Brandon Alston is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. He received his bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Religion from Haverford College and a master’s degree in Management from Wake Forest University. His current research examines the cultural foundations of surveillance practices that are reflect and reify the production and elaboration of racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized norms. brandonalston2020@u.northwestern.edu
I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater (1920)
Introduction
Introduction
Memory is not simply a way of holding on, it is a reencounter.
Imani Perry (2018)
Introduction
In an essay collection titled William Du Bois: Scholar, Humanitarian, Freedom Fighter produced by the Africa Institute of Russia, scholar G. B. Starushenko observed:
Philip Luke Sinitiere and Edward Carson: What is your first memory of hearing the name W. E. B. Du Bois? What of his books and writings did you find most meaningful before your work began with the W. E. B. DuBois Clubs?
To fiery Du Bois,
who,
in the midst of a war
against those who shot
when they didn’t see the whites
of their I’s,
wrote about the soul suppressed
in way his eyes were trained to see,
to train those who were blinded by
a lie.
To you who died before the March,
and paced your own determined march
to the beat of a different drummer,
to fight a present
that confined your army
to a past.
To you,
who bound the past
and seized the future
with the drumbeat of your pen,
Your words soared
like flying swords
across a multitude of sympathies,
broad enough to trouble the land
like the oceans in the hands
of the omnipotent
moving upon the face of the waters,
until light exposed
firmaments
dividing divisions
and yet
uniting difference
into dissidence
that shook and mixed the disciplines
into
broad sympathies.
He wanted to right
the couplets of Wheatley,
the folking of Hughes,
the dialect of Dunbar,
the preaching of Johnson,
when all the sounds were crowding out
the purpose of the sounding, so
he planted new criteria.
He wanted a rite
of passage so
the beauty would be seen despite
projected ugliness.
He would not be silenced, as
he brushed his voice
across the canvas of a zeitgeist
determined to predestine
a people as colored,
but uncolorful.
Swing low,
sweet chariot.
Come and go,
Sweet Harriet,
into a new millennium.
Coming for to carry memory,
night riding
to the homes
of those who dream of divvying
human rights
in a new reality
against anti-Christian
hospitality.
Unnatural,
when babies pitter patter
to paradise beyond parenting,
“so still he be
and he be there.”
Nothing natural
when time escapes
“not dead, but escaped,”
before the sands fall
or eulogy calls
to report a past
that lasts.
“There be a there,”
naturally,
lest sanity
pitter patter to paradise
with thee.