← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · edward gibbon

W.E.B. DuBois on Russian Jews

Thread ID: 15023 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-09-16

Wayback Archive

edward gibbon [OP]

2004-09-16 17:47 | User Profile

Much nonsense has been written about the love affair between blacks and Jews. The following should be a tonic for those who could not believe or stomach the contrived explanations of today. [url]http://www.bartleby.com/114/9.html[/url]

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963). [B][I]The Souls of Black Folk[/I][/B]. 1903.

Chapter IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man

    Life treads on life, and heart on heart; 
    We press too close in church and mart 
    To keep a dream or grave apart. 
            MRS. BROWNING.

[QUOTE]What the black laborer needs is careful personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial differences to prove the necessity of such group training after the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plain duty of some one to assume this group leadership and training of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose duty it was,—whether that of the white ex-master who had profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government whose edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without capital, without land, without skill, without economic organization, without even the bald protection of law, order, and decency,—left in a great land, not to settle down to slow and careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost immediately into relentless and sharp competition with the best of modern workingmen under an economic system where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]For we must never forget that the economic system of the South to-day which has succeeded the old régime is not the same system as that of the old industrial North, of England, or of France, with their trades-unions, their restrictive laws, their written and unwritten commercial customs, and their long experience. It is, rather, a copy of that England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts,—the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle. [B]The rod of empire that passed from the hands of Southern gentlemen in 1865, partly by force, partly by their own petulance, has never returned to them[/B]. Rather it has passed to those men who have come to take charge of the industrial exploitation of the New South,—the sons of poor whites fired with a new thirst for wealth and power, [COLOR=Red]thrifty and avaricious Yankees, **shrewd and unscrupulous Jews[/B][/COLOR]. Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance; it is a cold question of dollars and dividends. Under such a system all labor is bound to suffer. Even the white laborers are not yet intelligent, thrifty, and well trained enough to maintain themselves against the powerful inroads of organized capital. The results among them, even, are long hours of toil, low wages, child labor, and lack of protection against usury and cheating. But among the black laborers all this is aggravated, first, by a race prejudice which varies from a doubt and distrust among the best element of whites to a frenzied hatred among the worst; and, secondly, it is aggravated, as I have said before, by the wretched economic heritage of the freedmen from slavery. With this training it is difficult for the freedman to learn to grasp the opportunities already opened to him, and the new opportunities are seldom given him, but go by favor to the whites.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE][B]Left by the best elements of the South with little protection or oversight, he has been made in law and custom the victim of the worst and most unscrupulous men in each community[/B]. The crop-lien system which is depopulating the fields of the South is not simply the result of shiftlessness on the part of Negroes, but is also the result of cunningly devised laws as to mortgages, liens, and misdemeanors, which can be made by conscienceless men to entrap and snare the unwary until escape is impossible, further toil a farce, and protest a crime. I have seen, in the Black Belt of Georgia, an ignorant, honest Negro buy and pay for a farm in installments three separate times, and [I][COLOR=Red]then in the face of law and decency the enterprising Russian Jew who sold it to him pocketed money and deed and left the black man landless, to labor on his own land at thirty cents a day[/COLOR][/I]. I have seen a black farmer fall in debt to a white storekeeper, and that storekeeper go to his farm and strip it of every single marketable article,—mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, looking-glass,—and all this without a warrant, without process of law, without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person any account or reckoning. And such proceedings can happen, and will happen, in any community where a class of ignorant toilers are placed by custom and race-prejudice beyond the pale of sympathy and race-brotherhood. So long as the best elements of a community do not feel in duty bound to protect and train and care for the weaker members of their group, they leave them to be preyed upon by these swindlers and rascals.[/QUOTE]
Chapter VII. Of the Black Belt

[QUOTE][B]The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty[/B]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction,—“improvement” companies, wine companies, mills and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew fell heir. It is a beautiful land, this Dougherty, west of the Flint. The forests are wonderful, the solemn pines have disappeared, and this is the “Oakey Woods,” with its wealth of hickories, beeches, oaks, and palmettos. But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all. Here and there a man has raised his head above these murky waters. We passed one fenced stock-farm, with grass and grazing cattle, that looked very homelike after endless corn and cotton. Here and there are black freeholders: there is the gaunt dull-black Jackson, with his hundred acres. “I says, ‘Look up! If you don’t look up you can’t get up,’” remarks Jackson, philosophically. And he’s gotten up. Dark Carter’s neat barns would do credit to New England. His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man died last fall the master’s sons immediately laid claim to the estate. “And them white folks will get it, too,” said my yellow gossip.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:jYnyYorPu3EJ:www.blacksandjews.com/Quotes_and_Facts.html+dubois+souls+of+black+folk+jews&hl=en[/url] "The Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty [Georgia]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for moneygetting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction'improvement' companies, wine companies, mills and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew fell heir." [SIZE=4][COLOR=Red]The Souls of Black Folk (1903) note: When DuBois tried to republish the book in 1953, he succumbed to pressure to replace the word "Jew" with "foreigner."[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[url]http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:nsnbMy9EjsQJ:www.bostonreview.net/BR20.4/Martin.html+dubois+souls+of+black+folks+jews&hl=en[/url]

W.E. B. DuBois seems to reign supreme in Rivers' pantheon of good integrationist and nationalist heroes. But DuBois, too, has on occasion been considered antisemitic. No less a person than the Jewish historian Herbert Aptheker has documented the forced expunging of references to Jews in DuBois' Souls of Black Folk, over fifty years after its original publication. DuBois had referred to Jewish immigrant landowners becoming heirs to the southern slaveowning plantocracy, a most antisemitic thing to the bowdlerizers of his work. Tony Martin Wellesley College Click here to return to the Boston Review Forum