W.E.B. Du Bois - John Brown

William Edward Burghardt Du Boissociologist, historian, educator, journalist, and civil rights activistwas born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was the only child of Mary Burghardt, a proud woman of Dutch-African stock, and Alfred Du Bois, a French Huguenot. Du Bois experienced relatively little discrimination growing up as one of the few blacks in Great Barrington. His first exposure to segregation and the realities of race in America occurred in Nashville where he was a student at Fisk University. In 1888, Du Bois entered Harvard, earning both a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in history. Afterward he attended the University of Berlin, and in 1896, following a brief teaching assignment at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he became the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 16381870, Du Boiss doctoral thesis, was published in 1896. It lead directly to a position at the University of Pennsylvania; there he compiled research for The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). In 1897, Du Bois was named professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, where he taught for the next thirteen years. The Souls of Black Folk brought Du Bois to national prominence when it appeared in 1903; at the time the book was especially noteworthy for its criticism of Booker T. Washington, then the undisputed leader of African Americans.

In 1909 Du Bois helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was appointed director of research and editor of The Crisis, a monthly magazine that became a forum for confronting the racial prejudice in American society.

Du Bois also lectured widely in the United States and abroad, educating a whole generation of blacks in the art of protest and wrote a number of booksincluding The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), and Dark Princess (1928).

Du Bois broke with the NAACP over questions of ideology in 1934, and for the next ten years he taught at Atlanta once more. Resuming the role of dispassionate scholar, he wrote Black Reconstruction (1935), Black Folk, Then and Now (1939), Dusk of Dawn (1940), and Encyclopedia of the Negro (1945). He also founded Phylon, a quarterly journal addressing world race problems, published by Atlanta University.

In 1944, Du Bois resigned from teaching and returned to the NAACP. The next year he acted as a special consultant to the American delegation at the conference drafting the United Nations Charter. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) presents his views at the time on colonialism in Africa and beyond. After another clash with the NAACP over ideology, Du Bois left the association for good in 1948.

He later served as head of the newly formed Council on African Affairs, a group listed as subversive by the Department of Justice. In 1950, he made a failed bid for the United States Senate as a candidate of the American Labor Party. Du Boiss controversial left-wing opinions steadily eroded his influence. In 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, he was indicted for involvement with a dissident organization called the Peace Information Center; he was charged with being an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although he was acquitted, the experience disillusioned Du Bois with American democracy. He recalled his arraignment and trial in the book In Battle for Peace (1952) and paid tribute to the communists of the world for their help in my defense. During 1958 and 1959 Du Bois traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize, and the Peoples Republic of China, where he was honored by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Shortly after applying to join the Communist Party in 1961, Du Bois emigrated to Ghana at the invitation of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah to direct publication of Encyclopedia Africana. W.E.B. Du Bois died as a citizen of Ghana on August 27, 1963, on the eve of the civil rights march on Washington. His last book, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, was brought out posthumously in 1968.