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Visiting
Johns Hopkins professor addresses positions of W.E.B. Du Bois
The Africana Studies Program sponsored a talk on Sept.
23 in the Saint Augustine Center’s Luis De Leon Room delivered by
Professor Nahum D. Chandler of Johns Hopkins University titled “Delimitations:
The Positions of W.E.B. Du Bois in the History of Thought. Professor Chandler’s
well-attended talk offered a sweeping history of the significance of Du
Bois as not only the political activist who was a founding figure for
the NAACP, but it also painted a detailed portrait of Du Bois that receives,
in Chandler’s view, too little attention, namely, Du Bois as a scholar
who spent 15 years of his life as an academic. One of the stunning facts
illuminating Chandler’s talk pointed out that Du Bois was so well
published that by the time of his death on the eve of the Civil Rights
March on Washington in 1963 at the age of 95, he had what amounted to
six pages of publishable material for every day of his life.
Chandler dedicated a large part of the talk to a discussion of two works
for which Du Bois is probably best known; the essay, “The Conservation
of Races” and his book, The Souls of Black Folk. Chandler argued
quite persuasively that when “The Conservation of Races” and
The Souls of Black Folk are properly read they disclose the central concern
of all of Du Bois’ thinking. It turns out, and Chandler argued for
the importance of this emphasis, that Du Bois’s thinking is clearly
preoccupied with questions concerned with the grounding and production
of “ideals.” Chandler’s talk argued that the trajectory
followed by Du Bois in addressing and being addressed by what was then
called “The Negro Question,” sought to articulate a set of
“ideals” that would make manifest the valuable and necessary
contribution of black people to the program of values identified under
the heading of American ideology. Chandler’s presentation ultimately
communicated that Du Bois had successfully married the life of thought
to the life of action. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African-American
Ph.D. from Harvard, is truly an exemplary figure whose entire life is
a call to an intellectual life in service to the human situation.
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