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As founder and editor of The Crisis, the flagship publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois helped publicize the achievements of countless African American writers and other intellectuals. Through The Crisis, which enjoyed a readership of nearly 100,000 at its peak, Du Bois advanced his conviction that literature and art could enhance the image of African Americans. According to Du Bois, an elite group of Black leaders—his so-called “Talented Tenth”—would blaze a trail to a better life for those who came afterward.

In 1896, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. The Souls of Black Folk, his essay collection published in 1903, had such an immediate and intense impact on Black artists and thinkers that it was hailed as an instant classic.

“My earliest memories of written words,” Langston Hughes would later recall, “were those of W. E. B. Du Bois and the Bible.”

In his speeches and in his fiction, Du Bois urged young African Americans to combat racism with the written word. (Du Bois had pioneered the tactic in his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece.) Yet he remained something of an elitist: Du Bois supported only those artworks that depicted the abilities of his ideal Talented Tenth, and he denounced the frivolity of Black life that Claude McKay had depicted in Home to Harlem. Blues and jazz, Du Bois maintained, should be disregarded until they evolve into more “serious” art forms.

After scholar Alain Locke compiled the New Negro—heralding a younger generation of Black voices and establishing Harlem as a cultural center—Du Bois vented his ire about the state of the arts in Harlem. At the NAACP’s annual convention in June 1926, Du Bois delivered a lecture entitled “Criteria of Negro Art” in which he insisted that all relevant art should be propaganda. The lecture was later published in a special Crisis series, “The Negro in Art.”

I n t e r s e c t i o n s
	Langston Hughes dedicated his “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to Du Bois.
	He and Marcus Garvey labeled one another traitors.

Listen: W. E. B. Du Bois—A Recorded Autobiography

Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans? Now turn it around. Suppose you were to write a story and put in it the kind of people you know and like and imagine. You might get it published and you might not. And the “might not” is still far bigger than the “might.” The white publishers catering to white folk would say, “It is not interesting”—to white folk, naturally not. They want Uncle Toms, Topsies, good “darkies” and clowns. I have in my office a story with all the earmarks of truth. A young man says that he started out to write and had his stories accepted. Then he began to write about the things he knew best about, that is, about his own people. He submitted a story to a magazine which said, “We are sorry, changing the color of the characters and the locale and sent it under an assumed name with a change of address and it was accepted by the same magazine that had refused it, the editor promising to take anything else I might send in providing it was good enough.”

We have, to be sure, a few recognized and successful Negro artists; but the are not all those fit to survive or even a good minority. They are but the remnants of that ability and genius among us whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance. We black folk are not altogether peculiar in this. After all, in the world at large, it is only the accident, the remnant, that gets the chance to make the most of itself; but if this is true of the white world it is infinitely more true of the colored world. It is not simply the great clear tenor of Roland Hayes that opened the ears of America. We have had many voices of all kinds as fine as his and America was and is as deaf as she was for years to him. Then a foreign land heard Hayes and put its imprint on him and immediately America with all its imitative snobbery woke up. We approved Hayes because London, Paris, and Berlin approved him and not simply because he was a great singer.

Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of beauty, of the preservation of beauty, of the realization of beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artists in times gone by? First of all, he has used the truth—not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used goodness—goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor, and right—not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.

The apostle of beauty thus becomes the apostle of truth and right not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by truth and justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the truth or recognize an ideal of justice.

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

Reprinted with permission of Dr. David Graham Du Bois and the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation. From The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). Originally in Crisis, October 1926.

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