10.6092/issn.2611-2752/7177
This article explores W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought through his use of rhetoric in his The Crisis writings (1910s–1930s). I argue that Du Bois used The Crisis to build an interracial dialogue on civil and political rights to draw support for federal intervention in favor of African Americans. Du Bois’s views on artistic expression were an organic part of his program to build a black public image for political purposes. As Du Bois’s political strategy started shifting after 1925, so did his position on the political use of interracial dialogue and, thus, his ideas on artistic expression.
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“All Art is Propaganda”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s <em>The Crisis</em> and the Construction of a Black Public Image
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“All Art is Propaganda”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s <em>The Crisis</em> and the Construction of a Black Public Image
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/7177                                                              ISSN 2611-2752




     “All Art is Propaganda”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Crisis and the
                         Construction of a Black Public Image

                                                Martina Mallocci

                              Submitted: July 24, 2017 – Revised version: January 5, 2018
                                 Accepted: February 2, 2018 – Published: March 1, 2018



                                                       Abstract

       This article explores W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought through his use of rhetoric in his The Crisis
       writings (1910s–1930s). I argue that Du Bois used The Crisis to build an interracial dialogue on civil
       and political rights to draw support for federal intervention in favor of African Americans. Du Bois’s
       views on artistic expression were an organic part of his program to build a black public image for
       political purposes. As Du Bois’s political strategy started shifting after 1925, so did his position on
       the political use of interracial dialogue and, thus, his ideas on artistic expression.
       Keywords: W.E.B. Du Bois; The Crisis Magazine; NAACP; Double Consciousness; Cosmopolitan
       Patriotism; Harlem Renaissance




Martina Mallocci: Università di Bologna (Italy)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6179-3313
Contact: martina.mallocci2@unibo.it
Martina Mallocci is a PhD Candidate in Global and International Studies at the University of Bologna. She spe-
cializes in African-American intellectual thought and is currently working on E. Franklin Frazier.



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    In June 1926, the African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, delivered a
speech at the Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), later published in the association’s magazine under the title “Criteria of Negro Art.” In this
widely circulated article, Du Bois talked about the political standing of African American art in explicit
political terms. Its most controversial passage stated:

       All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter
       shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for pro-
       paganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any
       art that is not used for propaganda.1

     “Criteria of Negro Art” came in the middle of a long and heated discussion about the political mean-
ing of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. This debate opposed “pure” artistic expression—
a representation of African Americans devoid of racial connotations—to “propaganda,” a pejorative
term used to discredit black artists who depicted racism and/or exhibited racial dignity in their liter-
ary and artistic creations. Many studies about African-American art and its political implications focus
on this decade, which saw Du Bois trying to reconcile artistic expression with political commitment
during most of the 1920s, and heavily criticizing the Harlem Renaissance after 1925.2 Indeed, both
Du Bois and The Crisis were at the front and center in the discussion, as the New Negro movement
grew thanks to the monthly and its editor, and the magazine hosted most of the debate on its pages.3
Literary scholars, as well as historians who focus on the 1920s, largely agree that “at a time when some
black intellectuals found safe harbor in the doctrine of art for art’s sake, The Crisis as an agent of black
print culture pushed a confrontational aesthetics that revalued traditional categories of the beautiful.”4
     However, this interpretation does not apply only to the 1920s. If we consider Du Bois’s work as
editor of The Crisis from a long-term perspective, it is evident that he understood the political im-
portance of cultural production and artistic expression since the first issues of the magazine. As early
as 1911, Du Bois started encouraging and promoting writers through The Crisis, and he launched its
first literary contest in 1917.5 Du Bois’s The Crisis also made a sophisticated use of visual arts to both
challenge racial stereotypes and dignify blackness since the early 1910s.6 Hence, Du Bois’s ideas about
artistic expression and his political commitment were strongly linked since the beginning of his edi-
torial experience, and even earlier.7
     In this context, the question raised by “Criteria of Negro Art” is not, then, whether Du Bois changed
his mind about the political significance of artistic expression in the 1920s, but what caused him to talk
about art by using an explicit political terminology and why. In fact, just a few years earlier, Du Bois
had disputed the rhetoric connecting art and propaganda.8 As Kirschke, Alessandra Lorini, and others
have argued, this does not mean that Du Bois did not see artistic expression as essentially political, but


1
    W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis, 32 (1926): 295.
2
    Eric K. Watts, “Cultivating a Black Public Voice: W.E.B. Du Bois and the ‘Criteria of Negro Art,’ ” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 4
    (2001): 181-201. David Levering Lewis has also suggested that Du Bois’s decision to publish the article was influenced by
    Langston Hughes’s essay on artistic freedom, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which appeared in The Nation in
    June 1926. See David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois. The Fight for Equality and The American Century, 1919-1963 (New York:
    Henry Holt & Co, 2000), 179; Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 23, 1926,
    692–4.
3
    Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 56–7; Robert Bone, Down Home: A History
    of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginning to the End of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Putnam, 1975), 109–38.
4
    Russ Castronovo, “Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the ‘Crisis,’ ” PMLA, 121 (2006): 1443.
5
    See L. A. Proctor, “My Sweet Love Salome,” The Crisis, 2 (1911): 34; W.E.B. Du Bois, “To Our Young Poets,” The Crisis, 9 (1915):
    236; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Best Summer,” The Crisis, 14 (1917): 111.
6
    Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis. W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory (Bloomington:
    Indiana University Press, 2007), 2. See also Jenny Woodley, Art for Equality. The NAACP’s Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights
    (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).
7
    Ross Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics,” American Literary History, 7 (1995): 500–24.
8
    W.E.B. Du Bois, “Negro Art,” The Crisis, 22 (1921): 55.



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just that he avoided talking about the political role of art explicitly.9 According to Ross Posnock, Du
Bois’s use of the term “propaganda” in 1926 was widely misunderstood by his contemporaries, as he
tried to challenge the dichotomy between art and propaganda, and thus to turn “the aesthetic into
a militant part of a political, economic, and cultural movement.” This misreading was caused by “a
context of fiercely contested cultural politics, a climate that took a toll on the generosity of all the
combatants.”10
    While Posnock’s interpretation is correct, this essay argues that the reasons behind the rhetoric
used in “Criteria of Negro Art” are not found exclusively in the contingencies of the debate about
the Harlem Renaissance. “Criteria of Negro Art” also reflects a shift in Du Bois’s political strategy, a
change that started during the mid-1920s. Before, Du Bois had understood art, literature, and culture
both as an end in itself and as part of a multifaceted political program, whose realization was based
on the construction of a black public image, and the engagement of a wide interracial audience. After
World War I, as Du Bois struggled to see his political strategy succeed and searched for a solution,
his commitment to interracial diplomacy gradually shifted and so did his ideas on artistic expression.
This study will analyze how Du Bois employed his editorial role to address both his white and black
readers, and thus will look at his 1926 statement on artistic expression as a turning point in Du Bois’s
thought, connected to his elaborate rhetoric and evolving political strategy. In particular, three aspects
will be analyzed: Du Bois’s editorial project and position within the NAACP, his political program for
African Americans, and the connection between art and rhetoric, both of which he used to construct
a positive black public image for political purposes in the historical context of the 1910s and 1920s.



1 Du Bois, The Crisis and His Political Program for Racial Equality
Du Bois’s role as editor of The Crisis is central to understanding the connection between art and pol-
itics, and between artistic expression and rhetoric in the development of his political program. Du
Bois contributed to establishing the magazine in 1910, one year after the founding of the NAACP, and
became its only editor after a few years.11 In 24 years of Du Bois’s editorship, the NAACP’s magazine
reached a wide circulation, and hosted several articles penned by black and white progressive intellec-
tuals, from social worker and NAACP co-founder Jane Addams to poet and writer Langston Hughes.12
From the very beginning, Du Bois fought within the NAACP to ensure his editorial autonomy, and his
strong personal imprint on the magazine emerges from the very first issue, as he penned The Crisis
manifesto. The document clearly stated the moral and political mission of The Crisis and its editor’s,
by advocating for

        the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democ-
        racy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempt to gain these rights and realize
        these ideals.13

    As Daniel Levering Lewis’s biographical work has detailed, The Crisis was mostly shaped as Du
Bois’s own personal project, and became a public platform for its editor’s ideas on African-American
culture and politics.14 Du Bois’s stubbornness and provocative arguments often put him at odds with
the board of the NAACP, and eventually prompted him to leave the association and the magazine.15

9
     Kirschke, Art in Crisis; Alessandra Lorini, “ ‘The Spell of Africa is Upon Me’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Notion of Art as Propaganda,”
     in Temples for Tomorrow: Looking back at the Harlem Renaissance, eds. Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, (Bloomington:
     Indiana University Press, 2001), 159–76.
10
     Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois,” 520–1.
11
     Daniel Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois. Biography of a race, 1868-1919, 466–500.
12
     Elliott M. Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois in the Role of Crisis Editor,” The Journal of Negro History, 43 (1958): 214–40.
13
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Crisis,” The Crisis, 1 (1910): 10.
14
     Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919, 466–500.
15
     Elliot M. Rudwick, “Du Bois’ Last Year as Crisis Editor,” The Journal of Negro Education, 27 (1958): 529–31; Raymond Wolters,
     Du Bois and His Rivals (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 78; Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868–1919, 477.



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Specifically, after the market crash of 1929 The Crisis hosted a lengthy debate on Communism, while
urging its readers to embrace a “new racial philosophy.”16 In 1934, Du Bois was in open conflict with
the association, and—in an extreme attempt to raise a discussion within the ranks of the NAACP—he
publicly advocated for auto-segregation as the only feasible way to both preserve the dignity of black
culture and safeguard the African Americans’ economic interest during the Great Depression.17 How-
ever, until he started questioning the association’s political strategy in the second half of the 1920s,
Du Bois’s outlook was mostly similar to the NAACP’s, and it included unconditional opposition to
racial separation and a strong commitment to interracial dialogue and federal intervention. The mag-
azine then became a powerful weapon in putting forward this agenda, but it also retained its editor’s
personal take on the matter. For this reason, The Crisis is an essential source to trace the evolution
of Du Bois’s thought and examine his ability to adapt his rhetoric and theoretical arguments to the
contingencies of the moment.
    As he had stated in The Souls of Black Folk, one of Du Bois’s cultural and political dilemmas was to
find a way for African Americans both to retain pride in their blackness and to be recognized as full
citizens of the United States. “He [the American Negro] would not Africanize America,” Du Bois wrote
in 1903,

        for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro
        soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for
        the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an
        American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of
        Opportunity closed roughly in his face.18

     On one hand, Du Bois’s lifelong commitment to reconcile the aspects of the “double conscious-
ness” resulted in an attempt to redefine the concept of blackness (and of whiteness by contrast), by
celebrating black culture and constructing a nationwide, positive, and unifying black identity. On the
other, it meant exposing racial prejudice—and its practical consequences—as a powerful tool of social
control and domination, and as a means of political exclusion.19 Until the second half of the 1920s, the
cornerstone of Du Bois’s political strategy is explained by the concept of “cosmopolitan patriotism.”
Historian Jonathan Hansen has used this expression to describe a heterogeneous group of progressive
intellectuals, such as Jane Addams, socialist union leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs,
and Du Bois himself, who tried to push the boundaries of liberalism between 1890 and 1920, by chal-
lenging the link between liberalism and laissez-faire theories about economics and social regulation.
During this period, social reform was widely discussed, and it was ultimately made possible through
the growth of the role of the federal government.20 This was also a moment when the concepts of
whiteness and citizenship were under revision. The arrival of millions of migrants from southern and
eastern Europe pushed the boundaries of what being “white” meant, but ultimately prompted a series
of immigration reforms, which employed a quota system based on ethnic and racial hierarchies.21 In
the 1920s, Du Bois was increasingly influenced by these changes, as well as by the lack of recognition re-
served to black troops who fought in World War I, and by the absence of federal commitment to racial
equality. The latter aspect was especially reflected in the never-ending stalling of the anti-lynching
bill in Congress, despite the numerous campaigns launched by the NAACP and other activists in favor
of its passage.22

16
     Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919-1963, 265; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Toward a New Racial Philosophy,” The Crisis, 40 (1933): 20–2.
17
     See for example W.E.B. Du Bois, “Segregation,” The Crisis, 41 (1934): 20.
18
     W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Rockville, 2008, 1st ed. 1903), 12–3.
19
     See for example W.E.B. Du Bois, “Logic,” The Crisis, 6 (1913): 81.
20
     Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920, (Chicago: University of Chicago
     Press, 2010), i–xxii.
21
     See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard
     University Press, 1998); Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival. Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New
     York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
22
     See Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1900-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980);



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     Even though it started to diminish after World War I, Du Bois’s commitment to cosmopolitan patri-
otism is visible at least until 1925, and is traceable through his writings in The Crisis. As a cosmopolitan
patriot, Du Bois celebrated “individual autonomy and cultural diversity,” while exhorting “Americans
to embrace a social-democratic ethic that reflected the interconnected and mutually dependent na-
ture of life in the modern world.” Firmly believing that “Americans could best secure the blessings of
liberty and property by ensuring their universal distribution,” Du Bois openly advocated for federal
support to public education, as well as federal intervention against racial segregation, disfranchise-
ment, and lynching.23 However, as much as Du Bois believed in the right to equal opportunity and
universal access to citizenship, for example by supporting the women’s right to vote, he was—very
practically—aware that a broad political alliance was needed in order to push the federal government
to take a stand in favor of African Americans. During the 1910s and 1920s, the majority of African
Americans held no political power where segregation was institutional, a situation only slightly im-
proved by the increasing numbers of African Americans living in northern cities during the Great
Migration.24 Hence, Du Bois used his editorship of The Crisis to build an interracial dialogue on po-
litical and civil rights, and to construct a wider political alliance, composed of other discriminated
groups and northern liberal whites. In order to achieve this goal, he employed an elaborate rhetoric,
which encompassed a variety of political and social issues—like distribution of taxation and Congress
representation—and linked them directly with the fight against racial prejudice.



2 Black Artistic Expression as a Multilayered Political Discourse
In the context of Du Bois’s editorship of The Crisis, artistic representation of black subjects emerges as
instrumental to his political program for racial equality. At a time when African Americans were rarely
featured in mainstream magazines—and when they were it was often in racist terms—promoting a
black art was more than just a way to build a strong cultural identity for African Americans.25 In Du
Bois’s view, reaffirming the dignity of African Americans as artistic subjects was also a powerful politi-
cal weapon. It was a means to reinforce their public image as both citizens and individuals in the eyes
of the American nation, while directly challenging the power relationship implicated by the concepts
of blackness and whiteness regarding access to citizenship. Through The Crisis, artistic expression was
theorized and employed to dignify the image of African Americans as humans, and their contribution
to society and history.
    During this period, Du Bois’s belief in the political significance of art and his commitment to
interracial dialogue is well represented by his pageant The Star of Ethiopia. Written between 1911 and
1913, The Star of Ethiopia debuted at the New York Emancipation Exposition, set to celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Even though staged only four times between 1913
and 1923, the pageant was widely publicized in The Crisis, and Du Bois used it to explain his views
about the political role of art. Written with the purpose of celebrating “the gifts of black men to this
world,”26 The Star of Ethiopia implicitly expressed “Du Bois’s concept of art as propaganda—that is, an
art conveying a message of racial uplifting and equality.”27 The dual and equally important cultural
and political role artistic expression occupied in Du Bois’s thought is summarized in a 1916 article in


     Sarah Silkey, Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
     2015).
23
     Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism, xiv.
24
     See Alferdteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus: The Great Migration of from the American South ( Jackson, MS, 1991); Steven Hahn,
     A Nation under Our Feet. Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: The Belknap
     Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).
25
     Jenny Woodley, Art for Equality, 63; Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 2.
26
     In 1913, The Star of Ethiopia was published under the title The People of Peoples and Their Gift to Men. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The
     People of Peoples and Their Gifts to Men,” The Crisis, 7 (1913): 339. See also Rebecca Hewett, “ ‘Looking at One’s Self through
     the Eyes of Others’. Representations of the Progressive Era Middle Class in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia,” Theatre
     History Studies, 30 (2010): 187–201.
27
     Lorini, “ ‘The Spell of Africa is upon me’,” 167.



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The Crisis titled “The Drama among Black Folk.” In this text, Du Bois referred to The Star of Ethiopia
as a demonstration that “pageantry among colored people is not only possible, but in many ways of
unsurpassed beauty and can be made a means of uplift and education … .”28
    On one hand, Du Bois thought that The Star of Ethiopia showed his commitment to the develop-
ment of an authentic black art, consecrated to an original ideal of “beauty” not conforming to white
standards. On the other, by showing that people of African descent could be both artists and artistic
subjects, as well as agents—and not merely objects—of history, The Star of Ethiopia was bound to rein-
state the African Americans’ role in Western civilization and, thus, to legitimate their claims to equal
citizenship. On this last matter, the people who needed to be “educated” were the white readers of
The Crisis.
    “We should set the black man before the world as both a creative artist and a strong subject for
artistic treatment,” Du Bois wrote in an article in The Crisis titled “The Immediate Program of the
American Negro,” as he listed artistic development alongside the fight for political and civil rights.29
The editor also emphasized the need to “bring into closer contact and mutual knowledge the white
and black people of this land” and, thus, to fight prejudice with direct knowledge.30 It is no coinci-
dence that this piece was published in 1915, only a few months after D. W. Griffith’s transposition of
Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman was released, prompting the Ku Klux Klan to be refounded in its wake.
Set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation highly glamourized the KKK, and it
featured actors in blackface who played the African-American characters.31 Most of all, the movie re-
iterated the widely accepted idea that Reconstruction represented “a tragic time when white Southern
rights were compromised by a corrupt and overbearing federal government supported by the votes
of African Americans who were ignorant and easily manipulated.”32 The NAACP launched a boycott
campaign against the movie, but The Birth of a Nation was a huge cinematic success and was the first
full-length movie to be screened at the White House.33 In this context, if art and literature painted a
multifaceted image of African-American society and culture, Du Bois thought, they also served as a
means to strengthen an interracial alliance and advance the cause of civil rights.



3 Defying Stereotypes through a Black Public Image: The Political Link
      between Art and Rhetoric
Du Bois’s interpretation of art as a multilayered discourse is directly reflected in his elaborate use of
rhetoric to describe African Americans as fit for citizenship and reclaim their space in the history of
the modern nation. This is evident in Du Bois’s non-fiction writings, and especially in his historical
studies on the Reconstruction period. Du Bois’s first contribution on Reconstruction was published
in the American Historical Review in 1911, after being presented as a paper in 1909. In this article, titled
“Reconstruction and its Benefits,” Du Bois stressed the positive influence freedmen had on Southern
administrations before Jim Crow laws were passed. In particular, Du Bois’s article stated that:

        We may recognize three things which negro rule gave to the South:

           1. Democratic government.
           2. Free public schools.


28
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Drama among Black Folk,” The Crisis, 12 (1916): 173.
29
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Immediate Program of the American Negro,” The Crisis, 9 (1915): 312.
30
     Du Bois, “The Immediate Program,” 311.
31
     Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision: D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation,” in The Birth of a Nation: D. W.
     Griffith Director, ed. Robert Lang, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 250–93.
32
     James M. Campbell and Rebecca J. Fraser, “Introduction,” in Reconstruction: Peoples and Perspectives, James M. Campbell
     and Rebecca J. Fraser (eds.), (Santa Barbara, CA, 2008), xix. About Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s
     Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Perennial Classics, 2011, 1st ed. 1988).
33
     Rogin, “The Sword became a Flashing Vision,” 240.



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             3. New social legislation.34

    As this passage suggests, Du Bois’s analysis of Reconstruction provided several arguments in fa-
vor of his political program for racial equality. It stated the African Americans’ fitness for citizenship,
rectified their role in US history, and demonstrated the positive impact a direct federal intervention
could have in guaranteeing equal rights for African Americans. As we have seen, Du Bois’s studies
challenged the mainstream narration about Reconstruction, which provided cultural and political le-
gitimacy for White Supremacy. Since Du Bois meant to widen the support for civil rights along the
color line, Reconstruction became a recurring theme in his writings in The Crisis.35
    That Du Bois was committed to constructing a positive black public image, necessary to engage an
interracial audience, emerges clearly also if we look at the issue of racial responsibility. Through his ed-
itorship of The Crisis, Du Bois used the concept of racial responsibility to inspire his African-American
readers to undertake the task of “uplifting the race,” while at the same time assessing their dignity as
individuals. As he had stated in his 1903 article on the “Talented Tenth,” Du Bois sustained the need
to develop an African-American elite to lead the fight for racial equality, and The Crisis reflected this
idea.36 The magazine hosted a page entirely dedicated to the “Talented Tenth,” and achievements
by African-American citizens were celebrated as accomplishments and sources of inspiration for the
entire racial group.37 As we have seen before, Du Bois referred to The Star of Ethiopia, and to artistic
expression in general, in the same terms. As historian Kevin Gaines has noted, this was part of Du
Bois’s struggle to reconcile citizenship with blackness and “to transform a pejorative concept of race
into an affirming vision of cultural distinctiveness.”38
    However, the notion of racial responsibility had also been historically problematic, since it was
used in the public discourse to support negative stereotypes about African Americans. The concept
was deeply entangled with pseudo-scientific theories about the biological inferiority of non-white
racial groups, their tendency for abnormal behavior, and their unfitness for citizenship.39 In this
context, Du Bois did not dismiss the notion of racial responsibility altogether, but he challenged its
negative outcomes.40 The magazine featured several articles on this topic, and presented scientific
evidence to dispute the existence of racial hierarchies.41 Du Bois also made extensive use of visual
references to stress his point. A notable example is a cartoon drawn by the African-American artist
Lorenzo Harris and picked by Du Bois for the June 1913 issue. In the picture, titled American Logic, one
finely dressed white man stands next to a “rough-looking white hoodlum.”42 On the left, two black men
stand next to each other, mirroring the two white men on the other side of the picture. The caption
below the two whites reads: “THIS MAN [referring to the finely-dressed man] is not responsible for
THIS MAN even if they do belong to the same race.” By contrast, the caption below the two black

34
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and its Benefits,” The American Historical Review, 15 (1910): 795.
35
     See for example W.E.B. Du Bois, “Social Equality,” The Crisis, 12 (1916): 30. Du Bois also referred to his political program as
     a “coming Reconstruction.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Ballot,” The Crisis, 17 (1918): 62. In 1935, Du Bois published his major work
     about Reconstruction, Black Reconstruction. See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History
     of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press,
     2011, 1st ed. 1935).
36
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem, ed. Booker T. Washington, (Redford, VA, 2008, 1st ed. 1903),
     11-25; NAACP, “Sixth Annual Report, 1915, § 12: The Talented Tenth,” The Crisis, 11 (1916): 254.
37
     Furthermore, Du Bois’s own purpose as editor was to contribute to the education of the Talented Tenth of the future, and
     The Crisis published special issues dedicated to children. See The Crisis, 4 (1912): 261–312.
38
     Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of
     North Carolina Press, 1996), 9.
39
     Ibid.
40
     Du Bois’s work as a sociologist in Atlanta in the early 1900s played a major part in challenging scientific arguments about
     racial inferiority. See Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia Uni-
     versity Press, 2014): 95–109; Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland:
     University of California Press, 2015).
41
     Franz Boas, “The Real Race Problem,” The Crisis, 1 (1910): 22-23; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Races,” The Crisis, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Aug., 1911):
     157–8; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Macon Telegraph,” The Crisis, 19 (1920): 110–1.
42
     Kirschke, Art in Crisis, 168.



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figures says: “THIS MAN is responsible for all that THIS MAN does because they belong to the same
race.”43
    In order to capture the attention of his white audience, mainly based in the North, Du Bois did not
limit himself to criticizing stereotypes about African Americans, but he designed some of his own. In
opposition to the vilified honest black citizen, Du Bois placed the trope of the unlawful white citizen of
the South, and thus challenged the link between whiteness and fitness for citizenship. In many of his
writings for The Crisis, he confronted racial segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans
by describing white Southern citizens and their state administrations as corrupt and disrespectful
of the law.44 This was the case with a series of articles written between 1911 and 1920, in which Du
Bois challenged the widespread idea that white taxpayers’ money funded schools and services for
African Americans. In order to prove his point, Du Bois published data showing irregularities in how
tax expenditures were calculated, thus invalidating the economic argument used by state and county
administrations to justify poor quality services for African Americans in the South.45 In some cases,
Du Bois sustained that African-American taxpayers were the ones who funded the same schools and
facilities they were barred from attending, because of Jim Crow legislation.46
    The pejorative stereotype about white Southern citizens was employed at length in Du Bois’s edi-
torials on lynching as well as in his writings about disfranchisement. In particular, Du Bois’s rhetoric
about white Southern citizens and administrations portrayed the segregated South as a threat to the
whole democratic system of the United States. Du Bois argued that since the distribution of repre-
sentatives per state was calculated according to the total number of citizens, the disfranchisement of
African Americans allowed white Southern voters to proportionally elect more representatives than
the average per citizen. He often gave detailed accounts on how this disproportion affected the balance
of power on the federal level.47 On the other hand, Du Bois argued, the de facto one-party system in
the South affected the balance of power in the Senate, because white Southern Democrats were certain
to be elected and most of them were able to hold office for more terms than the average congressional
representative.48 This argument was presented to appeal to a wider interracial audience, and thus to
cement an alliance between African-American citizens and white northern citizens in favor of federal
intervention.
    The campaign Du Bois conducted at the end of the 1910s in support of women’s suffrage repre-
sents another fundamental example of how he made use of his rhetorical skills to construct a wide
political alliance. Du Bois, as many scholars have confirmed, genuinely supported votes for women as
part of a cosmopolitan democratic project “which knows no race or sex.”49 In his articles in The Crisis,
however, Du Bois’s arguments in favor of women’s suffrage also served as a means to attract support
for civil and political rights for African Americans. Firstly, Du Bois tried to unite the supporters of the
two causes by comparing women’s struggle for suffrage to the struggle against the disfranchisement
of African Americans.50 Secondly, he tried to convince his African-American readers that their back-
ing of women’s suffrage could reopen the “discussion of the right of black folk to vote in America,”



43
     Lorenzo Harris, “American Logic,” The Crisis, 6 (1913): 80.
44
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Sterling Discrimination Bill,” The Crisis, 27 (1924): 200.
45
     See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Cost of Education,” The Crisis, 3 (1911): 69; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Macon Telegraph,” 19 (1920):
     110–1.
46
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Taxation Without Representation plus Theft,” The Crisis, 7 (1914): 240.
47
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The South and the Saddle,” The Crisis, 7 (1914): 188. See also W.E.B. Du Bois, “Disfranchisement,” The Crisis,
     27 (1923): 9.
48
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The White Primary,” The Crisis, 1 (1911): 20.
49
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Woman’s Suffrage,” The Crisis, 6 (1913): 29. In another occasion, Du Bois had described the struggle for
     woman’s suffrage as a “great human question”. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Votes for Women,” The Crisis, 4 (1912): 234. See also: Garth
     E. Pauley, “W.E.B. Du Bois on Woman Suffrage: A Critical Analysis of His Crisis Writings,” Journal of Black Studies, 30 (2000):
     406; Amy Helene Kirschke, “DuBois And ‘The Crisis’ Magazine. Imaging Women And Family,” Notes in the History of Art, 24
     (2005): 40.
50
     He was not the only NAACP member who wanted these two issues united: for example, the Crisis hosted articles on this
     topic penned by Jane Addams. See Jane Addams, “Social Control,” The Crisis, 1 (1911): 22–3.



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and implicated that their public image could benefit from their support for women’s right to vote.51
Finally, Du Bois used the trope of the undemocratic and unlawful Southern state administrations both
to associate the two causes and to stress the need for federal intervention. These rhetorical connec-
tions are summarized in the October 1920 editorial of The Crisis, published to celebrate the passing
of the Nineteenth Amendment. “Who oppose Woman Suffrage?” Du Bois asked his readers, before
concluding:

        With but few exceptions those states which oppose … universal education; those which
        advocate and practice lynching, mob violence and government by minority. These states
        are:
        Alabama Virginia
        Georgia Maryland
        Mississippi Delaware
        South Carolina North Carolina
        Louisiana.52

     After the victory represented by women’s suffrage, Du Bois initially hoped that, if the federal
sphere could successfully challenge the link between masculinity and citizenship, it could also inter-
vene in favor of African Americans. It became increasingly clear that this was not the case, and Du
Bois’s commitment to cosmopolitan patriotism faltered. Du Bois’s uncertainty was deeply influenced
by a profound change of public opinion about social reform and citizenship, a shift that started after
World War I. The Progressive Era had brought an array of reform possibilities and “economic, social
and political regulations [were] adopted, new public services were offered, and the management of
national resources expanded.”53 After the Russian Revolution, with the surge in nationalism due to the
war and the return of black troops, the United States faced a period of sharp social and political con-
flicts, against “the Reds,” foreigners, and African Americans. This political unrest influenced federal
legislation during the 1920s, e.g., immigration restriction, and had immediate violent consequences,
such as the race riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919.54 In 1918, Du Bois had sustained that the support of
African Americans for the war would have been essential to their recognition as citizens.55 For these
declarations, he had already faced severe backlash within the African-American community.56 When,
after the war, the results he expected did not materialize, Du Bois had to confront his own disappoint-
ment. As the immigration quota system of 1924 paved the way to the future inclusion of European
migrants as white citizens, the shifting concept of whiteness continued to be associated with citizen-
ship and defined in opposition to African Americans.57 By the second half of the decade, the enduring
Jim Crow system, the Congressional halt to the anti-lynching bill, and the increase in cases of school
segregation in the North made it increasingly clear to Du Bois that he but also the NAACP needed to
change their strategy, and rethink the connection between citizenship, identity, and the public image
of African Americans.58
51
     Du Bois, “Votes for Women,” 234.
52
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Triumph,” The Crisis, 20 (1920): 261.
53
     Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government. Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present (Bloomington:
     Indiana University Press, 1995): 4. See also Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967).
54
     # Daria Frezza, The Leader and the Crowd Democracy in American Public Discourse, 1880–1941 (Athens: University of Georgia
     Press, 2010, 1st Italian Ed. 2001), 136.
55
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks,” The Crisis, 16 (1918): 111.
56
     Mark Ellis, “ ‘Closing Ranks’ and ‘Seeking Honors’: W. E. B. Du Bois in World War I,” The Journal of American History, 79
     (1992): 96–124.
57
     See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Matthew
     Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
58
     See Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?,” in Du Bois on Education, Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. (ed.),
     (Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2002), 133–34; W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept
     (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002, 1st ed. 1940), 264; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South,
     1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 266–7.



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4     Forging a New Political Alliance through Artistic Expression: Du Bois’s
      Criteria of Negro Art
As Du Bois looked for a new political strategy, his ideas about artistic expression as a way to bridge
the gap between black and white Americans changed as well. This emerges clearly if we look at his
rhetoric about art as propaganda. As Daria Frezza has noted, the war boosted the debate about the
negative use of propaganda by enemy forces. After the end of the conflict, propaganda was discussed
in popular magazines, and the word “came to have a substantially negative meaning that included the
diffusion of false and misleading news, similar to the appeals put out by the enemy powers.”59 In 1921,
Du Bois confronted the topic head-on, and penned an editorial with the purpose of distancing African-
American artistic expression from a pejorative notion of propaganda. “Negro art is today plowing a
difficult row,” Du Bois wrote,

        chiefly because we shrink at the portrayal of the truth about ourselves. We are so used
        to seeing the truth distorted to our despite, that whenever we are portrayed on canvas, in
        story or on the stage, as simply human with human frailties, we rebel. We want every-
        thing that is said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest in us. We insist that
        our Art and Propaganda be one. This is wrong and in the end it is harmful. We have a
        right, in our effort to get just treatment, to insist that we produce something of the best
        in human character and that it is unfair to judge us by our criminals and prostitutes. This
        is justifiable propaganda. On the other hand we face the Truth of Art. We have criminals
        and prostitutes, ignorant and debased elements just as all folk have. When the artist paints
        us he has a right to paint us whole and not ignore everything which is not as perfect as we
        would wish it to be.60

    In this editorial, Du Bois tried to distinguish between a “positive” propaganda, that is a truthful
portrayal of African-American society, and a “negative” propaganda, which was harmful, because it
was partial and misleading. Even though there was a first attempt to reconceptualize the word “pro-
paganda,” the tone of the article profoundly differs from “Criteria of Negro Art.” By advocating for
a realistic and diverse representation of African-American society, Du Bois was still tied to the ideas
he expressed in The Immediate Program of the American Negro, about the need of increasing interracial
contacts and improving the dialogue between the two races.
    Notwithstanding Du Bois’s efforts, the use of the word “propaganda” as a pejorative term spilled
into the debate about the Harlem Renaissance, and it served as a weapon to discredit a part of the
movement. By the mid-1920s, as Watts put it,

        Harlem artists who dared to paint images of dignified racial difference were branded as
        ‘propagandists’ precisely because their stories undermined or indicted (racist) conven-
        tional wisdom promoted by ‘pure art.’61

    In this context, it is correct to say that Du Bois’s sharp language and his use of the word “propa-
ganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art” were a direct response to what he perceived to be dangerous drifts of
the movement. Specifically, in January 1926 Du Bois warned Alain Locke that his commitment to “a
search of disembodied beauty” devoid of political purpose was detrimental to cultural advancement
as well as political attainments for African Americans. He added that, if Locke’s thesis was “insisted
too much,” it was going to “turn the Negro renaissance into decadence.”62 The editor of The Crisis was
also critical of the depiction some artists of the Harlem Renaissance gave of African-American neigh-
borhoods, because he thought that they merely confirmed racist prejudices and catered exclusively to


59
     Frezza, The Leader and the Crowd, 126.
60
     Du Bois, “Negro Art,” 55.
61
     Watts, “Cultivating a Black Public Voice,” 182.
62
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The New Negro,” The Crisis, 31, (1926): 141.



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a white audience. This issue is evident in the negative reviews Du Bois wrote about Carl Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven in 1926 and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem in 1928.63
     Nonetheless, when Du Bois penned “Criteria of Negro Art,” it is highly unlikely that he was un-
aware of the wider public debate surrounding the word “propaganda” in the 1920s. Even if, as Ross
Posnock has argued, Du Bois was trying to change the meaning of the term “propaganda” to get rid
of its negative implications, he knew that the language he used to appropriate the word was going to
have a shocking effect on his audience. As someone who had always constructed his arguments with
care and used elaborate rhetoric to engage in a multilayered discourse about race, citizenship, and
identity, it seems simplistic to sustain that Du Bois did not expect to be misunderstood at least by a
part of his audience. This was especially true for the ones not directly involved in the debate about the
Harlem Renaissance. If we look at an article like “Criteria of Negro Art” from this point of view, his
1926 speech says as much about Du Bois’s position within the Harlem Renaissance as it does about his
changing political plan for African Americans and its consequent rhetoric. Until then, Du Bois’s polit-
ical program included engaging with a wide interracial audience and building a positive public image
of African Americans, in order to draw action from the federal government. Even when he advocated
for freedom and truth in art, Du Bois did so partly because he hoped that an honest depiction of the
daily lives of African Americans could help to tear down racial barriers. As we have seen before, Du
Bois had always supported African-American artists, and encouraged them to feature black subjects
in their work. Du Bois’s commitment to interracial dialogue never meant that his white audience had
a say in what black art should be about. They could, though, participate in its beauty and, through
it, improve their understanding of African-American culture and society. Hopefully, this knowledge
would foster their support for civil rights.
     What changed after 1926 was that, as the political climate shifted, art assumed a different political
purpose: forging a pact of political alliance solely among African-American citizens. Just a month after
he pronounced his speech, and before its publication as “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois published the
manifesto of the Crisis Guild for Writers and Artists (KRIGWA). First founded in 1924, this group
called for a new black artistic production catering exclusively to an African-American audience.64 Its
message excluded, then, the white audience who had been part of the readership of The Crisis and of
the NAACP from the founding of the Association. “The plays,” it stated,

        must be: 1. About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. By us.
        That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual
        association just what it means to be a Negro today. 3. For us. That is, the theatre must cater
        primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and
        approval. 4. Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of
        ordinary Negro people.65

    This detachment from the magazine’s previous editorial policy was increasingly reflected in Du
Bois’s writings concerning education, lynching as well as federal elections, and it finally reached a peak
in the 1930s, when Du Bois put forward his new political strategy.66 As Joy Carew has noted, since the
mid-1920s Du Bois increasingly dedicated himself to the study of Marx, and he took his first trip to
Soviet Russia in 1926.67 The editor gave a positive account of his journey in The Crisis, whereas he



63
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Books,” The Crisis, 32 (1926): 81–2; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Two Books,” The Crisis, 35 (1928): 202.
64
     Ethel Pitts Walker, “Krigwa, a Theatre by, for, and about Black People,” Theatre Journal, 40 (1988): 347–56.
65
     “ ‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre’. The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis, 32 (1926): 134.
66
     In a 1933 article, with which he presented his new program for economic self-help and black education, Du Bois looked
     back to the Harlem Renaissance and described it as “a literature written for the benefit of white people and at the behest
     of white readers, and starting out privately from the white point of view. It never had a real Negro constituency and it did
     not grow out of the inmost heart and frank experience of Negroes; on such an artificial basis no real literature can grow”.
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro College,” The Crisis, 40 (1933): 176. See also: Du Bois, “Toward a New Racial Philosophy,” 20–2.
67
     Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
     Press, 2010), 49–64.



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had expressed skepticism towards the Russian political experiment in the first half of the 1920s.68 “I
stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me,” he stated in his
November 1926 editorial:

        I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my own eyes
        and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.69

    Just two years after “Criteria of Negro Art” appeared in The Crisis, Du Bois admitted the failure of
his political program in a two-part article titled “The Possibility of Democracy in America,”

        For several years after the World War I used to talk concerning the results of the War, and
        to say that notwithstanding the slaughter and the upheaval that always accompany war we
        were going to have in the world an extension of democracy as a result of the fighting ….
        But I write today to apologize and change my thesis. I was wrong in what I was predicting.
        I see today without any doubt that instead of the great question of democracy being an
        extension of democratic control into further territory, the problem that faces us in Amer-
        ica and faces the world is the question as to whether we can keep the territory which we
        thought democracy had already conquered; … here in the United States, here where we
        have essayed the greatest experience in democracy, we have perhaps the greatest failure.70

    In the same issue of The Crisis, he called for a protest vote in the next federal election.71 By the turn
of the decade, Du Bois’s disenchantment towards a federal strategy was strengthened by the economic
crisis, and it became evident as he started advocating for self-help and grew weary of the NAACP, fi-
nally leaving his editorial position in 1934.72 However, Du Bois’s work for The Crisis reveals that his
political position started shifting before the 1930s and that this change is closely linked to Du Bois’s
views on artistic production as a means to strengthen the public image of African Americans. From
this point of view, the multilateral nature of Du Bois’s rhetoric—carefully adapted by the editor to
the contingencies of the moment—opens up many research possibilities about the wider political im-
plications of cultural production in black political thought. Specifically, a focus on the relationship
between African-American public intellectuals and their audience, the composition of this audience,
and its evolution over time and geographical context can provide useful insights into the public dis-
course about black identity, citizenship, and representation, especially during the pre-Civil Rights
era.




68
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Radical Thought,” The Crisis, 22 (1921): 104; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Class Struggle,” The Crisis,
     22 (1921): 151; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Spread of Socialism,” The Crisis, 22 (1921): 199–200. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Socialism and
     The Negro,” The Crisis, 22 (1921): 245; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The World and Us,” The Crisis, 23 (1922): 247. See also: Lewis, W.E.B.
     Du Bois, 1919–1963, 195–6.
69
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “Russia, 1926,” The Crisis, 33 (1926): 8.
70
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Possibility of Democracy in America,” The Crisis, 35 (1928): 336.
71
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “How Shall We Vote?,” The Crisis, 35 (1928): 346.
72
     W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro College,” 175–7; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Right to Work,” The Crisis, 40 (1933): 93–4. On black
     unemployment during the Depression, see William A. Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban
     Black Workers During the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992): 415–29.



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