Introduction: Among W. E. B. Du Bois’ vast accomplishments, his editorial leadership of The Crisis, the newspaper of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), was felt widely. His editorials were frequently reprinted in hundreds of local Black-owned papers. 

“Close Ranks,” written soon after the United States joined the fighting in World War I, was widely read and remarked upon in the Black press and beyond. Today, scholars question whether Du Bois’ position summed up what he and other African Americans were feeling during the war, or if he wrote it to try to relieve pressure that was being put upon him and others in the Black press from the U.S. government.

This is the crisis of the world.  For all the long years to come men will point to the year 1918 as the great Day of Decision, the day when the world decided whether it would submit to military despotism and an endless armed peace—if peace it could be called—or whether they would put down the menace of German militarism and inaugurate the United States of the World. 

We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome.  That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy.  Let us not hesitate.  Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.  We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.

Source: “Close Ranks” by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis, Volume 16, No. 3, July, 1918, p. 111