ers of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, which opposed the use of nuclear weapons.

In 1950, at the age of 82, Du Bois ran for U.S. Senator from New York on the American Labor Party ticket and polled a little over 200,000 votes, about 4% of the total. Although he lost, Du Bois remained committed to the progressive labor cause. In 1958, he would join with Trotskyites, ex-Communists and independent radicals in proposing the creation of a united left-wing coalition to challenge for seats in elections for the New York State Senate and Assembly.

In March 16, 1953, upon the death of Joseph Stalin, Du Bois controversially wrote of him in The National Guardian:

Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also - and this was the highest proof of his greatness - he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate.

While Stalin had fallen into disfavor among most of the American left of that era, and Communism had come to be regarded as "the god that failed" in the eyes of such African-American luminaries as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, Du Bois, apparently not believing reports of Stalin's purges and dismissing them as propaganda, persisted in his admiration for Stalin. He was frequently challenged for his support of Stalin, particularly after Khrushchev's 1956 "Cult of Personality" speech which seemed to further evidence Stalin's purges. Having once, after a 1920s visit to Russia, observed that, "Russia is the victim of a determined propaganda of lies", he remained persistently skeptical of American media reports regarding the USSR; when challenged as to his beliefs on Stalin in 1956, in one instance he conceded that, "[Stalin] was probably too cruel; but... he conquered Hitler."

In regards to Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, the 88-year-old Du Bois defended the USSR, suggesting that the Hungarian Revolution was a plot of, "landlords and fascists". For this he has been criticized by some historians for allegedly succumbing to dogmatism; while he was "one of the great pioneers of anti-colonialist scholarship", he was, "a headstrong idealist: he idealized Stalinism... He saw what he wished and needed to see, and thus he replicated the hard, domineering consciousness he condemned."

Du Bois visited Communist China during the Great Leap Forward. He was questioned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about his alleged communist sympathies. He was indicted in the United States under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and acquitted for lack of evidence.[citation needed] In 1959 Du Bois received the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party USA, at a time when it was long past its peak of support.

Just forty days before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at an event marking the hundredth anniversary of Du Bois' birth, at Carnegie Hall in New York City:

We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life, the English speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O'Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist, or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking. …Dr. Du Bois' greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice.

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