Lynching violence drove Du Bois from detached science toward persuasion

Evidence

But in April 1899, he became heartbroken over his inability to prevent the infamous lynching near Atlanta of Sam Hose, who had killed an oppressive White employer in self-defense. In August, armed Blacks in coastal Georgia’s McIntosh County drove back a lynching mob. “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming,” Du Bois later wrote. Firmly believing “that the majority of Americans would rush to the defense of democracy … if they realized how race prejudice was threatening it,” Du Bois adopted a more aggressive commitment to educational persuasion. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 748

Categorization

• XREF: Du Bois’s shift from detached study to persuasion maps onto the reader’s scheme question — here lived racial violence precedes and inverts the ‘ignorance→hate→discrimination’ order: violence comes first, ideas follow.