‘The Wounded World’ probes one of W.E.B. Du Bois’ greatest regrets

Esteemed scholar W.E.B. Du Bois urged Black men to enlist in World War I. As a new book explores, the decision haunted him for the rest of his life. 

Civil rights leader and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois spent decades attempting to turn his painful reckoning with World War I into a definitive account of Black soldiers’ participation in the global conflict.

For more than 20 years after the war, Du Bois worked on a manuscript he titled “The Black Man in the Wounded World.” But while his considerable labor resulted in an ambitious and sprawling draft approaching 1,000 pages, he was unable to complete the project. Now, historian Chad L. Williams has written a first-rate intellectual history exploring the complicated reasons behind that failure in “The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War.”

By the time the war broke out in 1914, Du Bois was, in Williams’ words, “Black America’s foremost thinker and leader.” Author of the seminal 1903 essay collection “The Souls of Black Folk,” he was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and was a co-founder of the NAACP. He had a powerful platform as editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine, The Crisis.

Though a pacifist, Du Bois used his considerable influence to urge readers to support the war effort. In a July 1918 editorial, he wrote that “the colored race” ought to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” At the time of the editorial’s publication, Du Bois was being considered for a government appointment, as a captain of military intelligence. “Du Bois, who had just months earlier offered blistering criticisms of the government, now astonishingly offered The Crisis as a platform of wartime propaganda,” Williams writes.  

The editorial – which, Williams adds, “smelled of calculation and opportunism” – severely damaged its author’s reputation. Readers bristled at the idea that they should set aside their urgent concerns about lynchings, segregation, and rampant discrimination to announce themselves as loyal patriots. As Williams, who teaches history and African and African American studies at Brandeis University, notes, “The democracy that [President] Woodrow Wilson extolled and promised to make safe around the world felt like a distant reality” to Black Americans. 

In addition to jockeying for the military appointment, however, Du Bois sincerely believed that the sacrifices of Black troops overseas would hasten the cause of equality at home. He ended up becoming bitterly disillusioned by the racism Black soldiers and officers endured at the hands of their fellow Americans. He managed to get press credentials to travel to France, where he investigated unfounded rumors of Black officers’ incompetence. He heard from the men themselves about white officers’ constant attempts to humiliate and undermine them. His time in Europe convinced Du Bois that “a history of the Negro in this war done carefully and with scientific thoroughness is of vital importance to our future”; he added that “already forces to discredit our work are mobilizing.” 

Alarmed by explosions of racial violence in America in the period after the war, Du Bois immediately began work on his history. But his self-imposed deadlines would come and go as the enormity of the task weighed on him and other projects distracted him. He put out a call in The Crisis for Black veterans to send him their photographs and documents for use in the book. Many responded, mindful of his promise that their precious artifacts would be returned. As his project stretched over years, his materials became disorganized and he failed to fulfill that promise. Williams quotes letters from veterans fruitlessly beseeching Du Bois to return their belongings.

Through Du Bois’ correspondence and his periodic applications to foundations to help support his work, Williams is able to trace his subject’s changing historical understanding of the war, culminating in his eventual belief that, in the author’s words, World War I “held no redemptive value.” Instead of ushering in a new era of democracy, as he had hoped, Du Bois concluded that the war had, in Williams’ words, “reinforced white supremacy, imperialism, capitalist greed, and reckless militarism.” 

Du Bois had lived through another catastrophic world war by the time he died, at age 95, in 1963. Over the course of his long life, he produced dozens of works of nonfiction and fiction. Through dogged research, Williams has illuminated the mystery of the book that could not be written and that haunted its author to the end.