W.E.B. Du Bois wrote ‘The Problem of Problems,’ challenging the Socialist Party and the labor movement over U.S. history and their racism and refusal to organize Black workers or to fight for Black civil and human rights. Two issues later, Eugene Debs would write a response to his close reading of Du Bois’ article,‘The Negro: His Present Status and Outlook.’ They should be read together and are both contained in the same cumulative PDF file below.

‘The Problem of Problems’ by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. Intercollegiate Socialist. Vol. 6 No. 2. December 1917-January, 1918.

‘There are in the United States to day nearly twice as many persons of Negro descent as there are Belgians in Belgium; there are three times as many as there are Irish in Ireland or Scotch in Scotland; as compared with 12,000,000 American Negroes, Servia and Greece together have only 6,000,000 inhabitants and Bulgaria less than 5,000,000. Indeed, the whole population of the Balkan States is only about one-third larger than the Negro population of the United States. The land which American Negroes own in fee simple is as large as the whole island of Ireland and equals in area the land which the Germans hold in Belgium and France, and the land which they cultivate as owners and tenants is as large as half the United Kingdom.

‘Absolutely, then, this group is of importance in the world. But the problem which I am to discuss is that which arises from the fact that this group has been from the beginning excluded from American democracy and that this exclusion has had a singular and often well-nigh fatal effect upon the nation whenever the nation has sought to follow great ideals or work out any line of unselfish endeavor. This is easily proven not simply in the present crisis but in every spiritual crisis which the territory in the United States occupied by the nation has passed. Mental contra diction and moral disintegration have been the price which the United States has paid again and again for refusing to face the problem of its Negro population.

‘Think, for instance, of the earliest of our great social problems. Late in the fifteenth century the eyes of the world were opened to see the earth doubled in extent, to realize vast new territories and unknown possibilities and not impossible fairy tales beyond the seas. Conceive the vision, the spiritual uplift that must have follow ed such a revelation. With this spiritual exultation, however, went the keen, cold, calculating realization that sufficient forces of brute labor could extract untold and immediate wealth from the known parts of this land. There you have the first spiritual conflict in which the Negro became a tremendous part. It was settled by a compromise which no thoughtful man believed, but which all, thoughtful and thoughtless, were willing to accept. Import workers to work in the mines and on the plantations and thus the heathen would be converted to the kingdom of God. Would not so meritorious a work excuse the horrors of the slave trade?

‘It was characteristic of this conclusion that few dared go behind it; few dared to call for facts and really argue and discuss the question. Discussion was interfered with by dominant public opinion, and America became a land of slavery.

‘In the “Land of Freedom”

‘Then, slowly, in the unwinding of years came a new spiritual conflict. More and more clearly a splendid ideal flamed in the minds of Americans. This was to be a Land of Refuge and a Land of Freedom. The Disinherited of the earth were to have here a chance for development such as the world had never seen before. All men were to be equal, with an equal chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The land was to exist for itself and not for Europe, and the forces for the great fight for Freedom gathered themselves. It was exceedingly unpleasant just here to remember that America, after all, was a land of slavery, to have the enemy turn frankly to the black slaves, like Dunmore in Virginia, and cry: “You are free. Fight for your own liberty against these slave-holding hypocrites!” Something had to be done and the result, again, was compromise. Black soldiers shall be free immediately, said the revolutionary fathers, and slavery as an institution will disappear from the land. But human changes take time and call for sacrifices. The cost of uprooting slavery must be spread over many years. Let the slave trade gradually be abolished; let emancipation spread state by state and plantation by plantation. Meantime, we will undertake to find a new home in Africa or elsewhere for the freed Negroes, and thus our dilemma will be settled. So, our fathers of revolutionary days fought for freedom and maintained slavery.

‘National Expansion

‘Meantime the world began to change and the new era of economic expansion swept over it. The nation felt the impulse, and in the fateful years when the factory system was being introduced and machinery sup planting crude labor, they were asked to lay the foundation of the first American economic kingdom – the kingdom of cotton – which antedated later kingdoms of iron, of cereals, of meat, and of lumber. Few in the nation or in the world understood exactly what was happening. The great ground swell of the universe revealed itself not as one mighty movement but rather as a new chance to make money, particularly in cotton raising, in tobacco, sugar and wheat. Gradually a demand gathered itself, a demand for more land and more labor. The nation took advantage of the Haitian revolution and got the empire of the Mississippi Valley for nothing, seized North Mexico and annexed the North west. We became a tremendous country, spreading from ocean to ocean and dreaming of a realm from the pole to the equator.

‘Right in the midst of this came the problem of American Negroes. We felt ourselves so large that we tried to sweep it aside, but persistently it returned. Thoughtful Americans knew perfectly well that States’ rights advocates bent the Constitution to the breaking point in order to have slave-ridden Louisiana; that we seized Mexico and Florida in order to have a larger area for slavery, and for the same reason we were intriguing in the West Indies; that the real thing that was expanding was not America but slavery, and that new laws and new customs were checking emancipation and making the Negro a caste to supplant the old caste of manual laborers. Rapidly the leaders of the cotton kingdom took the extreme attitude that the new caste of black labor was an inevitable thing and that so long as it was confined to inferior people it was the ideal organization of labor and of economic empire.

‘The Era of Compromise

‘Thereupon came the great attempt at national compromise. Granted, said the nation, that this is the ideal form of labor for certain industries it must be confined within the climatic belt where those industries are dominant, so that the black labor class shall not come in competition with the rising white laborers who propose to emancipate themselves from the caste idea and become a real part of modern democracy. The leaders of the cotton kingdom misread the times and re fused to accept the compromise. They said that their system of caste labor depended upon expansion for its very existence and that slaves must be slaves on Bunker Hill as well as in New Orleans; that they would not and, indeed, could not remain part of the country which did not allow this. On the other hand, the compromisers pleaded with them. They did not for a moment undertake to deny the caste idea for black men. The very man who is called the Emancipator declared again and again that his object was the integrity of the Union and not the emancipation of the slaves; that if he could keep the Union from being disrupted, he would not only allow slavery to exist but would loyally protect it.

‘It took but a few years of murder, anarchy and rapine to prove to everybody that if the question of black caste labor were settled there would be no need for disrupting the Union and no demand for it. It was, therefore, legally abolished, the Union preserved and the attention of the country turned to further economic development. But the country was, after all, the same country. It loved Negroes no better after emancipation than it did before and it had no more respect for them. It was just as willing in 1870 that Negroes should be slaves as in 1860, so long as they did not endanger the white man’s income.

‘After the War

‘Inevitably the problem continued to face the nation. If free white labor was not to be menaced by the slave wage of Negroes, then either Negro labor must be confined to the South or to a certain grade of work or the Negro’s economic and spiritual emancipation must follow his physical freedom. Again, came compromise: slavery persisted, only we called it the plantation system and supported it by vagrancy laws, the convict lease system and lynching. Labor unions carefully guarded against Negro competition in the decently-paid trades, while on the other hand the price of common labor in the North was kept but a notch above Southern wages by world migration.

‘This was our economic and moral dilemma when this world war burst. There can, as it seems to me, be no real doubt in anyone’s mind but that horrible as war is there lies before the world today a stake which may easily justify it. If at the cost of this world war, the death of millions and the sorrow and degradation of many mil lions more, if at that horrible cost we can put down anarchy among the nations, reduce them to some system of law and order, curb the bullying of the Highwayman by armed international police and make the freedom of nations, a freedom under law, as we have done partially with the individual, then the fight is worth every drop of blood that it costs. Every thinking man, too, must realize that if the world battle is a battle for such a stake, for this nation to keep out of it is either cowardice or insanity. But when the nation enters, can it enter and fight for such a stake? Are its hands reasonably clean and its soul sincere? I maintain that the one tremendous handicap which makes it almost impossible for this nation to fight with clear conscience or with untrammeled limbs is today, as yesterday, her attitude toward 12,000,000 American citizens of Negro descent. I can, perhaps, best illustrate my meaning by reminding you briefly of the problems which you are discussing in this conference.

‘The Negro Problem and Labor

‘You are discussing, for instance, labor. Now the central problem of American labor is the chronic oversupply of common labor. The oversupply has in the past come from migration, first from Ireland, then from Germany, finally from Italy and Austria, and above all from the mill ions of Negroes in the South recently emancipated from slavery and systematically kept in ignorance. As soon as this war starts a revolution takes place. Those who were formerly killed in industry in America are now being killed in war in Europe. Common labor becomes scarce and wages rise. The Negro, attracted by higher wages in the North and repelled by the menace of lynching and caste in the South moves to fill the new labor demand thus created. The common laborer in the North is caught between the tyranny of exclusive trade unions and the underbidding of blacks. The result is murder and riot and unrest. Those who for a generation have been calling the black man a lazy, ignorant burden and incubus on the South have suddenly developed a determination not to allow the rest of the country to Share that burden or pay Negroes higher wages. White Northern la borers find killing Negroes a safe, lucrative employment which com mends them to the American Federation of Labor. No discussion of labor problems arising out of the war can take place, then, without first facing this situation of the Negro laborer.

‘Freedom of Speech

‘You are taking up the problem of the freedom of speech. Many of you are vastly upset by the increasing difficulty which you have in discussing this war in America; but I should be much more impressed by your indignation if I did not realize that the greatest lack in freedom of discussion of present American problems come not in problems which you are not allowed to discuss but rather in those which you are free to discuss but afraid of. I know and you know that the conspiracy of silence that surrounds the Negro problem in the United States arises because you do not dare, you are without the moral courage to discuss it frankly, and when I say you, I refer not simply to the conservative reactionary elements of the nation but rather to the very elements represented in a conference like this, supposed to be forward-looking and radical. You may, of course, now and then and with some impatience turn from the things which you really want to discuss and listen skeptically and with little interest to a speaker who tries within twenty minutes to untangle a snarl of twenty decades. But you are perfectly willing to leave it at that, to go away without action, to let the mists of half-discussion and half-understanding lie continually upon this human problem. Ten indeterminate half-truths will sum up your whole knowledge of the Negro problem and the knowledge which you are unwilling to have disturbed. For instance, (1) the Negro is lazy; (2) the Negro is unhealthy and is dying out; (3) the Negro is inferior in mind and in body; (4) the Negro misused the ballot and the ballot was rightfully taken from him; (5) the Negro is lynched for rape; (6) the Negro is abnormally criminal; (7) the Negro’s one ambition is to marry your sister; ( efforts to educate Negroes beyond a certain point are a failure; (9) the South is the best friend of the Negro; (10) the Negro problem is insoluble.

‘There is not a single one of these propositions that is not a half-truth or a whole lie. As a whole they run counter to easily ascertainable facts, to open scientific proof, and to common sense, yet they are allowed to stand. They can be repeated at any time or place without contradiction. Any person any where in America, no matter what his standing or reputation, can rise and with proper gestures and embellishments repeat these ten sentences and sit down in nine cases out of ten uncontradicted and unquestioned.

‘A nation which thus refuses to dis cuss intelligently or to investigate the problem which historically and at the present is the greatest of its social problems may whine about and pretend that it wishes freedom of speech, but it deceives itself.

‘Conscription and Lynch Law

‘You are discussing the conscription of wealth for the national weal, and yet this great, rich country has allowed generation after generation of American Negroes to grow up in ignorance and poverty and crime, because they will not spend as many dollars upon a decent public school system or a system of social uplift for Negroes as they are perfectly willing to spend upon a single battleship. Under such circumstances it will be hard to make conscientious people believe that you believe in the conscription of wealth for the commonweal.

‘You are talking about the public control of food and the necessity in a great national crisis for the national government to come in and curb and guide the anti-social action of states and individuals, and in the face of this you refuse to ask that same national government to come in and conserve the lives which food feeds. You allow lynching and murder to become a national pastime. Nine out of ten of you have practically without protest sat by your parlor fires while 2,867 colored men have been lynched and burned and tortured in the last thirty years, and not a single one of the murderers brought to justice, not to mention the tens of thousands of Negroes who have been killed by mobs and murderers in that time.

‘You wish universal service in war and in peace, but you are willing that Negroes who are unprotected either in war or peace should give their services and be compelled to give them under circumstances of public insult such as no other part of the nation is asked to endure The State Socialism which you discuss is in America the Socialism of a State where a tenth of the population is disfranchised, (not to mention the half who are women), and where the power which at present controls is the power which gets its political rights from a franchise based on the disfranchisement of nine million Americans of Negro descent; and you raise scarcely a single word of protest against it.

‘The Negro and Peace Proposals

‘I was disgusted with Pacifists long before their present prominence. Today they think war a horrible thing, but yesterday, when war was confined to the Belgian Congo, to the head waters of the Amazon, to South Africa and parts of India and the South Seas it was not war, it was simply a method of carrying civilization on to the natives, and there were no national conventions on the subject. In the peace proposals that are now being made continually, the future of the natives of Africa, the future of the disfranchised Indians of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, and the disfranchisement of the Negroes in the United States has not only no important part but practically no thought. What you are asking for is a peace among white folk with the inevitable result that they will have more leisure and inclination to continue their despoiling of yellow, red, brown and black folk.

‘Revolution is discussed, but it is the successful revolution of white folk and not the unsuccessful revolution of black soldiers in Texas. You do not stop to consider whether the Russian peasant had any more to endure than the black soldiers of the 24th Infantry, but you do consider and consider with the utmost care that the black soldiers’ cause was lost before they took arms and that for that reason it can be easily forgotten.

‘An Alternative to Justice

‘Thus, in every question which you discuss and in many other great social questions which you might discuss, frankness and honesty on your part is almost impossible because of the fact that the nation is guilty of continual injustice toward one-tenth of its own citizenship, and that the injustice is deliberate as long as they refuse to investigate it or discuss it, and because if today you saw the righteous and honest solution you would be frankly unwilling to receive it, unwilling to carry it out, since you would not want to live in a world where Negroes were treated as men. Under such circumstances you must remember that the integrity of your own souls and minds is at stake. You cannot thus play with a human problem and not spoil your own capacity for reason. You must face the fact that these human beings cannot always remain in their present relation to world movements. I once suggested in “The Crisis” magazine a method of solving this problem which was received with a certain gasp of horror. Yet I venture to suggest it again. I said that every white family in the United States might choose a person of Negro descent, invite him to their home, entertain him and then through some quick and pain less method kill him. In that way, in a single day, we would be rid of 12,000,000 people who are today giving us so much concern, or rather so little concern. Remember, that as ghastly as a proposal of this sort appears that it is a good deal better than forcing these Negroes into slums and ghettos and letting them die slowly by a high death rate. It is a good deal better than forcing them to the lowest wages and letting them die of inanition. It is even better than presenting them with a program of life and education which includes universal and continual insult with absolutely no hope of normal citizenship in modern civilization, and, finally, it is the only one decent alternative to treating them as men.’