W.E.B. Du Bois on racism, race and religion
(an extract from: ‘The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto’ by W.E.B. Du Bois)
(in Jewish Life, 6 no. 7:14–15 (May 1952), published by the Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America)
W.E.B. Du Bois
By acquaintance with the problems of Jews and other targets of oppression, one gets “more complete understanding” of the Negro question
… Three years ago I was in Warsaw.
I have seen something of human upheaval in this world: the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta; the marching of the Ku Klux Klan; the threat of courts and police; the neglect and destruction of human habitation; but nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw in Warsaw in 1949.
I would have said before seeing it that it was impossible for a civilized nation with deep religious convictions and outstanding religious institutions; with literature and art; to treat fellow human beings as Warsaw had been treated. There had been complete, planned and utter destruction. Some streets had been so obliterated that only by using photographs of the past could they tell where the street was. And no one mentioned the total of the dead, the sum of destruction, the story of crippled and insane, the widows and orphans.
The astonishing thing, of course, was the way that in the midst of all these memories of war and destruction, the people were rebuilding the city with an enthusiasm that was simply unbelievable. A city and a nation was literally rising from the dead.
Then, one afternoon, I was taken out to the former ghetto. I knew all too little of its story although I had visited ghettos in parts of Europe, particularly in Frankfort, Germany. Here there was not much to see. There was complete and total waste, and a monument.
And the monument brought back again the problem of race and religion, which so long had been my own particular and separate problem. Gradually, from looking and reading, I rebuilt the story of this extraordinary resistance to oppression and wrong in a day of complete frustration, with enemies on every side: a resistance which involved death and destruction for hundreds and hundreds of human beings; a deliberate sacrifice in life for a great ideal in the face of the fact that the sacrifice might be completely in vain.
Enlarged View of Negro Question
The result of [my] visits [to Poland], and particularly of my view of the Warsaw ghetto, was not so much clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as it was a real and more complete understanding of the Negro problem.
No, the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.
So that the ghetto of Warsaw helped me to emerge from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph and broaden in the world.
Path to the Future
My friend, Gabriel D’Arboussier, an African, recently visited Warsaw and wrote:
“At the entrance to the city rises an imposing mausoleum erected to the memory of the 40,000 soldiers of the Red Army who fell for the liberation of Warsaw and who are all buried there. This is no cemetery, cut off from the living, but the last resting place of these glorious dead, near whom the living come to sit and ponder the sacrifice of those to whom they owe life, Had I seen nothing else, that mausoleum alone would have taught me enough to understand the Polish people’s will to peace and its attachment to the Soviet Union. But there is more to tell and it cannot be too often told: of Poland’s thirty-two million inhabitants six and a half million died. There is also Warsaw, 83 per cent destroyed and its population reduced from over a million to 22,000, and the poignant spectacle of the flattened ghetto.”
But where are we going — whither are we drifting?
We are facing war, taxation, hate and cowardice and particularly increasing division of aim and opinion within our own groups. Negroes are dividing by social classes, and selling their souls to those who want war and colonialism, in order to become part of the ruling plutarchy, and encourage their sons to kill “Gooks.”
Among Jews there is the same dichotomy and inner strife, which forgets the bravery of the Warsaw ghetto and the bones of the thousands of dead who still lie buried in that dust.
All this should lead both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group: the stopping of war and preparation for war; increased expenditure for schools better than we have or are likely to have in our present neglect and suppression of education; the curbing of the freedom of industry for the public welfare; and amid all this; the right to think, talk, study, without fear of starvation or jail.
This is a present problem of all Americans and becomes the pressing problem of the civilized world.
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Main picture credit: Ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1945 (source: Wikipedia)
