Messages 2009
An African American Activist’s Passion.
July 25th, 2009
San Francisco, California
Received by FAB
I am here, W. E. B. Du Bois:
You are very eager to know my thoughts. Well, I will satisfy your curiosity on this beautiful afternoon in San Francisco.
I was a young man of thirty-five when I published “The Souls of Black Folk”, and as I got older, I saw the increasing validity of what I had done.
You have just finished reading it for the very first time, and I thank you for your more than enthusiastic response. You felt it was truly inspired, and I can only say, with thanks, that it arose from my best and deepest perceptions. I saw it as an offering, and a way to help me and my people.
More than a hundred years have gone by, and the cause I fought for still cries out for attention. I have widened my scope as my soul expanded in this world of spirits. This is because I have seen darkness and light in those who were black and in those who were white. This spirit world levels everything, and the old way of injustice that seems to be permanently rooted in the world, is triumphantly uprooted, to the joy of the oppressed and of those who love justice, and to the sadness and suffering and darkness of those on the other side, who made injustice possible.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, historian, author, and editor. At the age of 95, in 1963, he became a naturalized citizen of Ghana.
Historian David Levering Lewis wrote, “In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism— scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.”
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed W. E. B. Du Bois on his list of the 100 Greatest African Americans. (Source: Wikipedia)