Held in Checks: Du Bois, Johnson, and the Figurative Work of Financial Forms

This essay investigates the personal check as it appears in two novels, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and James Weldon Johnson's he Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. In these novels, checks move money between a wealthy white individual and an African American; a close analysis of the check's form and function shows how Du Bois and Johnson revise mid-nineteenth-century connections among feeling, money, and social change by exploiting, rather than challenging, the abstraction of this financial form. The checks in Du Bois and Johnson present the logic of reparations. In doing so, the checks make a material difference in the lives of black beneficiaries, tying them to the flow of money made possible by finance capitalism, a flow from which most African Americans were excluded. At the same time, the check's figuration of the drawer's emotional motivations salvages the potential for progressive individual actions in those whose self-interest limits their willingness to act decisively for the benefit of others.

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“Nothing Special to Offer the Negro”: Revisiting the “‘Debsian View’ of the Negro Question”

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547908000252 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 74 (1) ◽

pp. 212-224 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

William P. Jones

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

Class Struggle ◽

The United States ◽

Close Reading ◽

Historical Significance ◽

Du Bois ◽

History Of ◽

Over Time

AbstractSince the early twentieth century Eugene V. Debs and his essay “The Negro in the Class Struggle” have been cited repeatedly as examples of an alleged indifference among white radicals to African Americans and the historical significance of racism in the United States. A close reading of the essay reveals just the opposite. Not only did Debs support African Americans' struggle for equality, he believed that it was critical to the realization of America's democratic promise. That position alienated him from other white Socialists, but it won the admiration of African American radicals including W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. This essay examines how Debs's essay came to be interpreted as a capitulation to racism and, over time, alleged indifference to African Americans and the significance of racism in the history of the United States.

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Rights Through Knowledge and Reason

The Progressives' Century ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300204841.003.0015 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Frymer

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Labor Market ◽

African Americans ◽

Progressive Era ◽

Black Labor ◽

American Life ◽

Department Of Labor ◽

Du Bois ◽

Societal Problems

This chapter focuses on the work of African American activists in the Department of Labor (DOL) during the Progressive era, and on two men in particular: W. E. B. Du Bois and George E. Haynes. The labor problem was in many ways at the heart of the Progressive project, and the establishment of the DOL and its forerunner, the Bureau of Labor, represented an early victory. Like many of these early institutional victories, the DOL was not a huge success. Its power was at the margins, and it rarely used such power for anything more than conciliation and tepid reformism. In the area of race, the DOL did little to disturb a racially fragmented labor market dominated by white employers and by unions that discriminated against African Americans. But the department, following the Progressive spirit of believing in the power of knowledge, science, and expertise to expose societal problems and begin the process of solving them, participated in a quite wide-ranging examination of black labor in American life. Some of this was through issued reports. Du Bois wrote three of these reports for the Bureau of Labor in the years around 1900. In addition, the DOL created the Division of Negro Economics, headed by George Haynes.

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African Intellectuals in the Belly of the Beast: Migration, Identity, and the Politics of Exile

African Issues ◽

10.1017/s1548450500006351 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 70-75

Author(s):

F. Njubi Nesbitt

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

African Americans ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

The West ◽

Du Bois ◽

Talented Tenth ◽

American Intellectual ◽

Class Status ◽

African Intellectuals

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of Africans in America, he was reflecting on the complex identities of the “talented tenth,” the educated minority of a minority like himself who felt alienated because of their awareness that their qualifications meant little in a racist society. Though written in reference to the African American intellectual, this duality, this sense of “two-ness,” is even more acute for African exiles today because they have fewer social and cultural ties to the West than African Europeans and African Americans. The exiles are much closer to the African “soul” Du Bois referred to and are less prepared for the pervasive racism and second-class status that they have to overcome in the West.

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Shifting the Historical Lens: Early Economic Empowerment Among African Americans

Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work ◽

10.18084/1084-7219.1.1.25 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 25-37 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

N. Yolanda Burwell

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Social Work ◽

African Americans ◽

People Of Color ◽

Historical Case Study ◽

Historical Case ◽

Social Work Educators ◽

Self Interest ◽

Welfare Agencies

The use of economic clout by poor and middle class African Americans to secure social work professionals and foster social change is the subject of a historical case study. By collecting pennies, nickels and dimes from “friends,” African Americans paid the salaries and expenses of the first “colored” workers in public welfare agencies in segregated and predominately rural North Carolina. One African American social worker was identified in the state in 1925. Four years later, twenty six African American social workers were employed in county welfare offices. This study concludes with urging a “raised consciousness” about people of color who act in their own self-interest in small, but significant ways. Social work educators are urged to teach students about people of color as “philanthropists and economic producers.”

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Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of DNA and RNA

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100152148 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 47 ◽

pp. 34-35

Author(s):

Patricia G. Arscott ◽

Gil Lee ◽

Victor A. Bloomfield ◽

D. Fennell Evans

Keyword(s):

Molecular Structures ◽

Inorganic Materials ◽

Resolving Power ◽

Scanning Tunneling ◽

Tunneling Microscopy ◽

Form And Function ◽

Dna And Rna ◽

Calf Thymus ◽

And Function ◽

The Relationship

STM is one of the most promising techniques available for visualizing the fine details of biomolecular structure. It has been used to map the surface topography of inorganic materials in atomic dimensions, and thus has the resolving power not only to determine the conformation of small molecules but to distinguish site-specific features within a molecule. That level of detail is of critical importance in understanding the relationship between form and function in biological systems. The size, shape, and accessibility of molecular structures can be determined much more accurately by STM than by electron microscopy since no staining, shadowing or labeling with heavy metals is required, and there is no exposure to damaging radiation by electrons. Crystallography and most other physical techniques do not give information about individual molecules.We have obtained striking images of DNA and RNA, using calf thymus DNA and two synthetic polynucleotides, poly(dG-me5dC)·poly(dG-me5dC) and poly(rA)·poly(rU).

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