William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois was the preeminent scholar, thinker, writer and African-American social realist, who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advocated for the strengthening of black civil rights, voting rights, equality and higher educational opportunities. In his greatest literary production, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois tackles the most important and highly-divisive issue of his time, the color line between blacks and whites in America. He speaks to the African-American struggle of coping with the “double-consciousness” that afflicted the black man’s sense of worth and made him look at himself as if through the eyes of others. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His childhood was one of fun, family and friendship, but he would learn where he stood as a young black man early on when he found himself rejected by a white girl in school. Du Bois would harness lofty ambitions, his thirst for knowledge and graduate from Fisk University in 1888. Later that year, he began his graduate studies at Harvard University and then graduated 1892 with a degree in History. Du Bois would commence his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin before moving back to the United States and returned to Harvard where he wrote The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 as his doctoral dissertation. This inaugural production would become one of his most famous literary works and it would earn him his Ph.D plus the honor of becoming the first African-American to do so. After a stint at the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois moved on to Atlanta University in 1897 where he would teach Sociology and begin his intense research and study into African-American history and life. Du Bois would forever refocus his energies towards activism for black rights soon after he found a black man, who was accused of rape and murder, whom he was scheduled to present an appeal for, brutally lynched, dismembered and burned at the stake. Six years later, in 1903, Du Bois would release The Souls of Black Folk, a far-reaching and learned sociological study of the quest for black equality and civil rights in a country that neither guaranteed them their rights and looked upon them as sub-human, property and ⅗ of a man. One particular chapter in The Souls of Black Folk castigates Booker T. Washington’s stance regarding black suffrage, equality and civil rights. It would be damning indictment against a man, in Washington, who up until then, was looked upon and revered as the preeminent black scholar and advocate for African-American rights. Du Bois would forever change how the black community, whites in the South and North, and history in general view Washington’s soft-handed and conciliatory tone toward the oppressive white masters in the South.

This article argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’s struggle for a durable peace was inextricably linked to his rejection of the United States’ racialized economic order that emplaced Blacks at the bottom of society within its borders and, given its imperial ambitions, threatened perpetual war abroad, with particularly dire consequences for colonized peoples. The first section re-interprets Du Bois’s writings and speeches about “caste” as, more accurately, explicating a system of “U.S. capitalist racism” in the United States that was inexorably tied to imperialism and war. Such clarity opens up an understanding of Du Bois’s conception of peace not as the absence of conflict, but rather as a necessary condition for the eradication of political, economic, and social inequality and injustice on a world scale. The next section argues that Du Bois’s analysis and critique of U.S. capitalist racism undergirded his advocacy of “People(s)-Centered Human Rights” (PCHR). Coined by Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka, PCHR emanate from and address the every- day realities, needs, and challenges of racialized and colonized people. For Du Bois, PCHR could only be achieved through a durable peace, and durable peace could only be maintained through the extension of PCHR to all persons irrespective of race, class, or nation. The final section explicates how this anticapitalist, antiracist, anti- imperial, and anticolonial conception of durable peace drew the ire of the U.S. government and made Du Bois, the Peace Information Center, and his fellow peace activists targets of Black Scare and Red Scare repression.

Many of the early American pragmatists, including John Dewey, Horace Kallen, and Jane Addams conceived of a multicultural America as a culturally pluralistic democracy with different ethnic communities bringing their common cultural values, social practices, moral beliefs, and ideals of excellence and human flourishing into conversation with one another, learning from one another, and articulating a shared conception of civic cooperation within deep democracy. W.E.B. Du Bois’s work is precisely about the cultural contributions of African Americans to US American political life. Starting in 1897, in his essay, “The Conservation of the Races”, Du Bois advances a notion of cultural pluralism that predates the classical pragmatist reflections on the nature of a multicultural United States. Du Bois believes that the unique cultural contribution of African Americans consists of a particular understanding, arrived at through their centuries of experience with subordination and marginalization in white supremacist society, about the nature of power and democratic governance in the United States that has the potential to radically shift the direction of American society. I examine two main points in this line of thought. First, Du Bois thinks that we ought not to abandon the notion of race and become a race neutral or colorblind society and instead preserve the notion of races as communities that may possess unique cultural gifts to contribute to the betterment of American democracy. Second, Du Bois thinks that the unique cultural gifts of African Americans have already altered the United States, not just in terms of cultural forms such as jazz or soul food, but in terms of the ethical foundations of US American democracy. Du Bois believes that in their particular pursuit of equality and liberty, African Americans have created a society that is much more moral and democratic than what the Founders intended. More importantly, Du Bois believes their struggle offers a prophetic vision that portends an even more participatory and deliberative United States.