Amid the rising popularity of the Second Klan, and in support of an early book concept, W. E. B. Du Bois lectured at Willamette University 100 years ago on March 20th, 1923.
WU Collegian March 14th, 1923 |
The announcement hit the morning and afternoon city papers also. The morning paper simply churned the notice in the Collegian. The notice in the afternoon paper gave a different title to the lecture and seemed to be somewhat independently composed.
Afternoon paper March 19th, 1923 |
Morning paper March 20th, 1923 |
"The Black Man in the Wounded World," the title from the Collegian and the morning paper, is very likely the correct title. In a recent article, "In the Shadow of World War: Revisiting W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction," Chad Williams writes:
Du Bois, in fact, envisioned Black Reconstruction as the first of two consecutive books exploring the history and meaning of democracy for Black people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second book was a study of the participation of African Americans and other people of African descent in World War I, titled The Black Man and the Wounded World....Du Bois initially titled the book “The Black Man in the Revolution of 1914-1918.” He offered a detailed, albeit preliminary, survey in the June 1919 issue of The Crisis. The first indication of his revised name for the book appeared in early 1923, when he delivered a series of lectures on the Black experience in the World War under the title “The Black Man in the Wounded World.”
The book never got finished. (You can see an outline from 1936 here. I am sorry I did not find the lecture notice in time for the showing of the Buffalo Soldiers film last month!)
The afternoon paper's review the next day seems somewhat more engaged and less skeptical than the morning paper two days later, though they repeat phrases as if they were working off a common text.