Phil Sinitiere, a scholar specializing in W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), recently brought to my attention that today, Du Bois’s 156th birthday, is commemorated as the Third Annual W. E. B. Du Bois Day at Fisk University. Fisk was Du Bois’s alma mater (1885-1888) before he became the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard College in 1895. The birthday occasioned today’s brief post.
I’m linked to Du Bois through my modest involvement a half-century ago in Aptheker’s preparation of Du Bois’s correspondence and bibliography for publication, which I discussed briefly here. In another post I elaborated upon certain grim facts that no admirer of his efforts to secure civil rights for African Americans should forget.
After graduating from Fisk, Du Bois studied philosophy at the feet of several members of Harvard’s Minervan pantheon, including Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, George Santayana, and William James. James’s mentoring of Du Bois was a major factor in his pioneering of American sociology.[1]
By temperament and education, Du Bois was the furthest thing from “woke”; he had earned a Harvard doctorate when that institution was transmissive rather than subversive of Western Civilization. In the six decades since his passing, unfortunately, the writings of this card-carrying Communist have inspired many of that civilization’s enemies. In the last two decades of his life, his disgust with the West moved him to eulogize Stalin effusively and admire Mao cordially. Should we judge such things less harshly than the inanities of “woke” ideology (which rationalize genocide)? My posts suggest a negative answer.
Note
[1] “I became a devoted follower of James,” Du Bois wrote, “at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy”; James “guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism.” He recalled being “repeatedly . . . a guest in the home of William James . . . .” Cited in James Campbell, “Du Bois and James,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 28:3, Summer 1992, 569-570. Campbell contrasts the younger man’s star-struck recollection with James’s more sober description: “although James was no doubt concerned with Du Bois’s future and respectful and supportive of Du Bois’s work,” Campbell writes, “it is not clear that James offered him any real help to advance any of his projects” (570).
Listening this morning to an old (well, 2022) podcast[1] by the great Calvinist apologist James R. White, I was startled by his reference to Thom Notaro’s 1980 Van Til and the Use of Evidence. (White says he paid $3.75 for his copy back in the day, but a used copy on Amazon will set you back forty-five bucks.) Startled, I say, because over forty years ago, the Roman Catholic periodical New Oxford Review published, in its November 1981 issue, pages 29-30, my cluelessly negative review of Notaro’s book.
In any case, I find myself enjoying their reaction to the money-making notes that I see coming (having seen the videos hundreds of times). The females, black and white, American, European, and Asian, invariably melt, even shed tears. Sometimes their accents make their English unintelligible to me, but the emotion is undeniable. Some male viewers, rendered speechless, are content in that silence; others, metaphysically shocked. “I thought they were black,” some mutter, followed by “Soul got no color!” or the equivalent.
No one who met Jim Sadowsky could ever forget him. I first saw him at a conference at Claremont University in California in August 1979; his great friend Bill Baumgarth, a political science professor at Fordham, was also there. His distinctive style of conversation at once attracted my attention. He spoke in a very terse way, and he had no patience with nonsense, a category that covered much of what he heard. If you gave him an argument and asked him whether he understood what you meant, he usually answered, “No, I don’t.” He once said to a fellow Jesuit, “that’s false, and you know it’s false.”
“And the Word became (ἐγένετο, egeneto) flesh (σάρξ, sarx) and dwelt (ἐσκήνωσεν, eskēnōsēn) among us . . . .” John 1:14
I welcome it, and recently got 
with Metaphysics,” Section 1 of Chapter 3, “Neutrality & Autonomy Relinquished,”