Du Bois,W. E. Burghardt. Typed letter signed to Miss Helen Buckmiller, 17 November 1920

DU BOIS, WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT 

TYPED LETTER SIGNED ("W. E. B. DU BOIS") TO MISS HELEN BUCKMILLER, DISCUSSING "THE ENORMITY OF THE LYNCHING PROBLEM," THE GREAT MIGRATION, AND LIBERIA

1½ pages (8½ x 5½ in.; 216 x 140 mm) on his personalized The Crisis letterhead, New York, New York, 17 November 1920, with the original typed envelope; folds, light handling wear. 

"The basic difficulty is that this is a nation of murderers, that human life is cheap and that it is difficult to arouse the conscience of the nation on the subject.

Writing to a Miss Helen Buckmiller of Dayton, Ohio, as the editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois devotes much of this letter to the organizations' efforts to draw attention to the "enormity of the lynching problem." The NAACP had been founded in 1909 by a diverse group of advocates that included Du Bois. In addition advocating for federal anti-lynching legislation, the organization concentrated its efforts on fighting Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. This activism came at a time of great urgency, with some 4,000 African Americans murdered between 1877 and 1950 in the south alone.

In response to the economic and social conditions that bred such violence, some six million people relocated from the rural south between 1916 and 1970, in a movement that would come to be known as the "Great Migration" or "Great Black Migration." Writing to Miss Buckmiller about this phenomenon, Du Bois says: "Migration from parts of the south where lynching prevails is going on all the time ... If we had more funds and organization a spectacular depopulation at any locality where a lynching takes place would be excellent. But here we would have to contend against the whole police force of the state and county and would probably be arrested for promoting migration without a license." This appears to have been part of a larger exchange with Buckmiller, and Du Bois would publish a letter of hers in his January 1921 issue where she echoes the idea of migration and economic deprivation as strategic response to lynchings.  

Turning his attention to a discussion of Pan-Africanism generally, using Liberia as a specific example, Du Bois writes: "There is today practically no place where a small and weak band of people could take refuge and be safe from the aggressions of the militant white world... There are plenty of places where the colored people of United States could and gradually would go, the Highlands of East Africa, Haiti, etc., but each place of such sort is dominated and threatened by some white imperialism which seeks colored slaves."

A powerful letter from one of the founders of the NAACP, underscoring the life and death stakes of the civil rights movement.