Journal of Southern History | 2019
Between Washington and Du Bois: The Racial Politics of James Edward Shepard by Reginald K. Ellis (review)
Abstract
(1935) logically and richly inform these collected essays. Drawing on Black Reconstruction to examine the “imperial miracle,” James Edward Ford III reads the “poetic fragments” that end each chapter as being engaged in “an interminable analysis” (pp. 104, 11, 102). Following Nathaniel Mackey, Ford suggests that the poetry serves as “a ‘paracritical hinge,’ a ‘door . . . between disparate modes of articulation’” (pp. 101–2). For Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, as Vijay Phulwani writes, the question remained “how to build durable political institutions for African Americans out of the fragmented and loosely organized forms of collective agency available to them after centuries of slavery andwhite supremacy,” institutions such as the black church (p. 273). Du Bois ultimately answered this question by inverting “the political implications of the tragic” in pursuit of political and economic power—to argue in favor of “a strategic embrace of segregation” (pp. 272, 273). As Phulwani argues, Du Bois very well understood William A. Dunning’s depiction of “the state as the primary political actor” in political theory; to create governments that might endure after Reconstruction also created the problem of incorporating black politics “into a state that refused to acknowledge them” (pp. 279, 280). Notably, faced with the 1917–1919 labor crisis, Great Migration movement, and mob law, Du Bois shifted his view toward “‘self-sufficing’” black agency; the publication of The Gift of Black Folks (1924) foreshadowed this strategic embrace of the “group economy” (pp. 281, 293). This collection of essays offers an impressive study of Du Bois’s work, showing real appreciation for the scope of Du Bois’s scholarship. Though the essays are well researched and carefully sourced, the arguments suggested by the authors that Du Bois contributed to political theory as much as he did to the social sciences state more than the sources allow. But with these essays in A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois, to recognize Du Bois’s contributions to political theory is overdue.