Du Bois’s race and training freed him from Marxist dogma

Evidence

As a Black, Du Bois was sensitive to the contradictions in American society, in particular to the material force of racism. He was even more conscious of racism since in his early years he had been cocooned from it. He was a young man by the time he was forced to openly confront the culture of racism. Later, as a Black scholar, he had had an immediate and profound experience with the false histories produced in that culture. Both his training at Harvard with its history department largely influenced by German historiography, and his studies in Berlin had left him with an acute sensitivity for myth and propaganda in history. And as we have suggested earlier, as a critic of Marx, Du Bois had possessed no obligations to Marxist or Leninist dogma, nor to the vagaries of historical analysis and interpretation that characterized American Communist thought. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1072