For Du Bois beauty made truth and goodness known. Truth, “the one great vehicle of human understanding.” Goodness, “the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.” Du Bois, though, was careful to articulate that truth here was not to be understood as a “scientist seeking truth,” goodness was not “ethical sanction.” Rather, by actively embracing the beautiful in its promise, Black Americans would become apostles of truth and right. The art they produced would be a form of propaganda, one that Black people could love and enjoy, discovering and asserting the validity of their humanity over against a country that remains unprepared to bear this truth. Too much of Black artistic production was judged by Whites, through the rules of Whites, Du Bois protested. This was not seeing the real America. This was the sight of Blackness through White eyes. Only propaganda would solve this problem:
Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.
Du Bois longed for a world where Black artists were taken seriously, judged by Black Americans through the lens of their own aesthetic freedom. He imagined an America where artistic production was not first understood by the color of one’s skin, but as the truth of their humanity.
“There is something in the nature of Beauty,” Du Bois began his last section of “Of Beauty and Death,” from his 1920 experimental work Dark Water, “that demands an end.” Whereas ugliness, of which there is so much in the world, is indefinite, trailing “into gray endlessness,” beauty is different. Beauty desires completion, and in our experience of the beautiful we desire completion as well. The eternality of ugliness resides not in its essence, but in its partiality. We find joy, Du Bois wrote, because ugliness never finds completeness, while beauty’s finality ends in the release of death. Du Bois anointed as celebratory, “the sweet silence of perfection, the calm and balance of utter music. Therein is the triumph of Beauty.” Beauty succeeds because it ends. The ugliness of the world does not—it stretches out, spilling into everything—never finding closure, never finding death. Beauty triumphs in completion. Its value is that it is finite.