Cedric de Leon Challenges Honors Students to Continue the Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois at the 2022 Honors Plenary Lecture
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Students, faculty, staff, and other guests gathered in the Student Union Ballroom on Thursday, October 6 for the 2022 Honors Plenary Lecture. The inspiring lecture delivered by professor of sociology and labor studies Cedric de Leon, was received by over 350 attendees.
After a warm welcome and introduction by Dean Castañeda, de Leon took to the podium to deliver the Plenary Lecture titled: Black Souls or Black Labor? A Duboisian Vision for the US Labor Movement.
To begin the lecture, de Leon explained and then rejected the common knowledge and perceptions of W.E.B. Du Bois that stem from the first chapter of his famous 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk.
"This pared-down, fortune-cookie version of Du Bois decontextualizes Souls from the broad way that he visualized Black people — which was not about individuals, but systems, not about psychology, but sociology," he said.
De Leon continued by recounting the early life of Du Bois and how his upbringing in Great Barrington, MA, during the nineteenth century significantly influenced his life’s work. Specifically, de Leon cited Du Bois’ own words as he experienced work as a managing timekeeper:
W.E.B. Du Bois in his class of 1884 photo at Great Barrington High School
I was learning something of industry, I began to see workers as human beings, and to know how hard a task stone-cutting by hand was. I began to realize what discharge from a job meant when there was no union and no funds for supporting the unemployed.
Du Bois wrote.
After summarizing the early life and beginnings of Du Bois as a sociologist, de Leon critiqued existing interpretations of the activist’s work, including theories that Du Bois was mostly a scholar of urban sociology, and other outlandish theories suggesting that he was an elitist.
“For different reasons then, each of the foregoing approaches cut out, downplay, or delay Du Bois’ interest in race, labor, and capitalism,” explained de Leon.
“...The upshot of his presentation was that the economic system which had married northern industrial capital to southern slavery created certain economies that laws would not and could not stop,” he continued.
De Leon analyzed the milestone works from the times Du Bois was a researcher at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, his position as head of the Atlanta School of Sociology, and other scholarly positions. In his lecture, De Leon argued that there are “three independent theoretical claims” that present Du Bois’ systematic understanding of labor:
“The first is a system of capitalism that is enabled by nothing less than enslaved and colonized people. The second is the importance of racialized systems of labor control, such as debt and competition. The third, which follows from the other two, is that the vanguard of liberation from this system must be Black labor,” de Leon said.
After concluding his analysis of Du Bois’ work, de Leon moved to what the vision in those efforts meant for the many Honors undergraduates in the audience. He solemnly offered that Du Bois’ efforts have not yet been fully realized — as vestiges of white supremacy still permeate in the U.S. labor movement, political sphere, and overall daily life.
He encouraged the students to fulfill that vision with this quote from Du Bois:
W.E.B. Du Bois receiving honorary degree on his 95th birthday, University of Ghana, Accra
Surely, there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the veil and set the prison free. Not for me, I shall die in bonds, but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning.
To conclude, de Leon presented attending students with his own inspiring and thought-provoking question.
My question to our students is this, can we make the morning come? In western Massachusetts, Du Bois witnessed the problems of our economic system, and devoted his life to changing it. What will you do in western Massachusetts, in the flower of your youth?
The Plenary Lecture was widely well-received among both students and faculty attending.
“I really enjoyed listening to him talk about things we’ve been learning in class and we haven’t gotten to devices of economic thought yet. So I’m happy that I was able to get a sense of that before we got into it in class,” said Keertana Gangireddy, a first-year biology major.
Additionally, de Leon’s main concluding message effectively resonated with students, as Firdaus Muhammad, a first-year public health sciences major said:
“I feel like as a person of color, it was really empowering to hear that. It made me feel empowered to just go out and fight for what’s right.”