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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
Some younger Negro writers say, “What is the use of your fighting and complaining? Do the great thing and the reward is there.” And many colored people are all too eager to follow this advice; especially those who are weary of the eternal struggle along the color line, who are afraid to fight and to whom the money of philanthropists and the alluring publicity are subtle and deadly bribes. To them I say that the Beauty of Truth and Freedom which shall some day be our heritage is not in our hands yet, and that we ourselves must not fail to realize.
William E. B. DuBoisSTRANGE as it might sound, William E. B. DuBois had more in common aesthetically with Sheriff Mordecai Manuel Noah than DuBois had with Alain Locke. Every one of Noah's plays, which were as stiff and as dreadful as DuBois's own, had politics in mind. Yet had Noah had to function during the DuBois Era of Protest Drama (1913–32), the first of five periods of the Black Arts School, he would have been plagued by conniption. Before dying, however, he would have published the nastiest editorials possible. The fun Noah did make of William Brown's African Company would have been nothing compared to what he would have said about DuBois's pageant, The Star of Ethiopia (1913), which had African peoples inventing everything from fire to the Sabbath. DuBois's every effort to forge a Pan-African perspective, to fashion community links, and to develop drama classifications would certainly have been lampooned.
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