In 1929 the stock market crashed and was the tipping point in the great depression, Du Bois was at the time director of publications and research and controlled The Crisis the official publication of the NAACP.
With unemployment at 50 percent with African Americans, Du Bois believed that hard times called for something different. So with this new radical thinking he began like praising Communism and calling for the NAACP to back off the fight against Jim Crow and devote more energy to strategies for black economic development.
In 1934 Du Bois would shock everyone when he wrote "the thinking colored people of the united states must stop being stampeded by the word segregation." Du Bois wanted black people to embrace voluntary segregation, and at this point Du Bois had little hope that he would see an end to racial prejudice. He no longer felt that racist whites were merely ignorant about black life and their history, they were mentally ill.
he argued that fighting against discrimination didn't have to mean fighting for integration, instead of fighting for school integration with whites, campaign for black schools to receive he same funding as white ones.
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