Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (b. 23 Feb. 1868, d. 27 Aug. 1963). US sociologist and civil rights leader. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he graduated from Fisk University, Tennessee, in 1888 and in 1895 received a doctorate from Harvard. As a professor at Atlanta University (1897–1914) he became a recognized scholar in the field of race relations. His book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a sophisticated description of the Afro-American people achieved through blending sociology, history, and popular memory, established him as leader of a movement for civil rights. In this book he challenged current ideas (developed by Booker T. Washington) that Blacks should aspire to White values of thrift and enterprise, while (at least initially) accepting White supremacy. In 1905 he founded the Niagara Movement, which demanded full civil rights for African Americans, and in 1909 he was a founder of the NAACP. After active work with NAACP 1909–34 he returned to Atlanta, where he wrote another important work, Dusk of Dawn: An Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), which charted the development of modern racial theory. In contrast to his advocacy of immediate African American integration in the US, he also advocated Black nationalism elsewhere. He was a pioneer for pan-Africanism and co-organizer of various Pan-African Conferences around the world between 1919 and 1927. In 1945 he was an organizer of the Pan-African Conference in Manchester, where he worked closely with Kwame Nkrumah. During the 1950s he moved left ideologically, and in 1951 he was indicted (but acquitted) as ‘an unregistered agent of a foreign power’. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and received a Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union. He moved to Ghana, where he became a citizen and where he died.