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Title: Life Seen at Ninety
Author: Du Bois, W. E. B. [William Edward Burghardt] (1868-1963)
Author [introductory sentence]: Anonymous
Date of first publication: 17 February 1958 [National Guardian]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Labour Monthly, April 1958
   [London: The Trinity Trust]
Date first posted: 16 September 2014
Date last updated: 16 September 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1203

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

We have reproduced the _Labour Monthly_'s spelling of the
author's name: DuBois, rather than the usual Du Bois.






LIFE SEEN AT NINETY

W. E. B. DuBOIS

  Born February 23, 1868, the famous
  scholar and fighter for Negro rights,
  wrote this for his 90th birthday.


This is the month of my 90th birthday, I have lived to an age which is
increasingly distasteful to this nation.  Unless by 60 a man has gained
possession of enough to support himself without paid employment, he
faces the distinct possibility of starvation.  He is liable to lose his
job and to refusal if he seeks another.  At 70 he is frowned upon by
the Church and if he is foolish enough to survive until 90, he is often
regarded as a freak.  This is because in the face of human experience
the United States has discovered that Youth knows more than Age.  When
a man of 35 becomes president of a great institution of learning or
United States Senator or head of a multi-million dollar corporation, a
cry of triumph rings in the land.  Why?  To pretend that 15 years bring
of themselves more wisdom and understanding than 50 is a contradiction
in terms.

Given a fool, a hundred years will not make him wise; but given an
idiot, he will not be wise at 20.  Youth is more courageous than age
because it knows less.  Age is wiser than youth because it knows more.
This all mankind has affirmed from Egypt and China 5,000 years ago to
Britain and Germany today.  The United States knows better.  I would
have been hailed with approval if I had died at 50.  At 75 my death was
practically requested.  If living does not give value, wisdom and
meaning to life, then there is no sense in living at all.  If immature
and inexperienced men rule the earth, then the earth deserves what it
gets: the repetition of age-old mistakes, and wild welcome for what men
knew a thousand years ago was disaster.  I do not apologise for living
long.  High on the ramparts of this blistering hell of life, I sit and
see the Truth.  I look it full in the face, and I will not lie about
it, neither to myself nor to the world.  I see my country as what
Cedric Belfrage aptly characterises as a 'Frightened Giant', afraid of
the Truth, afraid of Peace.  I see a land which is degenerating and
faces decadence, unless it has sense enough to turn about and start
back.

It is no sin to fail.  It is the habit of man.  It is disaster to go on
when you know you are going wrong.  I judge this land not merely by
statistics or reading lies agreed upon by historians.  I judge by what
I have seen, heard and lived through for near a century.  There was a
day when the world rightly called Americans honest even if crude;
earning their living by hard work; telling the truth no matter whom it
hurt; and going to war only in what they believed a just cause after
nothing else seemed possible.  Today we are lying, stealing and
killing.  We call all this by finer names: Advertising, Free
Enterprise, and National Defence.  But names in the end deceive no one;
today we use science to help us deceive our fellows; we take wealth
that we never earned and we are devoting all our energies to kill,
maim, and drive insane, men, women and children who dare refuse to do
what we want done.

No nation threatens us.  We threaten the world.  Our President says
that Foster Dulles is the wisest man he knows.  If Dulles is wise, God
help our fools--the fools who rule us.  They know why we fail--these
military masters of men--we haven't taught our children mathematics and
physics.  No, it is because we have not taught our children to read and
write or to behave like human beings and not like hoodlums....

Criticism is treason, and treason or the hint of treason testified to
by hired liars may be punished by shameful death.  I saw Ethel
Rosenberg lying beautiful in her coffin beside her mate.  I tried to
stammer futile words above her grave.  But not over graves should we
shout this failure of justice, but from the housetops of the world.
Honest men may and must criticise America: describe how she has ruined
her democracy, sold out her jury system, and led her seats of justice
astray.  The only question that may arise is whether this criticism is
based on truth, not whether it may be openly expressed.  What is truth?
What can it be when the President of the United States, guiding the
nation, stands up in public and says: '_The world also thinks of us as
a land which has never enslaved anyone_'.

Everyone who heard this knew it was not true.  Yet here stands the
successor of George Washington who bought, owned, and sold slaves; the
successor of Abraham Lincoln who freed four million slaves after they
had helped him win victory over the slave-holding South.  And so far as
I have seen, not a single periodical, not even a Negro weekly, has
dared challenge or even criticise that extraordinary falsehood.  This
is what I call decadence.  It could not have happened 50 years ago.  In
the day of our fiercest controversy we have not dared thus publicly to
silence opinion.  I have lived through disagreement, vilification, and
war and war again.  But in all that time, I have never seen the right
of human beings to think so challenged and denied as today.  The day
after I was born, Andrew Johnson was impeached.  He deserved punishment
as a traitor to the poor Southern whites and poorer freedmen.  Yet
during his life, no one denied him the right to defend himself.  A
half-century ago, in 1910, I tried to state and carry into realisation
unpopular ideas against a powerful opposition--in the white South, in
the reactionary North, and even among my own people.  I found my
thought being misconstrued and I planned an organ of propaganda--_The
Crisis_--where I would be free to say what I believed.

This was no easy sailing.  My magazine reached but a fraction of the
nation.  It was bitterly attacked and once the government suppressed
it.  But in the end I maintained a platform of radical thinking on the
Negro question which influenced many minds.  War and depression ended
my independence of thought and forced me to return to teaching, but
with the certainty that I had at least started a new line of belief and
action.

As a result of my work and that of others, the Supreme Court began to
restore democracy in the South and finally outlawed discrimination in
public services based on colour.  This caused rebellion in the South
which the nation is afraid to meet.  The Negro stands bewildered and
attempt is made by appointments to unimportant offices and trips abroad
to bribe him into silence.  His art and literature cease to function.
He is scared.  Only the children like those at Little Rock stand and
fight.  The Yale Sophomore who replaced a periodical of brains by a
book of pictures concealed in advertisements, proposed that America
rule the world.  This failed because we could not rule ourselves.  But
Texas to the rescue, as Lyndon Johnson proposes that America take over
outer space.  Somewhere beyond the moon there must be sentient
creatures rolling in inextinguishable laughter at the antics of our
earth.  We tax ourselves into poverty and crime so as to make the rich
richer and bring more crime and poverty.  We know the cause of this: it
is to permit our rich business interests to stop socialism and to
prevent the ideals of communism from ever triumphing on earth.  The aim
is impossible.

Socialism progresses and will progress.  All we can do is to silence
and jail its promoters.  I believe in socialism, I seek a world where
the ideals of communism will triumph--to each according to his need;
from each according to his ability.  For this I will work as long as I
live.  And I still live.






[End of Life Seen at Ninety, by W. E. B. Du Bois]
