An important pamphlet by W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), one of the most important figures in twentieth-century sociology and the civil rights movement. Printed for distribution at the “Hall of Negro Life” at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, here Du Bois presents not just an overview of African American achievements, but makes that case that African Americans form the foundation of American civilization.
The pamphlet is divided into seven topics: “Negro Labor and Exploration,” “Negro Music,” “Negro Literature, Science and Art,” “The Emancipation of Democracy,” “The Black Soldier,” “The Spirit of Religion,” and “Texas.”
It’s in the section titled The Emancipation of Democracy that Du Bois finds his stride, noting that “the Negro is the central thread of American history. The whole story turns on him whether we think of the dark and flying slave ship in the sixteenth century, the expanding plantations of the seventeenth, the swelling commerce of the eighteenth, or the fight for freedom of the nineteenth.” This section highlights the importance of African Americans in American political life and that their influence has been continuous. Importantly, Du Bois clarifies: “It was the black man that raised a vision of democracy in America such as neither Americans nor Europeans conceived in the eighteenth century and such as they have not even accepted in the twentieth century; and yet a conception which every clear sighted man knows is true and inevitable.”
Du Bois states that African America soldiers were involved from the outset of the Revolutionary War via Crispus Attucks, he notes that 700 Haitain soldiers “saved the American Army at the Siege of Savannah in 1779” and that “after the Battle of New Orleans … Andrew Jackson thanked the Negro Regiment for helping him.” Critically, Du Bois adds, “[i]n these wars, the Negro fought to prove his right to be considered an American citizen. In the Civil War, he fought directly for his freedom … Abraham Lincoln said that without the help of Negroes the war could not have been won.”
Of course, he highlights the importance of various African American figures going back to the fifteenth century in Mexico, and details their achievements, among others he includes Elijah McCoy (“the pioneer inventor of automatic lubrication”), Granville Woods (“who patented fifty devices relating to electricity”), Stephen Dorantes (“a Negro explorer” known as Estevanico who led the Narvaez Expedition through Texas in 1527), and Phillis Wheatley (“the first colored writer of national importance”).
This pamphlet is all the more extraordinary for appearing during Jim Crow Texas. In the section dedicated to the state, Du Bois comments that “the Negro has from the beginning occupied a central place in Texas history.” He credits the attractiveness of emigration to Texas to “cheap slave labor” and “the rich land, especially adapted to cotton culture.” He mentions the history of the Galveston slave market, and the story of African Americans in Texas from the Spanish and Mexican land grants in 1821 through the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the latter-19th century. He concludes by citing that there are now “4,284,000 whites, 855,000 Negroes, and nearly 684,000 Mexicans and Indians” who “form a center for racial cooperation and understanding.” Du Bois’s final line is a thinly-veiled comment on the state’s present and his hopes for its future: “All that is necessary is justice and freedom and understanding between men.”
The front cover is illustrated with a painting by Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), who was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The back page pictures the Department of Commerce building in Washington, D.C., and the “Hall of Negro Life” at Fair Park. The present pamphlet appears to be one of three works relating to African-American life in Texas specially produced for the “Hall of Negro Life,” along with Charles Hall’s Progress of the Negro in Texas and the Commerce Department’s A Selected List of Books By and About the Negro.
