The Black Worker and World Peace – Black Reconstruction Painting, Part I

The initiative for this project is to concretize, and take seriously the contribution that W.E.B Du Bois has given to world history, and the struggle for world peace. I have based this painting on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. I hope to make a series on this topic but this first painting primarily considers the First Chapter of the book, “The Black Worker.” In a time when art and the public intellect are not taken seriously as they should, Black Reconstruction is a basis for the future human being. 

This project has both been quantitative and qualitative. As a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation I have studied, alongside everyone else, Black Reconstruction about three or four times. In my own personal studies I have begun to refer to this magnum opus as a guide throughout philosophical, historical, and ideological issues. 

These studies have led me to think in creative ways. My imagination has always been keen to run wild, so I enjoy the interwoven empathy that Du Bois has alongside his consideration of concrete fact. Why this is important is because Black Reconstruction is a work that can inspire an epic, bodies of art in theater, music, dance. This was taking place with August Wilson, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte; and many others deserve the roll call. They are my inheritance. 

As Du Bois also instigates with his writing, I hope to showcase a metaphorical narrative based upon what Du Bois calls the relationship or effect of freeing the Black proletariat to democracy in America. 

There were three stages of making the project: the study, meditation, and synthesis. The sections I took from the book are quotes below; then I sat and thought about the quotes, and thought about this time, and listened to jazz, in particular John Coltrane.

The impetus of a narrative is because I am a creative person, and metaphor and allegory allows me to explain emotion and dialectics. 

The narrative in the painting starts with W.E.B. Du Bois telling the story of the Black proletariat at the left hand side, with students cramming to come in the door to hear Du Bois. Those who are listening are Soong Ching Ling, Sekou Toure, Paul Robeson, and our celebrated Henry Winston.

The Story continues where white individuals are reading about the Emancipation Proclamation on a newspaper, amidst a crucifixion, or lynching, of a man by the Ku Klux Klan. Slaves are seen praying over the body of a lamb which represents Jesus. In front of a lamb, I show a slave and a white KKK man with a whip. Both are connected by a chain that is tied to the two men, and the end of the chain ends at the body of the lamb. Three-way chain. These slaves soon will run by the desk of Abraham Lincoln writing the Emancipation Proclamation. Behind Lincoln stands Edward Ruffin, a confederate soldier who fired the first shot of the Civil War and unbeknownst to a southern oligarch, ironically, as Du Bois puts it, freed the slaves (Chapter 4). 

Next, the Slaves are found running by Lincoln to a slave block, where they are found amongst interracial relating white men and women and Black proletarian women and men. The scene flows into an auction, and could you imagine if one of the slaves, instead of being sold away from his family and people, was instead, with his family, running to the armies of freedom? As a slave is shown, will the Black Proletariat give away the loaves of the tribes of Egypt, its 13th being Shabazz, or use civilization to make freedom real? The narrative ends here and the question I put forward is how the struggle for freedom is ultimately a question of how the American people can become completely one people. 

This historical and metaphorical narrative is intertwined with the revolutionary appeal, showcasing the present question of the unity of the American people—and the core of the American people as the Black proletariat—with the Afro-Asiatic Reconstitution and world peace. The struggle against slavery that formed into the Civil Rights Movement leads to the movement for peace, at home and amongst the world’s peoples. This is why I consider people like Ibrahim Traoré, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping. The Belt and Road and Highway 80 represent two different but parallel things. Highway 80 is found in Alabama and the marches that occurred there were many but part of the vein of the Civil Rights Movement. The Belt and Road Initiative represents a new world system based upon coexistence and peace. That is why alongside these symbols I showcase people like Gandhi, Rev. James Lawson, Ms. Coretta Scott King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and Ms. Diane Nash.

I completed this first painting with Ms. Diane Nash holding the Immortal Child, for the struggle for freedom is the struggle for a future for the people, for peace, and world civilization.

Selected passages from “The Black Worker”—Chapter 1 of Black Reconstruction:

“Easily the most dramatic episode in American history was the sudden move to free four million Black slaves in an effort to stop a great civil war, to end forty years of bitter controversy, and to appease the moral sense of civilization.”

“So long as slavery was a matter of race and color, it made the conscience of the nation uneasy and continually affronted its ideals. The men who wrote the Constitution sought by every evasion, and almost by subterfuge, to keep recognition of slavery out of the basic form of the new government. They founded their hopes on the prohibition of the slave trade, being sure that without continual additions from abroad, this tropical people would not long survive, and thus the problem of slavery would disappear in death. They miscalculated, or did not foresee the changing economic world. It might be more profitable in the West Indies to kill the slaves by overwork and import cheap Africans; but in America without a slave trade, it paid to conserve the slave and let him multiply. When, therefore, manifestly the Negroes were not dying out, there came quite naturally new excuses and explanations. It was a matter of social condition. Gradually these people would be free; but freedom could only come to the bulk as the freed were transplanted to their own land and country, since the living together of black and white in America was unthinkable. So again the nation waited, and its conscience sank to sleep.”

“As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace. As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened society; but as an educated property holder, a successful mechanic or even professional man, he more than threatened slavery. He contradicted and undermined it. He must not be. He must be suppressed, enslaved, colonized. And nothing so bad could be said about him that did not easily appear as true to slaveholders.”

“What was this industrial system for which the South fought and risked life, reputation and wealth and which a growing element in the North viewed first with hesitating tolerance, then with distaste and finally with economic fear and moral horror? What did it mean to be a slave? It is hard to imagine it today. We think of oppression beyond all conception: cruelty, degradation, whipping and starvation, the absolute negation of human rights; or on the contrary, we may think of the ordinary worker the world over today, slaving ten, twelve, or fourteen hours a day, with not enough to eat, compelled by his physical necessities to do this and not to do that, curtailed in his movements and his possibilities; and we say, here, too, is a slave called a ‘free worker,’ and slavery is merely a matter of name.”

“But there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual. It was without doubt worse in these vital respects than that which exists today in Europe or America. Its analogue today is the yellow, brown and black laborer in China and India, in Africa, in the forests of the Amazon; and it was this slavery that fell in America.”

“Thus human slavery in the South pointed and led in two singularly contradictory and paradoxical directions—toward the deliberate commercial breeding and sale of human labor for profit and toward the intermingling of black and white blood. The slaveholders shrank from acknowledging either set of facts but they were clear and undeniable.”

“In this vital respect, the slave laborer differed from all others of his day: he could be sold; he could, at the will of a single individual, be transferred for life a thousand miles or more. His family, wife and children could be legally and absolutely taken from him. Free laborers today are compelled to wander in search for work and food; their families are deserted for want of wages; but in all this there is no such direct barter in human flesh. It was a sharp accentuation of control over men beyond the modern labor reserve or the contract coolie system.”

“But even the poor white, led by the planter, would not have kept the black slave in nearly so complete control had it not been for what may be called the Safety Valve of Slavery; and that was the chance which a vigorous and determined slave had to run away to freedom.”

“The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free—were given schools and the right to vote—what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.”

“And of all human development, ancient and modern, not the least singular and significant is the philosophy of life and action which slavery bred in the souls of black folk. In most respects its expression was stilted and confused; the rolling periods of Hebrew prophecy and biblical legend furnished inaccurate but splendid words. The subtle folk-lore of Africa, with whimsy and parable, veiled wish and wisdom; and above all fell the anointing chrism of the slave music, the only gift of pure art in America.”

“It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power.”

“That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry—shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name; spawning the world’s raw material and luxury—cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil, fibers, spices, rubber, silks, lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather—how shall we end the list and where? All these are gathered up at prices lowest of the low, manufactured, transformed and transported at fabulous gain; and the resultant wealth is distributed and displayed and made the basis of world power and universal dominion and armed arrogance in London and Paris, Berlin and Rome, New York and Rio de Janeiro.”

“Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.”