In response to the idea of a hypothetical display on Du Bois, you replied,
As Dubois was a Stalinist, I’d suggest trying non-totalitarians to balance out a presentation on his work.
Now you’re asking why I said that’s a cartoonish caricature. Basically, as @ChuckV said, he was far more than that.
I mean, imagine if a patron were to ask you (I think you said you’re a librarian?), “Who was J. Edgar Hoover?” Would you reply, “Oh him? He was a closeted-homosexual.” I imagine not, because there was a lot more to Hoover than that, and also it’s not the most noteworthy facet of his life.
Du Bois lived to be 93. His thought, writings, speech and actions went through many phases, and he wrote major works on many topics. In an interview about his third book on Du Bois, Bill Mullens says,
Du Bois was most accurately described as an internationalist. His worldview was framed by 19th-century nationalisms, the Pan-Africanist movement, Communist internationalism and the anticolonial movement of the 20th century. His political orientation was to see in all directions simultaneously the interdependence of the advanced and underdeveloped worlds, as well as the historical movements of people between nations and territories. He called Japan’s defeat of Russia in their 1905 war the first “crossing of the color line” in world history, and India’s independence in 1947 the greatest event of the 20th century. He first used his famous coinage “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line” in the 1900 Pan-African Congress address to refer to the relationship of nonwhite peoples across the world to their colonial masters.
Intellectually, his influences ran from Hegel to Alexander Crummell, Bismarck to Nehru. His 1928 anticolonial novel, Dark Princess, is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For me, communism and socialism provided the intellectual synthesis of this global perspective: he understood what the Communist International called “world revolution” as the drawing together of modern humanity into a single project, or totality, of global unity and emancipation.
Du Bois expressed support for Stalin (Mullen also addresses that mistake) during the last decade of his incredibly varied, peripatetic life, a life that influenced many people in many, many ways. To reduce all of that to “Du Bois was a Stalinist” is indeed cartoonish, as well as offensive.
