W. E. B. Du Bois
Communism

Du Bois was bitterly disappointed that many of his colleagues – particularly the NAACP – did not support him during his 1951 PIC trial, whereas working class whites and blacks supported him enthusiastically. After the trial, Du Bois lived in Manhattan, writing and speaking, and continuing to associate primarily with leftist acquaintances. His primary concern was world peace, and he railed against military actions such as the Korean War, which he viewed as efforts by imperialist whites to maintain colored people in a submissive state.

In 1950, at the age of 82, Du Bois ran for U.S. Senator from New York on the American Labor Party ticket and received about 200,000 votes, or 4% of the statewide total. He continued to believe that capitalism was the primary culprit responsible for the subjugation of colored people around the world, and although he recognized the faults of the Soviet Union, he continued to uphold communism as a possible solution to racial problems. In the words of biographer David Lewis, Du Bois did not endorse communism for its own sake, but did so because "the enemies of his enemies were his friends". The same ambiguity characterized his opinions of Joseph Stalin: in 1940 he wrote disdainfully of the "Tyrant Stalin", but when Stalin died in 1953, Du Bois wrote a eulogy characterizing Stalin as "simple, calm, and courageous", and lauding him for being the "first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality".

The U.S. government prevented Du Bois from attending the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The conference was the culmination of 40 years of Du Bois's dreams – a meeting of 29 nations from Africa and Asia, many recently independent, representing most of the world's colored peoples. The conference celebrated those nations' independence as they began to assert their power as non-aligned nations during the Cold War. Du Bois praised the conference as "pan-colored" and believed it would have decisive and long-lasting influence.

After the United States Supreme Court ruled in Kent v. Dulles that the State Department could not deny passports to citizens who refused to sign affidavits that they were not communists, Du Bois and his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois immediately applied for passports. The two visited both the Soviet Union and China during a 1958 to 1959 trip which Du Bois described as the most significant journey of his life. Du Bois later wrote approvingly of the conditions in both countries. In 1959, Du Bois gave a speech at Peking University in which he advocated for increased ties between the black people in the United States and China because "China is colored and knows to what a colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner." Du Bois stated that Africa and China should stand together. The speech was reprinted and widely circulated in China, including through the People's Daily and the Peking Review.

Du Bois and Graham Du Bois were staying at the border between Sichuan and Tibet when the 1959 Tibetan uprising began. Describing the events in his Autobiography, Du Bois concluded, "The landholders and slave drivers and religious fanatics revolted against the Chinese and failed as they deserved to. Tibet has belonged to China for centuries. The Communists linked the two by roads and began reforms in landholding, schools and trade, which now move quickly."

Du Bois became incensed in 1961 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, a key piece of McCarthyist legislation which required communists to register with the government. To demonstrate his outrage, he joined the Communist Party in October 1961, at the age of 93. Around that time, he wrote: "I believe in communism. I mean by communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part." He asked Herbert Aptheker, a communist and historian of African American history, to be his literary executor.
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