Racist dismissal of Black scholars helped push Du Bois from academia into activism

Evidence

Black scholars were routinely ignored by the White media and by White readers, even when they had nationally recognizable names, like Du Bois. “We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes,” Du Bois recalled, “and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?” What did science have to do with the fierce fight against the Tuskegee Machine and Jim Crow segregation? “What with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight?” Du Bois asked. Losing faith in scientific persuasion, he decided to “lead and inspire and decide.” He left Atlanta University in the summer of 1910 and moved to New York to become the founding editor of The Crisis, the organ of the recently founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 790

Categorization

• QUESTION: Du Bois’s abandonment of ‘scientific persuasion’ is a live challenge to rational-debate models of fighting racism — worth testing whether his shift supports or complicates Kendi’s idea-first skepticism.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how well-meaning people (Villard, liberal White publishers) enact assimilationism while Du Bois was pushed out of science-before-politics. — connects to: Cooperating with anti-Communist congressional committees destroyed leftist scholars’ academic standing — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 857; Du Bois held that only education and activism can lift the veil — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 281