W.E.B. Du Bois and the Rhetoric of Social Change, 1897-1907: Attitude as Incipient Action

This study examines the social change rhetoric of scholar and civic activist W.E.B. Du Bois to understand the role, motivations, influences, and shortcomings of his message upon a shifting current of black thought during the late ninetieth and early twentieth-century. In this study, I focus upon Du Bois\u27 rhetorical aptitude in the building of his character, the emotional appeals made to his immediate audience, and the logical arguments and counter arguments that he publicly advanced in developing his program of parallel development. I contend that in providing an alternate narrative to the competing opinions of accommodation as a solution to the Negro problem, Du Bois\u27 social change rhetoric was more congruent to black\u27s and liberal white\u27s inclination of mutual social progress and provided a vision in which education and political resistance, in terms of both attitude and action drove blacks to seek to improve themselves as an ethnic group not merely a race. The study relies heavily on a strict neo-Aristotelian analysis with Burkeian undertones to explicate widely read and significant Du Boisian speeches, written publications, and rhetorical artifacts such as the 1897 speech and later converted pamphlet The Conservation of the Races, the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, the published 1901 review of Washington\u27s autobiography Up From Slavery On Booker T. Washington and Others, and the Souls of Black Folk published in 1903. Ultimately, the study argues that DuBois\u27 approach was rhetorically superior to others, namely Washington, insofar as Du Bois\u27 rhetoric exemplified a greater congruity between the message and his own life, the way in which the message was implemented, the degree to which he embodied it; and its appeal and deference to the opinions of a broader audience