Editor’s Note: David Levering Lewis won two Pulitzer Prizes for his two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois titled, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Lewis also authored the noted study of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue. He also wrote the widely read biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., King: A Biography. Additionally, he has written a book on the scramble for Africa, The Race to Fashoda, and a study of the Dreyfus affair, Prisoners of Honor. He is a Martin Luther King, Jr. University Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University. He sits on the board of directors of The Crisis magazine in New York. This interview was conducted by Joel Wendland.

PA: How did you become interested in studying history, more specifically, writing biography as a form of writing history?

David Levering Lewis: History has always been a love of mine. Somewhere early on, in my father’s study probably, I picked up a big book that engrossed me. Around the dinner table, we were always talking about issues of civil rights, the world and culture. I should add that my mother had a considerable appreciation for European history. She had taught Latin and was fluent in French. That was very much a part of the atmosphere. The reason I went to law school was that, of course, you can make more money. That was my parents’ view. But I decided that if the choice was less money and more congeniality in terms of what I was doing, I’d choose the latter. Clio was always the muse whispering in my ear.

But I didn’t think I was going into biography, and it is only now that when I answer questions like the one you’ve just posed, [I realize] that my master’s thesis was in a sense a biography because it was a study of the important politics of John Fiske and the movement he pushed along. I had not intended to become a biographer. Indeed my Ph.D. was biographical as well. It was on the leading French liberal Catholic Emmanuel Mounier and that critical period of French Catholicism in the 1920s and 30s, when it seemed that there could be a synthesis of Catholicism and Marxism. These fellows tried that, and eventually the Vatican notified them they were in error. But it was an exciting moment in French thought and politics. But it’s true, I got through the issues through the life of Mounier. That has been the strategy. It does seem I use lives as windows to a period and its issues.

But the King option, that was quite serendipitous, because I was working on a book I called 'The Clerks in Politics.' In the middle of writing the early chapters, I was asked if I’d be interested in writing a biography of Martin Luther King for a Penguin series called Great Leaders of the 20th Century. I thought I shouldn’t do it. One, because King was 39 years old, and by the time I finished, his life might have taken a very different track. I had just returned to the country, so there were others far more knowledgeable. And then, did I wish to leave the area that I was hoping to make my name in? But the assassination of King almost immediately after the invitation decided for me that that life does have a conclusion. So I wrote that biography. After then people began to think of me in terms of biography.

But the next book was not biographical, although of course again central to the monograph was Alfred Dreyfus. It was a new look at the Dreyfus affair based on some new archive information. From that point on, I used lives. But only when I got to Du Bois did I think, “Well here we have a life, and it’s so fascinating in its personal aspects but also in its public resonance – so terribly significant – that you have to do both.” So the other lives I just rather dutifully got them born, married and dead, and then went on to the big issues that brought me to them in the first place. But with Du Bois, this was a real biography because what’s going on with him, almost from the cradle, is so interesting in terms of the formation of personality, but on the other hand, of course, what he launched.

PA: On writing history, in your contribution to the book Historians and Race, you write “that ambivalence [of academics toward writing or understanding Black history] derived from the assumption (subconscious) that the cardinal value of African American historiography was what it revealed about the classist, sexist and economic hegemonies controlling the American past and present.” I think you’re referring to historians that view African American history as only worthwhile if it reveals something about America. Can you explain this more fully?

DLL: I have since changed 180 degrees, but, I thought there is something called the quest for universality: that is what knowledge is all about. If you begin to look at the social scene and focused on women or labor or minorities, I felt that you were fragmenting and obscuring the universal of the human experience. I thought what was significant about Black history was that the goal was not that it should turn itself into an independent, autonomous field of research, but that it should be an integral part of history. It should simply look at the universal from the particular perspective. I felt that was true of women’s studies as well.

I’ve changed my mind, because, while I think objectively and theoretically I was on solid ground, realistically, it’s a no go to have that point of view. That is because my position ignored the politics of scholarship. This is to say, that history departments have been and continue to be very much over-represented by white males very much imbricated in founding fathers stuff, and in majoritarian views of the American narrative. So by privileging, or promoting, or buying into histories that were fragmented or that were contestatory – the role of women, the role of Blacks – you began to transform the larger narrative. It may well be true that the universal quest I had, we’re much closer to achieving in this parallel way that the academy now has embraced. I am still a little on my guard against too much separation, because once again we’re talking politics. If these feudal fiefdoms are created, then the business of tenure and promotion, self-judgment, self-monitoring, those issues become a bit troubling.

So I suppose, at the end of the day, I have a dialectical view of the academy. I think that is a statement of how things have evolved. You start with the consensus, the reaction to the consensus, and we’re moving toward a new consensus or the synthesis because it’s true now no one writes a book about anything without the obligatory trinity of race, class and gender. We now think of it as so commonplace and obvious, that we, and certainly my students coming along now, have to be reminded this is a recent [development].

PA: Relating this dialectic that you see in the universities to society, where there are similar kinds of struggles, at the end of the 1978 re-publication of your King biography, you noted with optimism the successes of the civil rights struggles and pointed to the possibilities of affirmative action. Have things changed since 1978, in light of the present challenges to affirmative action? Are you still optimistic?

DLL: I’m not sure. Basically it’s about being an American. If you put a question like that to a Frenchman or an Englishman or another European, whatever he or she would say would very well comport with what was thought two decades earlier. Whereas the peculiarity of the United States is that things change between commercials. And though in 1978, I was ptimistic, I thought that all those vectors of good benign change were well under way. Two years later Ronald Reagan was elected. Of course that’s one of the fault lines, a before and after moment in American history. Reagan and his group changed American history. Not that they were that radical; that they did was simply embrace what had not been the prevailing paradigm. They did say government was useless and indeed inimical to the good society, and the market was the solution to social problems. Taxes should only serve the rich. It was pretty radical, in that it became the ruling ideology. For a moment there, with Clinton, there was a break. We’re still on the path to the kind of America I thought we were saying good bye to. The neo-con America, of course, is now the America that I’m the new minority in, in that my point of view about the social contract is the one that lost out in the elections.

So, affirmative action, one of those things I thought would simply be part of the warp and woof of American society, is being now acrimoniously revisited and cynically contested. I guess I am, if not optimistic, I am not yet ready to despair, because of this dialectical view I have of things. My guess is that this administration is riding for a major fall, as its hubris captures it. By 2004, there will be so many negatives with this regime that probably we could say goodbye to it. But I am not quite sure what will follow. That’s because to have a good dialectic, you have to have an antithesis. And if the antithetical force is the Democrat Party, well, then one is very close to despair, as it now manifests itself. Of course, a third force in American politics is only the luxury of clinical scientists and people in New York who can afford to vote for Ralph Nader without actually voting against the Democrat.

I think today [January 18th] is a very good day. The March in Washington is the beginning. The campuses are beginning to become restive. I think, whether he intended it or not, when Charles Rangel said that he wanted a national debate about the draft, I think that that was something students heard. It’s the first time they shifted from MTV, saying, “What’s this?” Mind you, I’m not sure we should not have a draft, taking my own experience in the Army, which was very democratizing. It may well be that six months from now, enough will have gone wrong under the aegis of the Bush people, that the opportunity to talk again sanely and smartly about how to make America work will be there.

PA: Elsewhere, you have written about moving from Eurocentrism to polycentrism. Could you define polycentrism and its value in historiography and politically?

DLL: It may be a synonym for comparative history, which is how I describe myself. I fear that the politician who said that all politics is local could have said that about history – that all history is local. Increasingly it’s quite clear that the local only make sense in the global context. And if there is a great deal of rhetoric about globalism and the interconnectedness produced by the internet and the market, then it must reflect itself in the academy. We are at a point where the best of us really have to say goodbye to the comfort of simply doing the same thing over and again, looking at the same issues in a parochial sense. I think that languages again are going to be required, although English is the lingua franca. One has to look at other national experiences, the better to make sense of our own.

PA: So basically, we don’t start to understand our present or even our past without knowledge of others?

DLL: Yes. George Bush, in the wake of September 11th before the Joint Congressional Session, asked, “Why do they hate us?” This put us in another path of self-knowledge that is much to be regretted, because it immediately put us as the innocent American, doing our best to save the world. And to be churlishly and viciously misappreciated, well…. Even the British knew [empire] was quite an exploitative thing, and they gave civil servants the idea of rules. The British weren’t horrendous like the Belgians. But the American insistence on our innocence and good intentions has made it, if we embrace this kind of screen through which we see things, [impossible to] understand the world and therefore we have to demonize. That is the necessary response to George Bush’s, “Why do they hate us?” Why? They must hate us because they don’t understand how good we are. He and his epigones speak to a mal-educated American public now, whatever the SAT scores of the kids who go to the elite schools, that is really devoid of a good class in civics, of any kind of geography, and, for the most part, totally tone deaf to language. Today knowledge consists of internet, quick access and the sound bite. Of course the whole point of it is to give you a six-figure income as quickly as possible.

So education, insofar as historians have a contribution to make, needs to combine the local and the global in a way that gives not only the scholar but the people who pass under our nose a real sense of the complexity of the world and the state of the domestic world.

PA: Can you talk about your background?

DLL: I grew up in a number of places because my family was somewhat itinerant. I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. We left at a pretty early age, I guess [I was] perhaps three, and moved, to a rural academic community, Wilberforce, Ohio. I finished my teens in Atlanta, Georgia, which is really the ancestral birthplace of both my parents. My father was a college president, and, at one point, a high school principal. I went to Fisk in Nashville, and did not finish high school because of the special program pioneered by Fisk copying the early entrance program at the University of Chicago. I had two years of high school, went to college, finished at age 19. There was law school briefly at the University of Michigan. I was unhappy with the law. I did well enough academically, but I decided that I didn’t want law as a career. And over my parents’ vociferous objections, I left law school and took a bus ride to New York, and talked my way into graduate studies at Columbia in the history department. I worked my way through Columbia, getting a master’s in US history, writing a thesis on the American historian and intellectual John Fiske, the leading Social Darwinist of the late 19th century, early 20th. I moved on to the London School of Economics and a doctorate in modern French history. And then I was drafted. I got out of the army through a special program that would reduce your draft term if you were going to do something socially useful. My choice was to go to the University of Ghana as a lecturer in history. I intended to stay two or three years, but did not remain due to a combination of factors: my mother’s illness and the rapid deterioration of the political situation. The university was basically under the gun, suspected of un-Ghanaian activities – opposition to the then-President Kwame Nkrumah. It was a wonderful university with superb students, but the handwriting was on the wall. The economy was going south. The United States felt that this was a country that should be red-lined, as it were. There was a great deal of paranoia. I returned and went to Howard University, to Cornell and then to the University of Notre Dame, teaching my specialty, which was Third Republic France.

PA: What project are you currently working on?

DLL: I was in Rabat Morocco, when the twin towers fell, in the kasbah with my wife, as part of the first leg of the recreation of the invasion route of the Berbers and Arabs. In 711, they crossed the Gibraltar Straits and invaded Spain. Six months before 9-11, I signed on to do a book on the moment when Islam and Europe made contact. The book is called The Invention of Europe: Islam in the 8th Century. It deals just with a 60-year time frame, between the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and the interface with France. It deals with the kind of cultural dynamic that produced a Europe that was exclusionary, misogynist, feudal and not pluralistic, as opposed to the experiment on the other side of the Pyrenees, which was a foretaste of the good society: pluralism, Jews, Catholics and Muslims in collaboration, although there certainly was a political hierarchy to mindful of. It’s only 150 pages, because I don’t think people can read more these days.