Unconventional Wisdom
These new books from scholars defy the accepted thinking in their fields.
By Angela P. Dodson
W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (Politics and Culture in Modern America) by Edward J. Blum, $39.95, University of Pennsylvania Press (June 2007), ISBN-10: 0812240103, ISBN-13: 978-0812240108, 273 pp.
As the leading African-American scholar of his day, W.E.B. Du Bois is remembered for many things. Being a man of God is not generally one of them.
It is not that he rejected the notion of a greater power or God, specifically, argues Blum, an award-winning historian who teaches at San Diego State University, but rather that he was deliberately ambiguous or private about his beliefs and was suspicious of dogma and compulsory religiosity.
Du Bois sealed his reputation, Blum recalls, with one incident that others often recounted. While teaching at the historically Black Wilberforce University in Ohio, he entered a prayer meeting, and the leader suddenly announced, “Professor Du Bois will lead us in prayer.” To which he replied, “No, he won’t.” Decades later, he said it was not in his training to do so as a layman in the Congregationalist denomination in which he grew up.
Even the FBI, which tracked him for decades looking for communist leanings, found no proof that he was or was not Godless, Blum says.
In this religious biography nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Blum examines the life and literature of Du Bois to demonstrate that spirituality was in fact a guiding principle of his work and the fountain of many of his ideas. The result would be an excellent supplemental text in literature, history or religion, or enjoyable for personal reading.
