1 “Democracy” meant freedom from want, freedom from oppression, freedom from imperialism (socialism and self-determination). It makes “abolition-democracy” into a purely American affair, downplaying the global significance of abolition and the global meanings “democracy” took on for Du Bois.
However, this tendency often separates the idea of “abolition-democracy” from the concrete history of abolitionism, which produced it, and from later socialist and anti-colonial revolutions, which were its heirs. Scholars have appropriated Du Bois’ term “abolition-democracy” to articulate a vision for interracial democracy in the United States, of the kind that briefly flickered during the Radical phase of Reconstruction. The profound role of abolitionism in the making of twentieth-century black revolutionary traditions has been little explored, sometimes misunderstood. Du Bois’ creative sense of class struggle, his Leninist understanding of imperialism and its global color line-all evolved out of his reflections on abolitionists’ battle for the uplift of the black worker in an era of consolidating imperialism. Just as importantly, the deeds and ideas of abolitionists, which Du Bois studied, absorbed, and never rejected, provided the very foundations for his mature Marxist and anti-imperialist convictions. As an activist, Du Bois took up the unfinished tasks of abolitionism, criticizing that movement’s limitations, but always looking up in reverential awe to the antislavery apostles, from John Brown to generations of slave rebels across the Americas. He meditated upon the significance of abolition for world history. As both academic and as “master of propaganda,” Du Bois likely wrote more on antislavery fighters, and the system they stood up against, than on any other subject.
Abolitionist thinking helped educate Du Bois as a young scholar. Du Bois remained of and in “the abolitionist tradition,” that is, the political and intellectual tradition arising out of the struggles of slaves and their allies to overthrow America’s despotic chattel empire.
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