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DU BOIS, WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT 1868-1963

AUTHOR, EDITOR, ACTIVIST

Student

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 and educated until the age of sixteen in a small local school of some twenty-five students and two teachers. They were humble origins for a man who would not only become a major voice for the advancement of blacks in the decade of the 1900s but would become an international figure of the twentieth century, active until his death in 1963 in Accra, Ghana. Du Bois's father left home when Du Bois was just a year old. He was raised by his mother, Mary Du Bois, until his 1885 departure for Fisk University, an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee. While at Fisk he founded the Fisk Herald, the college newspaper, but more importantly observed for the first time life in the American South, where the great majority of blacks lived in the nineteenth century. During two of his summers at Fisk he walked at length around the countryside looking for a school in which he could teach. The experience of living among and observing rural southern blacks would form the core of his most enduring book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He received his degree from Fisk in 1888 and then attended Harvard University. At Harvard he studied under William James and George Santayana, but for the most part he lived a segregated life, socializing primarily in Boston's black community. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1890, and his graduation speech on the position of blacks in American society attracted attention. He remained at Harvard, finishing his Ph.D. in 1895 after a two-year stint at the University of Berlin in Germany. His dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade 1638-1870," became his first published book and established Du Bois as a major voice in the history profession.

Professor

In 1894, while still completing his doctoral work, Du Bois began his teaching career at Wilberforce University in Ohio. The all-black college was a religious institution, and Du Bois found its strictures confining. In 1896 he obtained a fifteen-month appointment to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. While living in the city's Seventh Ward slums, he began his sociological studies of American blacks. Du Bois was convinced that prejudice was the result of ignorance and that socio-logical study that destroyed stereotypes and myth would gradually remove barriers. He also developed his concept of the "talented tenth," the idea that if 10 percent of blacks could achieve higher education, they could then begin the process of lifting poor and rural blacks out of poverty and inequality. Du Bois's time in Philadelphia resulted in his first work of sociology, The Philadelphia Negro (1898). By the time the book appeared, Du Bois had moved on to a position as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, where he remained until 1910. The years in Atlanta were productive for Du Bois. He was helping to develop the new field of sociology and inventing the field of black studies. While in Atlanta he edited the annual Publications, which summarized the department's work. He published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, written as a direct response to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, then the most influential black man in the country.

Activist

Although he remained a professor through the first decade of the new century, Du Bois's greatest work in the period was as an activist. He became an antilynching activist, but his emergence as a leader of black opinion in the 1900s resulted primarily from his debate with Booker T. Washington. Blacks were divided during the decade. Conservatives like Washington, who had grown up in the shadow of slavery and racism in the South, believed in slow progress, built through technical training and manual labor while tacitly accepting a lower position in American society. Washington's position seemed the path of least resistance in a dangerous racial climate. In 1905 Du Bois and others formed the Niagara Movement at Niagara Falls. Du Bois became the movement's general secretary, and the group issued demands for political and social equality while deriding Washington's policy of appeasement. The following year Du Bois began publishing The Moon, which lasted a year. From 1907 to 1910 he edited Horizon, the magazine of the Niagara Movement. His biography of militant abolitionist John Brown appeared in 1909, a book Du Bois would later consider his best written work. The Niagara Movement formed the core of what in 1909 became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a group of blacks as well as liberal whites determined to combat segregation and racial violence. In 1910 Du Bois left Atlanta University to become the director of publications and research for the NAACP. In his autobiography he wrote that "My career as a scientist was to be swallowed up in my role as master of propaganda. This was not wholly to my liking." Yet, since his early sociological studies, Du Bois had come to realize that numbers and facts were not enough to combat racism. Civil rights would only be obtained through public demands.

The Crisis.

Du Bois became editor of the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, in November 1910, where he remained for twenty-four years. Through The Crisis Du Bois became a leading black voice on all subjects, political and social. The Crisis exploded in popularity from a circulation of one thousand in 1910 to thirty thousand just three years later. Du Bois also became more internationally active. In 1911 he joined the Socialist Party, but left it the following year. He published a novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in 1911 and that same year attended the first Universal Races Congress in London. In 1918 he traveled to France to observe the status and treatment of black soldiers and caused a furor the following year when he published an army memo he had obtained that urged the degrading treatment of black soldiers. He was, however, on record as supporting the war, causing conflict with other NAACP members who wanted to concentrate on the situation in America. In 1919, 1921, and 1923 he attended Pan-African congresses in Europe. And though he disagreed with militant Marcus Garvey's attempt to create an autonomous black Africa and have American blacks immigrate to it, Du Bois did take a strong anti-imperialist stance. While at The Crisis Du Bois published the work of nascent Harlem Renaissance writers who would thrive, some under Du Bois's patronage, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Atlanta Again

In 1934 Du Bois, at age sixty-six, left the NAACP and The Crisis after conflicts with organization leader Walter White. He returned to Atlanta University as chairman of the Sociology Department, where he resumed his career as a teacher as well as a sociologist, while remaining an international spokesman against racism. In 1935 he published an academic work, Black Reconstruction, which attempted to refute the claims of white historians that black politics in Reconstruction had been corrupt and inefficient. He also traveled extensively, visiting Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. Du Bois founded Phylon, a quarterly humanities journal in 1940, and edited it for four years. Du Bois's politics, though he was member of no party, had always been controversial. In 1926 he had visited the Soviet Union for six weeks as a guest of the Communist leadership. His outspokenness regarding American capitalism, about which he felt some ambivalance and eventually distaste, gave him a strong affinity with the leftist movements around the world. He would eventually run into trouble during the McCarthy years before finally joining the Communist Party of America in 1961 at the age of ninety-two. In 1944 he abruptly left Atlanta University and returned to the NAACP as a director of special research. Despite his advancing years he remained active, publishing Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), attending a Pan-African Congress in 1945, and publishing The World and Africa in 1947.

Exile

Du Bois's activism for the cause of peace and equality became a source of trouble. After being dismissed again from the NAACP in 1949, he joined the Council of African Affairs. He ran for the U.S. Senate in New York on the American Labor Party ticket in 1950, and was indicted in 1951 as an "unregistered foreign agent." He was tried and acquitted of the charges but had his passport revoked, which prevented him from traveling between 1952 and 1958. The final years of Du Bois's life were celebratory, however. He had published In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday in 1952, unable to imagine that he would live for another eleven years. He did, however, and even embarked on a world tour in 1958 and 1959, which included his being awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union in 1959. In 1961, at the request of President Kwame Nkrumah, Du Bois moved to Ghana to edit the Encyclopedia Africana. Two years later, just prior to his death, one of America's most influential voices for peace and equality during the twentieth century became a citizen of Ghana.