The 2008 Charles H. Thompson Lecture-Colloquium Presentation: From Du Bois to Obama--The Education of Peoples of African Descent in the United States in the 21st Century.

The 2008 Charles H. Thompson Lecture-Colloquium Presentation Dr. Lee's lecture discussed several points of similarities between W. E. B. Du Bois and President Barack Obama. These similarities in background, education, and in their ideas on politics and power are historically connected with implications for educating Black peoples through consciousness. When I decided on this title, I took the bold move of writing the introduction before the November 4th, 2008 election, because of my deep faith that we would be making history. We have this momentous occasion in the history of our nation and of Black people standing on the shoulders of proud men, women, and children, who as Dr. King would have said, carved out of a mountain of despair, a roadmap for us. Malcolm X and John Henrik Clark told us that history would reward our inquiries. The question before us today is how do we build the bridge from our history to the wide world literally, which is now open to our children? While African American history broadly offers much relevance for today, I will focus my comments through the lens of a wise and scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, who lived from the end of the Civil War, through Jim Crow, the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and through the first victory against colonialism with the independence of Ghana. It is most appropriate to understand our journey and challenge in the road from Du Bois to Obama, for the two men have much in common. Du Bois was the first Black person to earn the Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1895. Obama attended Harvard Law School and was the first Black to head the prestigious Harvard Law Review. Both men's lives reflect deep connections between the U. S. and Africa. Du Bois left the U. S. to live in Ghana, West Africa where he was naturalized as a citizen in 1963 at the age of 95, which is also where he died and is buried today. Obama's father was from Kenya and has direct descendants in Kenya. Most African Americans who are descendants of those who were enslaved during the African Holocaust cannot identify their direct ancestors from the continent because family lineages were destroyed through the horrors of that Holocaust. These two men, each in their own unique way, have been able to live in multiple worlds to which most of us do not have access. In 1892, Du Bois attended the University of Berlin and traveled extensively in Europe. During his long political career, Du Bois was actively engaged in the Pan African conferences of 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945, which forged long-standing relationships among African, African American, and Caribbean activists who were struggling against racism and colonialism (such giants as George Padmore of Trinidad, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya were at the 1945 conference; Adi, Sherwood, & Padmore, 1995). Obama, having been raised by his White mother and grandparents, has had access to two social worlds, working-class Whites in Kansas and Hawaii, later living in Indonesia, coming to the Black community on the Southside of Chicago, and as an adult making contact with his biological family in Kenya (Obama, 1995). While Obama is bi-racial, Du Bois wrote about the French and Dutch lineage on his father's side of the family, the Du Boises, although he had no direct contact growing up with that side of his family ( Lewis, 1993). However, his physical features did become an issue at times in his life, a story not uncommon in the complex world of within the U. S. Du Bois talked about not marrying a young woman with whom he had a relationship because of her light complexion, which might lead others to think, as he put it, that he had married outside his race. In addition to these biographical points of comparison, I am most interested in similarities in their ideas about politics and power in relation to peoples of African descent. This may seem ironic to some since Du Bois is clearly known as a race man while Obama has positioned himself in the presidential campaign as an example of someone of a post-racial world. …