Du Bois Was a Marxist. Aye. So?

W.E.B. Du Bois at 82 (cropped), New York, NY, 1950. (Keystone/Getty Images). Cropped photo qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.

In recent months, a few people I know have brought up the fact that at least since the mid-1930s, the great W. E. B. Du Bois had professed himself a Marxist. The poet E. Ethelbert Miller, one of my co-panelists at a talk a couple of months back, made a point of interrogating notions of Blackness with the idea that Black activists were/are afraid to identity Du Bois as a Marxist. Certainly by the time Du Bois broke free from the…