DU BOIS AND MARX, DU BOIS AND MARXISM

W. E. B. Du Bois’s engagement with the thought of Karl Marx forms an important aspect of his intellectual biography, yet its contours crystallize explicitly only late in his written work, and its development prior to the 1930s remains insufficiently understood. In order to bring to light the mix of criticisms, reservations, ideals, and inspirations that shape this reception, this article explores its trajectory as exhaustively as the available documentation permits, beginning from Du Bois’s early training in economics as a university student, continuing through his increasing attention to socialism in the early 1900s and his embrace of Soviet communism in the 1920s, and culminating in the 1930s in his teaching of Marx at Atlanta University and the overtly Marxian positions he adopts in Black Reconstruction (1935).

“Shakespeare for All Times and Peoples”: Shakespeare at Spelman College and the Atlanta University Center

In this paper I explore what it means to require Shakespeare at a historically black college by looking at Adrienne Herndon's 1906 essay “Shakespeare at Atlanta University” and W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. Despite the frequent association of Shakespeare requirements with a conservative agenda, both Herndon and Du Bois imagine possibilities for powerful politics in the performance and study of Shakespeare. Reading these two texts together suggests that teaching, studying, and performing Shakespeare might still be powerful politics at black institutions.