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Du Bois, W. E. B.

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W.E.B. DuBois Summary

Du Bois, W. E. B.

(b. February 23, 1868; d. August 27, 1963) American writer, sociologist, and civil rights leader.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His mother worked as a maid for local white families, despite being partially paralyzed in her hands and legs by a stroke. When Du Bois was just a year old, his father left home, ostensibly to look for work, and never returned. Though life was difficult and money hard to come by, Du Bois was bright and articulate and he excelled in school. Most of his friends were sons of the middle class white families in town. Du Bois's upbringing was relatively free of racial discrimination.

In 1885, Du Bois moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend historically black Fisk University, where, despite his self-described "blithely European and imperialist" outlook, he began to articulate his ideas about race relations and the importance of economics to American notions of equality. After Fisk, Du Bois fulfilled his long-held desire to attend Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in 1895 after falling under the spell of the burgeoning science of sociology.

Next came a series of teaching and research positions, first at tiny Wilberforce College in Ohio, then at the University of Philadelphia after he moved there with his new wife, Nina. In 1903, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays that became, and is still considered, one of the most important books ever written about the problems of African-American people in the United States. In it, Du Bois separated his philosophy from those of the towering black thinkers of American history, many of which he considered too focused on appeasement and delicately constructed accession. Not long after, Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and went on to serve as the organizations' director of publication and as the editor of its magazine, Crisis, for nearly a quarter of a century.

With the coming of World War I, Du Bois saw an opportunity for black Americans to advance and to win many of the freedoms and protections they had long struggled for. He urged blacks to insist on their right to serve their country by joining the armed forces, an idea the military at first resisted. Later, he used his position in the NAACP and as editor of Crisis to urge Congress to allow blacks to become officers and to establish economic and occupational assistance for returning black veterans. His writing about the moral conundrum of black soldiers voluntarily defending a country that refused to protect them from lynch mobs was widely read and discussed, and immediately became part of America's political and social vocabulary.

W. E. B. Du Bois.

When the war ended, Du Bois used his increased influence and popularity to bring yet more attention to the plight of black people around the world. The pan-African Conferences that he organized, though lauded in certain circles, were unsuccessful largely because of changing ideas among black Americans about how to proceed in the struggle for equality. As Du Bois had anticipated, World War I had been a catalyst for blacks to gain equal rights. For many black Americans who had served their country, a return to the days of political and social repression seemed unthinkable. A new idealism and purpose were afoot. What was missing was a unified voice. For many, like the orator and critic Marcus Garvey, the only solution was separation and a return to Africa. Du Bois' conflict with Garvey, who raised money to purchase a line of sailing ships, was widely reported in the press and served to forestall any attempts to create a viable pan-African political movement.

In 1934, Du Bois resigned his position in the NAACP when his own increasingly militant opinions brought him into conflict with other leading figures within the organization. He returned to Atlanta University, where he had taught from 1897 until 1910, and during the next decade he published many books. Then, having been forced to resign due in part to his increasingly radical views, Du Bois continued to organize international summits to examine the plight of black people in America and abroad. He rejoined the NAACP, but was again ousted when his criticism of U.S. foreign policy became too vocal.

That criticism increased following World War II, with America's ascension to the position of world military superpower. It was in the post war period that Du Bois began to speak out most vocally about the dangers of American imperialism, which he saw as creating a new class of conquered, desperate, and ignored humanity. In 1945, he warned against these dangers at the birth of the United Nations and later convened another pan-African Congress to consider the question and a possible response.

Not all of these gestures met with universal approval among African Americans. Indeed, a visit to the USSR, which cemented the favorable view of socialism Du Bois had developed during the Great Depression, as well as his decision to join the Communist Party in 1961 further alienated him from the mainstream Civil Rights movement. That same year, Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and emigrated to Ghana, Africa, where he undertook the editorship of the massive and audacious Encyclopedia Africana, a work suggested by the country's president and Du Bois's friend Kwame Nkrumah, but never brought to completion.

Du Bois died some six months later, at the age of ninety-four, very far from the land of his birth. The board of the NAACP, with whom he had so often tangled, honored him as "the prime inspirer, philosopher and father of the Negro protest movement."