The Black Intellectual Tradition and the Myth of Objectivity
As Du Bois’s biographers have noted, that question became unavoidable on April 24, 1899. On that day, Du Bois walked along Mitchell Street towards downtown Atlanta. He carried a letter of introduction addressed to Joel Chandler Harris, an editor at the Atlanta Constitution. He also held a proposed editorial protesting the recent lynching of Sam Hose, a black farmhand accused of murdering his employer before raping the employer’s wife. Du Bois, familiar with the work of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, knew that the charges were false. He would expose the truth: that Hose killed his employer in self-defense and had not raped the wife. He would demonstrate through objective research that Hose’s only “crime” was being black in America.
