W E B Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was born on Church Street on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington at the south-western edge of Massachusetts, to Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois. His father and paternal grandfather were from Haiti. Du Bois was born free and did not have contact with his biological father who left the family. His maternal grandparents didn’t like his father, and Du Bois blamed them for his departure. Du Bois was very close to his mother Mary. After Mary suffered a stroke which left her unable to work, they survived on money from family members and Du Bois' after-school jobs.

Du Bois did not feel differently because of his skin color while he was in school until a white girl refused to accept something from him, one day, because he was black. It was then that realized there would always be some kind of barrier between whites and others.

Du Bois was an outsider because of his status, being poor, not having a father and being extremely intellectual for his age; however, he was very comfortable academically. He was encouraged to further his education with college preparatory courses by those who recognized his intelligence. This show of confidence led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans.

He graduated from Fisk University in 1888. Fisk was in Nashville, Tennessee and it was there that Du Bois was exposed to segregation and the social and economic residuals of slavery that continued to keep most blacks in a squalid state of poverty and impotence in the South. He earned a bachelor's degree cum laude from Harvard College in 1890. In 1891, he received an M.A. in history from Harvard. In 1892, he received a stipend to attend the University of Berlin. While in Berlin, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, and studied with some of the most prominent social scientists in the German capital. Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1896. His dissertation was an exhaustive study of the history of the slave trade -- one that is still considered one of the most comprehensive on that subject. He taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio and the University of Pennsylvania. While teaching at Atlanta University, he established the department of sociology.

Du Bois wrote 22 books, including five novels, and he helped to establish four journals. He began writing about crime in 1897. He wrote ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ in 1899, which gave an in depth criminological study and a large section was devoted to analysis of the black criminal population in Philadelphia. He also wrote ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ in 1903, ‘John Brown’ in 1909, ‘Black Reconstruction’ in 1935, and ‘Black Folk, Then and Now’ in 1939. In ‘Reconstruction’, Du Bois documented how black people were central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction. He demonstrated the ways Black emancipation—the crux of Reconstruction—promoted a radical restructuring of United States society, as well as how and why the country turned its back on human rights for African Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction.

At the 1900 Paris World's Fair, DuBois created a full-scale exhibit of African American achievement since the Emancipation Procamation in industrial work, literature, and journalism. In 1905, Du Bois helped to found the Niagara Movement which was a group of African-American leaders committed to an active struggle for racial equality. Its manifesto was, in the words of Du Bois, "We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now.... We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win."

In 1909, Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1910, he left his teaching post at Atlanta University to work as publications director at the NAACP full-time. For 25 years, Du Bois worked as Editor-in-Chief of the NAACP publication

During World War I, Du Bois was offered an Army commission as an officer. He accepted but failed to pass the physical. Du Bois was impressed by the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. He saw the victory of Japan over Tsarist Russia as an example of "colored pride". During 1936, Du Bois visited Nazi Germany. He later noted that he received more respect from German academics than he had from white colleagues at American universities. He expressed his admiration for the manner in which the Nazis had improved the German economy but also his horror at their treatment of the Jews, which he described as "an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade".

Du Bois was investigated by the FBI, who claimed in May of 1942 that "his writing indicates him to be a socialist," and that he "has been called a Communist and at the same time criticized by the Communist Party. Du Bois visited Communist China and in the March 16, 1953 issue of The National Guardian, Du Bois wrote "Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature."

Du Bois was chairman of the Peace Information Center at the start of the Korean War. He was among the signers of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, which opposed the use of nuclear weapons. In 1950, he ran for the U.S. Senate on the American Labor Party ticket in New York and received 4% of the vote. He was indicted in the United States under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and acquitted for lack of evidence. W. E. B. Du Bois became disillusioned with both black capitalism and racism in the United States. In 1959, Du Bois received the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party USA.

Du Bois was invited to Ghana in 1961 by President Kwame Nkrumah to direct the Encyclopedia Africana, a government production, and a long-held dream of his. When, in 1963, he was refused a new U.S. passport, he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, became citizens of Ghana, making them dual citizens of Ghana and the United States. Du Bois' health had declined in 1962, and on August 27, 1963, he died in Accra, Ghana at the age of ninety-five, one day before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

His life and work improved the lives of blacks across the country while educating all races about the contributions of African Americans to American society.