"Returning Soldiers"

Du Bois, W.E. B. "Returning Soldiers." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 3-5. Print.

Everything I said about “If We Must Die” applies to this essay as well. However, I was startled by how Du Bois expressed himself. I read the article before we watched the movie on him in class and thought it was well written, but asking for trouble. Then, the biography of him painted this picture of a quietly active, thoughtful man who didn’t want to push too many buttons, but rather to attain equality through peaceful protests and discussions. The tone of this essay is exactly the opposite; although it is obviously addressed to his fellow black Americans as a rally to join him in the fight for change, he had to have known that more whites than blacks would have ended up reading it. While it would surely inspire the want to join Du Bois in much of the black population, it would just as surely have inspired hate and fury in many of the whites who did the same. He outright calls the hate crimes against blacks the actions of a “shameful land” of “ignorance” (4), and them’s fightin’ words, especially to a group of people who are looking for a reason to throw a punch.

I have to say, though – I like Du Bois a lot more after reading his essay in the context of his biography rather than just by his biography alone. A man of great intellect is nothing if he isn’t a man of great motivation – and, further, a man who does what he says he’s going to do. He obviously meant what he said, and I have no doubt that he lived his feelings on black equality. Sometimes to get things done, you have to run the risk of stirring up some hot blood, especially if it means boiling up equally hot blood for your own cause. Although I’m sure Du Bois was intellectual enough to know the useless stupidity of physical confrontations, I can’t help but feel that he wouldn’t have passed up the opportunity to sucker-punch some of the more radical white supremacists, given the right circumstances. And for that, I respect him; he wasn’t just a guy that wrote about equality in some offhand, academic way; he wrote from his own anger, and it translates to paper in all of his intended meaning.