism that we should use every effort to stop its advance. Here we rest today and to sharpen our aim and concentrate our strength, we starve our schools, lessen social service in medicine and housing, curtail our freedom of speech, limit our pursuit of learning, and are no longer free to think or discuss.

Where now does that leave American Negroes? We cannot teach the peoples of Africa or Asia because so many of them are either communistic or progressing toward socialism, while we do not know what socialism is and can study it only with difficulty or danger. After the First World War we Negroes were in advance of many colored peoples. We started in two ways to lead Africans. In the West Indies, Garvey tried to have Negroes share in western exploitation of Africa. White industry stopped him before he could begin. In the United States Negro churches carried on missionary effort and a few Negroes in 1918 tried to get in touch with Africa so as to share thoughts and plans. Four Pan-African Congresses were held in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1925, which American, African, and West Indian Negroes attended, and a few persons from Asia and South America. They made a series of general demands for political rights and education. The movement met much opposition. However, it encouraged similar congresses which still exist in all parts of Africa and it was the inspiration back of the mandates commission of the League of Nations and the trusteeship council of the United Nations.

After a lapse of twenty years, a fifth Pan-African Congress was held in England in 1945. It was attended by Negro labor leaders from all parts of Africa and from the West Indies and one from the United States. Especially prominent were the delegates from Kenya and from Ghana, the first independent black dominion of the British Commonwealth. The resolutions adopted here had a clear socialist trend, and further Pan-African Congresses were envisioned to be held in Africa.

Whither now do we go? We American Negroes can no longer lead the colored peoples of the world because they far better than we understand what is happening in the world today. But we can try to catch up with them. We can learn about China and India and the vast realm of Indonesia rescued from Holland. We can know of the new ferment in East, West, and South Africa. We can realize by reading, if not in classrooms, how socialism is expanding over the modern world and penetrating the colored world. So far as Africa is concerned we can realize that socialism is part of their past history and will without a shade of doubt play a large part in their future.

Here in our country, we can think, work and vote for the welfare state openly and frankly; for social medicine, publicly supported housing, state ownership of public power and public facilities; curbing the power of private capital and great monopolies and stand ready to meet and cooperate with world socialism as it grows among white and black.