Desegregationist Pan-African Spiritual Strivings: Du Bois, the Black Church and the Critique of Imperialism*

Abstract

This article argues that W. E. B. Du Bois grounded his seminal conceptualisation of “the Negro church” in a Pan-Africanist challenge to how Christian reformers and missionaries' usage of “Darkest Africa” as a metaphor for modern urban vice and poverty denigrated Africa and the African diaspora while promoting a segregated, imperialist version of the social gospel. Du Bois indicated that to undo the logic of “Darkest Africa,” African American churches should cultivate Black “striving” for what he viewed as the overlapping ideals of Pan-Africanism and civil rights in the United States. Through this “spiritual striving,” the Black church could be the wellspring of a desegregated, decolonised global civil society.