21 - Colonies as Cause of War: Address to the World Peace Congress, Paris (1949)

Summary

This speech reiterates and updates arguments Du Bois made in the 1915 “African Roots of War” (chapter 3): that colonialism is a continuation of the labor exploitation that began with ancient slavery and continued as the modern slave system sustained by racism, and that colonial rivalry among white states is the primary cause of war in the twentieth century. Du Bois laments the failure of the both the United Nations and organized labor to recognize and address this most urgent global crisis. He compares the United States and South Africa as two so-called democracies at the forefront of the movement to “re-enslave human labor” and condemn their Black members to disenfranchisement and poverty, and he links the long history of exploitation of African Americans to the United States’ extensive militarism and exploitation of colonial labor. The emancipation of Africa is the key to the emancipation of the world.