‘A Street for Du Bois’

There are many worthy and heroic African Americans who deserve a street named after them in New York City [Editorial, “A Street for Du Bois,” April 17, 2008]. Frederick Douglass stands as a giant among these. But I never thought I would see The New York Sun approving a street to be named after W.E.B. Du Bois.

It is certainly true that throughout his life he fought for civil rights. But simply to honor him without the ability to provide context for that honor is wrong. Du Bois may be one of the few individuals who praised both the Bolshevik Revolution and Nazi Germany.

Traveling to Germany after Hitler took power, Du Bois wrote that Hitler’s dictatorship was “absolutely necessary to put the state in order” and was based on a “developing body of thought” and was a new system standing between communism and capitalism.

As for Soviet Russia, he saw Stalin’s regime as the one place that did not discriminate against black people. In the 1950s, Du Bois chaired one of the major Communist front organizations and wrote that Stalin “was a great man: few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.”

Supporting Kim Il Sung in the Korean War, he wrote that “the things for which the North Koreans are fighting are exactly the things for which American fought in 1776.”

In Mao’s China he found “a sense of human nature free of its most hurtful and terrible meanness … simply inconceivable in the United States.”

He died renouncing the United States, and formally joining the American Communist Party. To honor Du Bois with a street name is to make him into an unadulterated hero. New Yorkers who pass the street will not know his full history.

RONALD RADOSH
Adjunct Fellow
The Hudson Institute

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