The Return of the Ivory Tower: Black Educational Exclusion in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Abstract

The year 2003 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s most celebrated publication, The Souls of Black Folk. An astonishing work of literary, historical, and sociological merit, Souls has inspired generations of academicians and activists alike drawn to the politics of identity, the color line, double consciousness, the talented tenth, and theories of race. The year also marks the fortieth anniversary of Du Bois’s death in Ghana in August 1963. Save for Souls, the memory of Du Bois appears perpetually in danger of passing into oblivion, given the concerted efforts on the part of established powers to radically curtail his contributions to twentieth-century social and political thought. It seems that the commemoration of Souls—written by Du Bois in his early thirties—sanctions an official burial of the next 60 years of the author’s life, which were devoted to scholarly examination of and struggle against racist exploitation and exclusion at home and U.S. imperialism and colonialism abroad. Though his relationship to the university was strained, his commitment to education as a primary mechanism for individual self-determination and collective democratization never wavered. Even as he explored the transformative potential of more public sites of pedagogy, he continued to produce groundbreaking studies in urban sociology, histories of the transatlantic slave trade, and his monumental Black Reconstruction in America, as well as several now-classic works in the field of education and numerous works of poetry and fiction (including five novels).