W. E. B. Du Bois

Early life and education

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He studied at Fisk University in Nashville, at the University of Berlin, where he encountered the new field of sociology, and at Harvard, which awarded him a PhD in 1895. He was the first Black man to earn a Harvard doctorate.

Scholar

After a brief post at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he met his first wife, Nina Gomer, Du Bois moved to Philadelphia in 1896 to carry out the fieldwork for The Philadelphia Negro, his first major book. He went on to teach economics and history at Atlanta University, which remained an academic home for much of his career. In 1900 he presented striking data visualizations about Black American life at the Paris Exposition. His later books include John Brown, Black Reconstruction in America and Dusk of Dawn.

The Souls of Black Folk and the Washington debate

The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made Du Bois a national voice. One of its essays challenged Booker T. Washington, then widely treated as the leading spokesman for Black Americans. As the National Constitution Center summarizes, Washington urged accommodation to segregation and disfranchisement while Black people built economic self-reliance through industrial education. Du Bois instead demanded immediate political and legal action to secure the rights promised by the Reconstruction amendments, above all the vote. That stance led him to help found the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the NAACP in 1909.

The NAACP and The Crisis

Du Bois was the only Black member of the NAACP's founding board and its director of publicity and research. In November 1910 he launched its magazine, The Crisis, from a single room in New York; the NAACP says it reached 100,000 readers by 1920. He edited it until 1934, when he left after a rift with NAACP leadership over his position on segregation and returned to Atlanta University. He came back to the NAACP as director of special research from 1944 to 1948.

Pan-Africanism and later life

Du Bois attended the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London and organized Pan-African Congresses in 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1927. He clashed bitterly with Marcus Garvey, whose movement he came to distrust. After World War II he campaigned for peace; in 1951 he was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department and acquitted. Late in life he embraced communism, which he believed was the only route to equal rights for Black Americans.

In 1961, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, he moved to Ghana to direct the Encyclopedia Africana project, and in 1963 he became a Ghanaian citizen. He died in Ghana on August 27, 1963, the day before the March on Washington, aged 95. He and his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, are buried at the W.E.B. DuBois Centre in Accra, and his papers are held at UMass Amherst, whose library bears his name.