Du Bois's great-grandfather, James Du Bois, was a wealthy white physician from Poughkeepsie, New York, who had married a black slave. His son, Alexander, was a merchant in New Haven, Connecticut, who, in the wake of Haitian independence, had moved to the former French colony during the late 1820s. Alexander's son Alfred, Du Bois's father, was born in Haiti. He returned with his father to New Haven in 1833 or 1834. Alfred met Mary Burghardt after service in the Civil War, but disappeared from the family shortly after his son's birth.
In Great Barrington Du Bois grew up in a racially diverse environment and was one of the few black children to attend the public schools, where he was successful academically. But school was also the place where he had his first experience of racism. He describes repeatedly in his life narratives, such as The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Dusk of Dawn (1940), and The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1908), an exchange of greeting cards among the students during which a white girl refused to accept his card.
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