Baltimore Heritage, Inc. Part 2: The W.E.B. DuBois House

“W.E.B DuBois had a house in Baltimore?” That was my surprised response to Molly Rick’s suggestion of the site as one of the five I would write about for the Baltimore Heritage, Inc. website as part of my internship. I’d always associated DuBois with Philadelphia, New York, and Atlanta, all places where he spent many years studying and writing, and sometimes teaching. And it seemed odd that such a titan of civil rights, Black, and intellectual history had lived in Baltimore for at least ten years and that I’d never heard about it in my twenty of living here. I suspect that at least part of the reason that it was under the radar that DuBois had a home in Baltimore from 1939 to 1950 is that the location had little, if anything to do with his professional and activist life. DuBois was known for his sociological studies on Black life in Philadelphia, his prodigious output, including one of his most famous works, “Black Reconstruction in America,” and his teaching life are associated with his time at Atlanta University, and his civil rights and political work, especially with the NAACP are connected to his life in New York City. In fact, while he was living in Baltimore he also had a home in New York. In fact, DuBois’ choice to have a home in Baltimore during that period was personal, it was in order to be close to his daughter, Yolande, who taught in Baltimore city public schools for decades. I was presented with a number of challenges in this assignment. First, there was so much information! My pieces are limited to about eight hundred words each, which is fairly short. It was daunting to confront how to cover a long life with so many different events, changes, publications, moves, and influences on other people and on the United States itself in less than one thousand words! I felt the pressure of having to define a life that was so important and yet that many don’t know about to the public. If I was writing for an academic audience, I could at least assume certain prior information. Here, in order to do what I was meant to, I practically had to start from scratch. In my work for Baltimore Heritage overall, and not just on this topic, I felt a responsibility for my beloved city, which is so often seen as pathological, neglected, and a joke, to show the brilliance in its history and its inhabitants, its overall importance in the history of the country. Perhaps this is not the most objective outlook to have, but I don’t think that public history (and don’t even get me started on academic history) can or even should pretend to be objective. As public historians, our responsibility is to the public, whether we are bringing it information, gathering information from it, or creating knowledge together. That does not mean burying histories that are unpleasant from the public eye. In fact the opposite is true. In order to be respectful of and responsible to a community, the truth about that community must come first. My motivation was related to the importance of telling less known truths about a community, like that the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century chose to make the little Northeast neighborhood of Morgan Park his home. And in telling that truth there arose a conduit into talking about truths on a grander scale—for example the history of civil rights activism, the historiographical debates (ongoing!) about Reconstruction, and how and why Baltimore has and hasn’t changed over the decades. I had to make hard decisions about what to include. My first draft was twice as long as the allotted word limit. As both Cicero and Mark Twain observed, writing shorter pieces is more difficult than writing longer ones. Cutting it meant getting rid of information that I found fascinating, like DuBois’ daughter’s very short lived marriage to Countee Cullen, major poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and details about his falling out with the NAACP. I also had to find out the best way to frame the story—to begin and end it in Baltimore, although it DuBois’ life is not a Baltimore story. The work of other public history institutions, particularly the Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights museum, helped to flesh out elements of the story, the walks DuBois took with Carl Murphy, that were not available in newspapers or other written resources. I hope that what was resulted was accessible, honest, and respectful of both Baltimore and DuBois. Let me know what you think! https://explore.baltimoreheritage.org/items/show/705