W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, a small town in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts ^[1]. His mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt, came from a family of free Black landowners who had lived in the region for generations. His father, Alfred Du Bois, a barber of Haitian descent, left the family when William was a young child, and the boy grew up in modest circumstances with his mother, who worked as a domestic servant ^[2].

Great Barrington's Black population was tiny, and Du Bois attended the local public schools alongside white classmates. He excelled from the start. Teachers and townspeople noticed his abilities, and when his mother died in 1885, members of local churches raised money to send him to college ^[1]. Anyone asking who was W. E. B. Du Bois before fame arrived would find a bookish New England teenager who wrote local news dispatches for regional papers while still in high school.

The scholarship carried him south to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The move was a shock. In Massachusetts he had encountered prejudice in scattered, personal forms; in the post-Reconstruction South he saw legal segregation, disenfranchisement, and the constant threat of racial violence. During summers he taught in rural Black schools in eastern Tennessee, an experience that gave him direct knowledge of poverty among sharecropping families and that he later described in his writing ^[2].

After graduating from Fisk in 1888, Du Bois entered Harvard College, where he earned a second bachelor's degree in 1890 and then pursued graduate study in history. He studied under philosophers William James and George Santayana and historian Albert Bushnell Hart. Between 1892 and 1894 he attended the University of Berlin on a fellowship, absorbing German methods of social science that stressed careful empirical research ^[3]. In 1895 Harvard awarded him a Ph.D., the first ever granted by that university to an African American ^[1].

His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638 to 1870, was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies series ^[3]. That same year the University of Pennsylvania hired him to conduct a sociological survey of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. The result, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), combined door-to-door interviews, statistics, and historical analysis. Scholars now regard it as a founding work of American urban sociology ^[4].

From 1897 to 1910 Du Bois taught at Atlanta University, where he directed an ambitious series of annual studies on Black American life covering topics from business to the church to crime. During these Atlanta years he also produced the book that made him nationally famous: The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Its essays introduced enduring concepts, including the idea of double consciousness, the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a hostile society, and the declaration that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line ^[2].

Any account of W. E. B. Du Bois achievements has to begin with his public break from Booker T. Washington, then the most powerful Black leader in America. Washington urged Black southerners to accept segregation temporarily and concentrate on industrial training and economic self-help. Du Bois rejected that bargain. In The Souls of Black Folk he argued that political rights, higher education, and full civic equality could not be postponed, and he called for a college-educated leadership class he termed the Talented Tenth ^[2].

In 1905 he helped launch the Niagara Movement, a small organization of Black professionals demanding an immediate end to disenfranchisement and Jim Crow. The movement struggled financially, but its program fed directly into a larger effort. After a deadly race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, an interracial group of reformers organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formally established in 1909 and 1910. Du Bois was among its founders and became its director of publicity and research, the only Black officer in the original leadership ^[5].

For the NAACP he created and edited The Crisis, a monthly magazine that began in 1910 with a print run of 1,000 copies and grew within a decade to a circulation of roughly 100,000 ^[5]. Through its pages he campaigned against lynching, protested the segregationist policies of the Woodrow Wilson administration, condemned the film The Birth of a Nation, and promoted the poets and novelists of the Harlem Renaissance. He also carried the fight abroad, organizing a series of Pan-African Congresses beginning in Paris in 1919 that pressed European powers on the rights of colonized Africans ^[6].

Du Bois married Nina Gomer, a fellow student he met while teaching at Wilberforce University, in 1896. The couple had two children. Their son Burghardt died as a toddler in Atlanta in 1899, a loss Du Bois mourned in a wrenching essay in The Souls of Black Folk. Their daughter Yolande survived to adulthood and in 1928 married the poet Countee Cullen in a celebrated Harlem wedding, though the marriage soon ended ^[2].

Nina Gomer Du Bois died in 1950 after more than five decades of marriage. The following year Du Bois married Shirley Graham, a writer, composer, and activist many years his junior who shared his political commitments and later accompanied him to Ghana ^[7].

Colleagues described Du Bois as formal, exacting, and reserved, a man more comfortable with ideas than with small talk. Yet his output was anything but narrow. Alongside scholarship and journalism he wrote novels, including The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and the Black Flame trilogy completed in his nineties, as well as poetry, pageants, and two autobiographies ^[3].

Du Bois left the NAACP in 1934 after clashing with executive secretary Walter White over strategy; Du Bois had begun arguing that Black communities should build strong separate economic institutions while segregation persisted, a position the association rejected. He returned to Atlanta University, where he wrote Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a massive reinterpretation of the years after the Civil War that credited Black Americans as central actors in democracy's brief southern experiment. Historians largely dismissed the book at the time; later generations recognized it as decades ahead of the field ^[4].

He rejoined the NAACP in 1944 and attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 as a consultant, but a second break came in 1948 amid Cold War tensions. Du Bois moved steadily leftward, chairing the Peace Information Center, which circulated the Stockholm Appeal against nuclear weapons. In 1951 the federal government indicted the 83-year-old as an unregistered foreign agent. A judge acquitted him that November, yet the State Department withheld his passport for much of the 1950s ^[7].

When travel restrictions eased in 1958, Du Bois toured the Soviet Union and China. In 1961 he formally joined the Communist Party of the United States and accepted an invitation from President Kwame Nkrumah to move to Ghana, where he began directing the Encyclopedia Africana project. He became a Ghanaian citizen in 1963. Du Bois died in Accra on August 27, 1963, at the age of 95, one day before the March on Washington, where Roy Wilkins announced his death to the assembled crowd ^[1].

Du Bois left a body of work that few American intellectuals have matched in range: pioneering empirical sociology, revisionist history, protest journalism, fiction, and political theory. The Souls of Black Folk remains standard reading in American classrooms more than a century after publication, and Black Reconstruction reshaped the historiography of the Reconstruction era ^[4]. The NAACP he helped found became the legal engine behind Brown v. Board of Education and much of the civil rights movement, and his Pan-African Congresses influenced a generation of African independence leaders ^[6].

Recognition has grown steadily. In 1959 he received the Lenin Peace Prize; earlier, in 1920, the NAACP had awarded him its Spingarn Medal. His Great Barrington boyhood homesite is a National Historic Landmark, and the main library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which holds his papers, bears his name ^[8]. Historian David Levering Lewis won two Pulitzer Prizes for his two-volume W. E. B. Du Bois biography, published in 1993 and 2000, a measure of the enduring scholarly interest in the man ^[7].

The basic W. E. B. Du Bois facts, a 95-year life stretching from the presidency of Andrew Johnson to that of John F. Kennedy, only hint at his significance. He gave American social science some of its earliest rigorous studies of Black life, gave the freedom struggle a national voice through The Crisis, and gave the world a vocabulary, from the color line to double consciousness, that still frames discussions of race today ^[2].