there was some stir. This is the scene, as depicted by DuBois:
“Diagne, the Senegales Frenchman who presided was beside himself with excitement after the resolutions were read; as under secretary of the French government; as ranking Negro of greater France, and perhaps as a successful investor in French Colonial enterprises he was undoubtedly in a difficult position. Possibly he was bound by actual promises to France and Belgium. His French was almost too swift for my ears, but his meaning was clear; he felt that the cause of the black man had been compromised by black American radicals; he especially denounced our demand for ‘the restoration of the ancient common ownership of the land in Africa’ as rank communism.”[378]
Dr. DuBois does not explain wherein it was not; but contents himself with declaring that Diagne used his power as chairman and prevented a vote, the question being referred to the French congress. Later in conversation with DuBois, Diagne declared that he had “only sought to prevent the assassination of a race.”
In his final analysis of the congress at Paris, DuBois says:
“France recognizes Negro equality, not only in theory but in practice, she has for the most part enfranchised her civilized Negro citizens. But what she recognizes is the equal right of her citizens black and white to exploit by modern industrial methods her laboring classes black and white; and the crying danger to black France is that its educated and voting leaders will join in the industrial robbery of Africa, rather than lead its masses to education and culture.”[379]
DuBois thought Diagne and Candace, while unwavering defenders of racial opportunity, education for and the franchise for the civilized, “curiously timid” when the industrial problems of Africa “were” approached. Well so was the Negro, Martin R. Delany, candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina in 1874. He had had advantages for studying the African problems which Dr. DuBois had possibly not enjoyed to the same degree. Delany in his younger days had been an African explorer and, even if he had not penetrated very deeply into “The Dark Continent,” had seen the African Negro in his lair. He and his younger co-laborer for reform in South Carolina, William Hannibal Thomas, ex-Union soldier from Ohio, as has been narrated, supported the candidacy of Judge Green for governor of South Carolina, in 1874, against the brilliant white Carpet-Bagger Daniel H. Chamberlain and his lieutenant, the even less reputable black Carpet-Bagger, R. B. Elliott. But while Thomas accepted Chamberlain, in 1876, as a changed man, with regard to Chamberlain’s accompaniment, Delany, who had been in South Carolina since 1865, eleven years to Thomas’s three, was still “curiously timid.”
DuBois later enlarged his experience by a trip to Africa and, before that, possibly may have been moved by the work of a French Negro scholar who had made some mark in the literary world and occasioned some stir in French colonial politics, just after the Pan-African congress. But upon his return from these in 1921 DuBois at once addressed himself to the consideration of President Harding’s Birmingham speech.
With a curious sympathy for the man, Harding, and a display of rank ingratitude to that white leader who had dared to do more for the Negro, than Harding thought became a white man, DuBois declared:
“The President made a braver, clearer utterance than Theodore Roosevelt ever dared to make or than William H. Taft or William McKinley ever dreamed of....
Mr. Harding meant that the American Negro must acknowledge that it was wrong and a disgrace for Booker T. Washington to dine with President Roosevelt.”[380]