Intellectual, Civil Rights leader W.E.B. DuBois stirred by visit to Grand Canyon

GRAND CANYON, Ariz. — William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Black intellectual leader, father of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Civil Rights Activist, visited the Grand Canyon. The prolific author described it as “…one thing that lived and will live eternal in my soul, the Grand Cañon.”

DuBois wrote extensively about his experience at Grand Canyon National Park, along with a visit to Acadia National Park in Maine, in his 1920 autobiography Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. The collection of poems, essays and personal anecdotes is a contemplation of racism in early 20th century America, with many of the passages dwelling on achieving a racial harmony which DuBois sees in his travels to the wilderness.

“Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space!,” writes DuBois of his impressions of the Grand Canyon. “See yonder peak! No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow, only the eye of God has looked. Listen to the accents of that gorge which mutters: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’”

While Du Bois is known for recognizing “the color line” as a significant problem in American society and the world, he also blended this theory and his own experiences with what he saw in the Grand Canyon. Traveling to the canyon by train he faced segregation and racism and had to follow Jim Crow laws.

Through his writings, he wanted to know, “why do not those who are scarred in the world’s battle and hurt by its hardness travel to these places of beauty and down themselves in the utter joy of life?”

Surely, if America can set aside such places of beauty, wonder, and inspiration such as this, with “...the shadows and the shades of all the world, glad colorings touched with a hesitant spiritual delicacy,” then perhaps there is a glimmer of hope, that we the people, can live in such harmony as the colors of the canyon.