William Edward Burghardt “W. E. B.” Du Bois
February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963)
Sociologist, Historian, Journalist, Black influential activist leader, NAACP CO-FOUNDER, CO-Founder THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT (Pan African movement)
He was an uncompromising visionary and pioneer for freedom and liberty. He lived a life of national and international importance. He was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He helped found the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was ONE OF THE MOST INTELLECTUAL MINDS THAT EVER LIVED.
Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at Friedrich Wilhelm University (in Berlin, Germany) and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Du Bois rose to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of black civil rights activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington that provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chance for advanced education to develop their leadership.
Du Bois and his mother.
Du Bois primarily targeted racism in his polemic, which protested strongly against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa, and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice and racism in the United States military.
Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life’s work: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
His 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn is regarded in part as one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published two other life stories, all three containing essays on sociology, politics, and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP’s journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.
In-depth Personal Life
Du Bois was organized and disciplined: his lifelong regimen was to rise at 7:15, work until 5:00, eat dinner, and read a newspaper until 7:00, then read or socialize until he was in bed, invariably before He was a meticulous planner, and frequently mapped out his schedules and goals on large pieces of graph paper Many acquaintances found him to be distant and aloof, and he insisted on being addressed as “Dr. Du Bois” Although he was not gregarious, he formed several close friendships with associates such as Charles Young, Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Hope, Mary White Ovington, and Albert Einstein.
His closest friend was Joel Spingarn – a white man – but Du Bois never accepted Spingarn’s offer to be on a first-name basis. Du Bois was something of a dandy – he dressed formally, carried a walking stick, and walked with an air of confidence and dignity. He was relatively short, standing at 5 feet 5.5 inches (166 cm), and always maintained a well-groomed mustache and goatee. He enjoyed singing[336] and playing tennis.
Du Bois married Nina Gomer (b. about 1870, m. 1896, d. 1950), with whom he had two children. Their son Burghardt died as an infant before their second child, daughter Yolande, was born. Yolande attended Fisk University and became a high school teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father encouraged her marriage to Countee Cullen, a nationally known poet of the Harlem Renaissance. They divorced within two years. She married again and had a daughter, Du Bois’s only grandchild. That marriage also ended in divorce.
Shirley Graham Du Bois
As a widower, Du Bois married Shirley Graham (m. 1951, d. 1977), an author, playwright, composer, and activist. She brought her son David Graham to the marriage. David grew close to Du Bois and took his stepfather’s name; he also worked for African-American causes. The historian David Levering Lewis wrote that Du Bois engaged in several extramarital relationships.
W. E. B. Du Bois — sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor — died on Aug. 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana. This was the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. When his death was announced, the immense crowd observed a minute of silence. In Accra, where he had lived since 1961, Du Bois was honored with a state funeral led by President Kwame Nkrumah.
DuBois’s house in Ghana has been converted to a museum for public viewing
Honors Books and Works
The NAACP awarded the Spingarn Medal to Du Bois in 1920.
In 1958, Du Bois was inducted into the Fisk University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa when he returned to campus to receive an honorary degree.
In 1959, Du Bois was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize by the USSR.
In 1969, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, now part of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, was established at Harvard University.
The site of the house where Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
In 1992, the United States Postal Service honored Du Bois with his portrait on a postage stamp. A second stamp of face value 32¢ was issued on February 3, 1998, as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.
In 1994, the main library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was named for Du Bois. He transferred his papers to the university via his literary executor, historian Herbert Aptheker.
In 2000, Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research began awarding the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, which is considered Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies.
A dormitory was named for Du Bois at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted field research for his sociological study The Philadelphia Negro.
A dormitory is named for Du Bois at Hampton University.
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience was inspired by and dedicated to Du Bois by its editors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Humboldt University in Berlin hosts a series of lectures named in his honor.
Scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Du Bois in his 2002 list of the 100 Greatest African Americans.
In 2005, Du Bois was honored with a medallion in The Extra Mile, Washington DC’s memorial to important American volunteers.
The highest career award given by the American Sociological Association, the W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, was renamed for Du Bois in 2006.
Du Bois was appointed Honorary Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
A bust was commissioned from Ayokunle Odeleye to honor Du Bois, and dedicated on the Clark Atlanta University on the anniversary of his birth, February 23, 2013 (pictured right).
In 2015, the Du Bois Orchestra at Harvard was founded.
In March 2018, Du Bois was awarded the Grand Prix de la Mémoire for the Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2017.
Du Bois was featured as a character in the 2020 Netflix miniseries Self Made, portrayed by Cornelius Smith Jr.
Non-fiction books
The Study of the Negro Problems (1898)
The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
The Negro in Business (1899)
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
“The Talented Tenth”, second chapter of The Negro Problem, a collection of articles by African Americans (September 1903)
Voice of the Negro II (September 1905)
John Brown: A Biography (1909)
Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1909)
Atlanta University’s Studies of the Negro Problem (1897–1910)
The Negro (1915)
The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924)[371]
Africa, Its Geography, People and Products (1930)
Africa: Its Place in Modern History (1930)
Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
What the Negro Has Done for the United States and Texas (1936)
Black Folk, Then and Now (1939)
Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945)
The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1946)
The World and Africa (1946)
The World and Africa, an Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947)
Peace Is Dangerous (1951)
I Take My Stand for Peace (1951)
In Battle for Peace (1952)
Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, Racialism, Imperialism (1960
Articles
Bois, W. E. Burghardt Du (1898). “The Study of the Negro Problems”. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 11: 1–23. JSTOR 1009474.
“An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War.” The Crisis, vol. 18, no. 2, June 1919, pp. 63–87.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt (1933). “Liberia, the League and the United States”. Foreign Affairs. 11 (4): 682–695. doi:10.2307/20030546. JSTOR 20030546.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). “Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View”. Foreign Affairs. 14 (1): 82–92. doi:10.2307/20030704. JSTOR 20030704.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1938). “Black Africa Tomorrow”. Foreign Affairs. 17 (1): 100–110. doi:10.2307/20028906. JSTOR 20028906.
Autobiographies
Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (1920) Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940) The Autobiography of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (1968)
Novels
The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) Dark Princess: A Romance (1928) The Black Flame Trilogy: The Ordeal of Mansart (1957) Mansart Builds a School (1959) Worlds of Color (1961)
Archives of The Crisis
Du Bois edited The Crisis from 1910 to 1933, and it contains many of his important polemics.
Archives of The Crisis at the University of Tulsa: Modernist Journals Collection Archives of The Crisis at Brown University Issues of The Crisis at Google Books
Recordings
Socialism and the American Negro (1960) Archived September 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
W. E. B. Du Bois: A Recorded Autobiography, Interview with Moses Asch (1961) Archived November 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
Dissertations
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638–1870, (Ph.D. dissertation), Harvard Historical Studies, Longmans, Green, and Co. (1896)
Speeches
Foner, Philip S., ed. (1970). W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890–1919. New York: Pathfinder Press. ISBN 978-0-87348-181-6.
Foner, Philip S., ed. (1970). W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1920–1963. New York: Pathfinder Press. ISBN 978-0-87348-182-3.
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