Du Bois shifted from viewing white workers as enemies to embracing socialism by 1911

Evidence

A new theme in the pages of the Horizon and The Crisis was Du Bois’s interest in the labor movement and in socialism. At one time he had viewed the white working class as the Negro’s ‘bitterest opponent.’ By 1904 he had come to believe that economic discrimination was in large part the cause of the race problem, and to feel sympathetic toward the socialist movement. Three years later, he was writing favorably of the socialists in the Horizon. Elsewhere he advised the socialists that their movement could not succeed unless it included the Negro workers, and wrote that it was simply a matter of time before white and black workers would see their common economic cause against the exploiting capitalists. Though in 1908 Du Bois did not vote for the socialists because they had no chance of winning, in 1911 he joined the party. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2189

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Black Reconstruction and Du Bois’s evolving Marxist analysis; relevant to the reader’s question about the height of the Black radical tradition and its labor alliances.
• DEEPTHINKING: Documents the pivotal intellectual pivot of a central figure in the Black radical tradition — economic determinism overtaking race-first analysis — a dense, multi-year arc worth sitting with.