Berkley Center

This essay is dedicated to the brilliant students in my Spring 2026 seminar, The Souls of Sociology

I spent 2015 in Portland, Oregon, working on my first book. The writings of the towering scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois became an inspiration. An album that came out that March–Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens—soundtracked my writing sessions. Unexpectedly, I found in Stevens and Du Bois spiritual guides for thinking about grief.

Stevens’ earlier album, Seven Swans, played on a loop when I scrambled to finish the dissertation that eventually became the book. In my first year of graduate school, I had given the Paulist priest who helped guide my journey to Catholicism a copy of Seven Swans. The music was introspective and beautiful, reverent but not pedantic. (I suppose I wanted my Catholicism the same way.) I listened as Father Al Moser explained to me the references to the Old Testament in the album. As an Army medic in World War II, Father Al had witnessed unspeakable horrors and was driven to the ministry. He listened as I shared why it was hard for me to speak of my own family’s history of loss. I was baptised in 2006.

Father Al passed away ten years later. My life by then had led me away from Christianity, but the Church had pride of place in my book, a story about how public schools educate Black boys. The book ends with a prayer by Du Bois which had been adopted as the motto for a new Black all-boys high school in Washington, DC: "Now is the accepted time—not tomorrow, not some more convenient season."

Du Bois wrote a series of prayers around 1909 while a teacher at Atlanta University. As Phillip Luke Sinitiere observes, they “were not spiritual platitudes but invocational creeds to spur action for altering social, economic, and political conditions.” Chants anchored in the Black radical tradition and which offered more than simply instructions for self-improvement. A bulwark against the religion of whiteness, which, as Du Bois wrote in 1920, represented “ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”

Singing Chimney Swifts

It was a lucky coincidence that Stevens’ Oregon-themed album was released the year I was in Portland. In his wonderful new book, Joel Mayward explains that the album cradles Stevens’ Christian faith while also speaking universally to the beauty and tragedy of life. The prayers in Carrie & Lowell help us to see the sacred in the ordinary as we face the truth that, as Stevens sings, “we’re all gonna die.”

I had known for a long time how my book would start (with a dedication to Father Al) and end (with Du Bois’s prayer). The surprise was how the co-mingling of Sufjan Stevens and W. E. B. Du Bois led me to songbirds. My favorite lyrics from Carrie & Lowell are from the first track, “Death with Dignity”: "Chimney swift that finds me, be my keeper. / Silhouette of a cedar. / What is that song you sing for the dead?"

Carrie, Stevens’ estranged mother and a resident of Eugene, Oregon, had suffered from drug addiction and had left Stevens and his siblings when they were young. “Death with Dignity” is ostensibly about Stevens forgiving Carrie as she was dying of stomach cancer. Perhaps the bird represents Carrie, now her son’s protector. Or maybe swifts are Carrie’s.

Every September, for decades, thousands of tiny Vaux’s swifts have roosted in the chimney of Chapman Elementary School in Northwest Portland, during their annual journey south. One evening I joined other “swifties” on the south slope of the school grounds, to witness this breathtaking event, “the world’s largest known tornado of birds pouring out of the sky.”

Familiar and transcendent, no animal has meant more to the world’s religions than birds. They inhabit Creation stories, are mythologized as messengers of the gods, and have been revered as guardians of the dead. For the first time in years, this past September the swifts abandoned Portland’s Chapman School. What that means for the future is unclear, but these birds leave behind a recorded history. In their elegies, perhaps swifts grieve the destruction of the land. Chimney swifts were so named because the birds were forced to take refuge in these man-made structures after humans had destroyed their homes in old-growth forests. Today, climate change has led to more severe forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. Portland is nicknamed “Stumptown” because of the widespread logging needed to accommodate the area’s rapid growth in the mid-1800s. Oregon conservationists have balked at the Trump administration’s new plans to open protected land to development.

The U.S. government helped found Portland in its own image, as white settlers drove out Indigenous peoples in Oregon. Nowadays, Stumptown is also known as “the whitest city in America.” Yes, we’re all gonna die; but as W. E. B. Du Bois understood, the terms of death are determined by the inequalities of social life, from systemic racism to land dispossession.

As the Crow Flies 

In their book Wings of the Gods: Birds in the World’s Religions, Peter Gardella and Laurence Krute write that since humans and birds evolved together, our own survival depends on birds. “If humans are to learn how to moderate the current crises of global warming and ocean pollution and recurring pandemics,” they remark, “we will need to monitor the global movements and health of birds.” Birds grieve a planet sickened by man-made injustices. 

In 1920, Du Bois took this message to heart. With other colleagues Du Bois created The Brownies’ Book, the first magazine for Black children. Du Bois introduced a column titled “As the Crow Flies” (see image 2). While these black birds often portend doom, and while the specter of Jim Crow haunted Black communities, Du Bois, as Brigitte Fielder writes, embraced the crow as his avatar. His anthropomorphized bird was an intelligent news correspondent who flew across the globe to share the world’s events with his young readers.

In the first-ever column, Du Bois wrote:

Ah!” says the Crow, as he sharpens his long, thin beak on his slender leg—“What a year—what a year that 1918 was—all blood and hurt and cries—I thought the world people were mad and would die away and leave the earth to us peaceful crows.

The Crow saw itself as the keeper for “my sweet babies—my dark Children of the Sun,” but such protection did not mean shielding children from knowledge of the awful toll from World War I, the imperialist aggression behind it, and the destruction left in its wake (including epidemics, societal instability, crime, and race riots: a romance of despair). In the February 1920 issue, the Crow tabulated the astronomical costs of war—his own ballad for the dead—and mourned the living: the children starving in war-torn countries. The bird’s wings are heavy with grief as the holidays approach:

THE forests, which I see as I fly, are full of Christmas trees—beautiful pines now tall, now small, covered with glistening snow and tiny star lights and all the good things of the world! But oh, alas! about them lie, stretched in the cold, all the hungry children of Europe, and instead of carols I hear their sobs!

The Crow was saddened by the grave inequities and wealth gaps within societies:

THERE are things I do not quite understand as I fly among men. There is food—they eat not; there are clothes—they freeze; there is joy —they cry. Why—why—why?

Yet the following year, Du Bois’s crow followed the tragic news with signs of progress. The Crow’s messages carry echoes of what Du Bois called the “sorrow songs” of Negro spirituals. But the bird’s liturgies were sustained by critical hope:

THE ocean breathed thoughts of courage, as I flew to America! There is much that displeases me here,—yet I am cheerful, for there are harbingers of good-will.

With marvelous clairvoyance, the Crow documented for his human babies the breadth of social challenges around the globe—and the collective work needed to address those crises, the “mighty causes” as Du Bois called them in one of his prayers. 

The Prayers of Songbirds

Over a century after Du Bois’ crow took flight, death remains, as Jyoti Puri writes, “a global spectacle.” A genocide cripples Gaza, and Palestine sunbirds now share airspace with Israeli drones. Below them, a musical group made up of displaced children—Gaza Bird Singing—harmonizes to drown out the sounds of these winged invaders.

COVID-19 has mostly receded from the public consciousness, yet there are warnings that the next pandemic will also likely be zoonotic, making the bird flu (of all things) a serious threat. Yet songbirds urge looking beyond the anthropocentric to a “planetary” politics in struggles against colonial legacies and extractive capitalism. Prayers that “imagine multispecies futures,” where humans are good custodians of the land and imagine new kinship with other animals who roam it; echoing in a bird that crows: "Amidst the prevailing unrest, I can see, here and there, a sign of hope! Caw! Caw! Caw!"