Some Additions to W.E.B. DuBois's Biography

I would like to add a few things to Elizabeth Angell's fine account of last Sunday's program in recognition of W.E.B. DuBois' career (Crimson, Oct. 18).

The program had its origin in the richly fertile intellect of Prof. Henry Louis Gates and in his talent for launching serious intellectual activity.

No Black son or daughter of Harvard has ever before been given what might be called an "intellectual memorial" by our University. The aesthetic caliber of the program was awesome, executed mainly by empathetically skillful readers of selections from DuBois' great American text--The Souls of Black Folk--especially the readings by Prof. Anthony Appiah, Dean Jeremy Knowles, and the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.

The readings rendered DuBois' words--words of one of America's great cultural civilizers and freedom fighters--accessible to a generation of both Black and non-Black students who are far removed from those quasi-authoritarian and viciously racist realities that defined the African-American status in DuBois' era.

The awesome aesthetic reach of Sunday's "intellectual memorial" for W.E.B. DuBois owed much as well to the voices of Walter Robinson and Co. These voices proved more than equal to the haunting and soulful beauty of what DuBois deftly called the "Sorrow Songs"--the Negro Spirituals. The Singer of "My Lord, What A Morning" matched Marian Anderson at her best, and the beautifully disciplined improvisation on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"--boldly folding over the classical Spiritual rendition with the classical or high-style Gospel mode--was something to behold.

That a good number of Black and non-Black students attended this occasion was a marvelous tribute to DuBois' life-long quest to cosmopolitanize the American psyche and to root out its twisted nativisms. Martin L. Kilson   Thomson Professor of Government