Du Bois, W. E. B.

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Du Bois, W. E. B.

February 23, 1868
August 27, 1963

Historian, sociologist, novelist, and editor William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His mother, Mary Burghardt Du Bois, belonged to a tiny community of African Americans who had been settled in the area since before the American Revolution; his father, Alfred Du Bois, was a visitor to the region who deserted the family in his son's infancy. In the predominantly white local schools and Congregational church, Du Bois absorbed ideas and values that left him "quite thoroughly New England."

From 1885 to 1888 Du Bois attended Fisk University in Nashville, where he first encountered the harsher forms of racism. After earning a B.A. (1888) at Fisk, he attended Harvard University, where he took another B.A. (1890) and a doctorate in history (1895). Among his teachers were psychologist William James, philosophers Josiah Royce and George Santayana, and historian A. B. Hart. From 1892 to 1894 he studied history and sociology at the University of Berlin. His dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States," was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies.

From 1894 to 1896 Du Bois taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he met and married Nina

Gomer, a student, in 1896. The couple had two children, Burghardt and Yolande. In 1896 he accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania to gather data for a commissioned study of blacks in Philadelphia. This work resulted in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), an acclaimed early example of empirical sociology. In 1897 he joined the faculty at Atlanta University and took over the annual Atlanta University Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems. From 1897 to 1914 he edited an annual study of one aspect or another of black life, such as education or the church.

Appalled by the conditions facing blacks nationally, Du Bois sought ways other than scholarship to effect change. The death of his young son from dysentery in 1899 also deeply affected him, as did the widely publicized lynching of a black man, Sam Hose, in Georgia the same year. In 1900, in London, he boldly asserted that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." He repeated this statement in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), mainly a collection of essays on African-American history, sociology, religion, and music, in which Du Bois wrote of an essential black double consciousness: the existence of twin souls ("an American, a Negro") warring in each black body. The book also attacked Booker T. Washington, the most powerful black American of the age, for advising blacks to surrender the right to vote and to a liberal education in return for white friendship and support. Du Bois was established as probably the premier intellectual in black America, and Washington's main rival.

Du Bois's growing radicalism also led him to organize the Niagara Movement, a group of blacks who met in 1905 and 1906 to agitate for "manhood rights" for African Americans. He founded two journals, Moon (1905–1906) and Horizon (1907–1910). In 1909 he published John Brown, a sympathetic biography of the white abolitionist martyr. Then in 1910 he resigned his professorship to join the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York, which had been formed in response to growing concern about the treatment of blacks. As its director of research, Du Bois founded a monthly magazine, The Crisis. In 1911 he published his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, a study of the cotton industry seen through the fate of a young black couple struggling for a life of dignity and meaning.

The Crisis became a powerful forum for Du Bois's views on race and politics. Meanwhile, his developing interest in Africa led him to write The Negro (1915), a study offering historical and demographic information on peoples of African descent around the world. Hoping to affect colonialism in Africa after World War I, he also organized Pan-African Congresses in Europe in 1919, 1921, and 1923, and in New York in 1927. However, he clashed with the most popular black leader of the era, Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Du Bois regarded Garvey's "back to Africa" scheme as ill considered and Garvey as impractical and disorganized.

Du Bois's second prose collection, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), did not repeat the success of The Souls of Black Folk but captured his increased militancy. In the 1920s The Crisis played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance by publishing early work by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other writers. Eventually, Du Bois found some writers politically irresponsible; his essay "Criteria of Negro Art" (1926) insisted that all art is essentially propaganda. He pressed this point with a novel, Dark Princess (1928), about a plot by the darker races to overthrow European colonialism. In 1926 he visited the Soviet Union, then nine years old. Favorably impressed by what he saw, he boldly declared himself "a Bolshevik."

The Great Depression increased Du Bois's interest in socialism but also cut the circulation of The Crisis and weakened his position with the leadership of the NAACP, with which he had fought from the beginning. In 1934 he resigned as editor and returned to teach at Atlanta University. His interest in Marxism, which had started with his student days in Berlin, dominated his next book, Black Reconstruction in America (1934), a massive and controversial revaluation of the role of the freedmen in the South after the Civil War. In 1936 Du Bois commenced a weekly column of opinion in various black newspapers, starting with the Pittsburgh Courier. He emphasized his continuing concern for Africa with Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), an expanded and updated revision of The Negro.

In 1940 Du Bois published his first full-length autobiography, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, in which he examined modern racial theory against the major events and intellectual currents in his lifetime. In 1944 his life took another dramatic turn when he was suddenly retired by Atlanta University after tension grew between him and certain administrators. When the NAACP rehired him that year, he returned to New York as director of special research. In 1945 he was honored at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, and published a bristling polemic, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. A year later, he produced a controversial pamphlet, "An Appeal to the World," submitted by the NAACP on behalf of black Americans to the United Nations Commission on Civil Rights. In 1947 came his The World and Africa, an examination of Africa's future following World War II.

By this time Du Bois had moved to the left, well beyond the interests of the NAACP, which generally supported the Democratic Party. In 1948, when he endorsed the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, he was fired. He then joined Paul Robeson, who was by this time firmly identified with radical socialism, at the Council on African Affairs, which had been officially declared a "subversive" organization. In 1950 Du Bois ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from New York on the American Labor Party ticket. Also that year, in another move applauded by communists, he accepted the chairmanship of the Peace Information Center, which circulated the Stockholm Peace Appeal against nuclear weapons.

W.E.B. Dubois

"…One even feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

the souls of black folk. chicago: a.c. mcclurg and co., 1903.

Early in 1951 Du Bois and four colleagues from the Peace Information Center were indicted on the charge of violating the law that required agents of a foreign power to register. On bail and awaiting trial, he married Shirley Lola Graham, a fellow socialist and writer (his first wife had died in 1950). At the trial in November 1951, the judge heard testimony, then unexpectedly granted a motion by the defense for a directed acquittal. Du Bois was undeterred by his ordeal. In 1953, he recited the Twenty-third Psalm at the grave of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as spies for the Soviet Union. For such involvements, he found himself ostracized by some black leaders and organizations. "The colored children," he wrote, "ceased to hear my name."

Returning to fiction, he composed a trilogy, The Black Flame, about the life and times of a black educator seen against the backdrop of generations of black and white lives and national and international events (the trilogy comprised The Ordeal of Mansart, 1957; Mansart Builds a School, 1959; and Worlds of Color, 1961). After the government lifted its ban on his foreign travel in 1958, Du Bois visited various countries, including the Soviet Union and China. In Moscow on May 1, 1959, he received the Lenin Peace Prize.

In 1960 Du Bois visited Ghana for the inauguration of Kwame Nkrumah as its first president. He then accepted an invitation from Nkrumah to return to Ghana and start work on an Encyclopedia Africana, a project in which he had long been interested. In October 1961, after applying (successfully) for membership in the Communist Party, he left the United States. He began work on the project in Ghana, but illness the following year caused him to go for treatment to Romania. Afterward, he visited Peking and Moscow. In February 1963 he renounced his American citizenship and officially became a citizen of Ghana. He died in Accra, Ghana, and was buried there.