When W. E. B. Du Bois traveled from New York to Englewood in December 1930 to address the Englewood Woman’s Club, the visit connected suburban Bergen County to Harlem’s intellectual and cultural circles, underscoring the reach of Du Bois’s influence and the seriousness of the occasion.

His lecture, “The Contribution of the Negro to the American Race,” struck directly at a persistent and damaging assumption — that Black Americans were a burden to the nation. Du Bois dismantled that idea with historical argument and concrete examples. He traced the country’s economic expansion to the labor of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, insisting that American prosperity had been built in no small part through Black hands. The development of agriculture, industry, and infrastructure, he argued, could not be separated from that contribution. Far from hindering the republic, African Americans had advanced it.

He also emphasized innovation and industrial ingenuity. Black inventors, he noted, had played decisive roles in modernizing American manufacturing. Machinery developed by African American innovators had transformed production processes and enabled the United States to export millions of dollars’ worth of goods. These were not marginal contributions; they were integral to national growth.

The afternoon’s program extended this argument beyond economics and into culture. Elizabeth Sinkford, a classically trained soprano based at 405 Edgecombe Avenue in New York City and connected to leading Black educational institutions, appeared as part of the presentation. Du Bois arranged transportation for the journey to and from Englewood, and accommodations were made so that her accompanist could travel as well. The performance was integrated into the structure of the event rather than added as ornament.

The pairing of lecture and song was meaningful. As Du Bois articulated the intellectual and industrial contributions of African Americans, Sinkford’s performance embodied cultural refinement and artistic accomplishment. Together, they presented a unified demonstration of Black achievement — scholarly, economic, and artistic.

In Englewood that day, Du Bois did more than deliver a speech. He asserted a claim about national identity. He insisted that Black Americans were not peripheral to American history but central to its making — builders of its wealth, contributors to its democracy, and cultivators of its culture. The event stands as a moment when Harlem’s intellectual and artistic leadership entered a suburban civic space and made that assertion unmistakably clear.

“DuBois to Address Woman’s Club.”
The Record (Hackensack, NJ), December 9, 1930.

Elizabeth Sinkford to W. E. B. Du Bois, December 5, 1930.
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.