W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a Berkshire hill town where his mother's family, the Burghardts, had been free and settled since the 1730s. His father Alfred Du Bois left when he was a toddler. He grew up in boardinghouses and rented rooms with his mother Mary Silvina, reading everything he could find. The local Congregational church and a handful of townspeople took up a subscription to pay his college tuition on the condition that he attend a Black institution. He had wanted Harvard. He arrived at Fisk University in Nashville in the fall of 1885, seventeen years old.

Fisk was the first moment in his life at which the color line was plain geography. He taught in one-room schools in rural Tennessee during the summers of 1886 and 1887. He wrote later that the two summers had given him the field notes that underwrote everything he produced for the next seventy years. He graduated Fisk in 1888 and was finally admitted to Harvard that fall as a junior.

He earned the Harvard BA in 1890, his commencement address on Jefferson Davis widely reported at the time, and the Harvard MA in 1891. From 1892 to 1894 he studied in Berlin on a Slater Fund fellowship, attending lectures by the economists Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller and the historian Heinrich von Treitschke. He returned to the United States, completed his dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, and in 1895 became the first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard. The dissertation was published as volume one of the Harvard Historical Series in 1896.

He took a temporary appointment at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 to conduct a study of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, then the largest Black neighborhood in the northern United States. The university gave him a nominal assistant instructorship with no office, no students, and no listing in the catalogue. He spent eighteen months conducting door-to-door interviews in the ward. The result, The Philadelphia Negro, appeared in 1899 and is now recognized as the first major empirical urban sociology study conducted in the United States. Max Weber's comparable works on German cities had not yet been published.

From 1897 to 1910 he taught at Atlanta University, where he organized the annual Atlanta Conferences and edited their published proceedings, a sixteen-volume series of empirical studies of Black life across the South. The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903. The book gathered fourteen essays, half previously published, into a single argument that fused history, memoir, and sociology. It introduced the phrases the color line, the veil, and double consciousness into American writing. It sold through a dozen printings in the first decade after publication.

He broke publicly with Booker T. Washington the same year. Washington's 1895 Atlanta address had urged Black Southerners to accept disfranchisement and segregation in exchange for industrial training. Du Bois had praised the speech at the time. By 1903 he had concluded that accommodation had yielded nothing but the loss of the vote and the spread of lynching. He organized the Niagara Movement in July 1905 with William Monroe Trotter and twenty-eight other men who met on the Canadian side of the falls because no American hotel near the falls would house them. The Niagara program demanded full suffrage, equal access to public education, and the end of segregated transportation.

The Niagara Movement folded into the NAACP at its 1909 founding. Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, and a group of white progressives convened the meeting after the 1908 Springfield, Illinois riot. Ida B. Wells signed the call, as did Du Bois. He became the only Black officer in the new organization and took the title Director of Publications and Research. From that desk he founded The Crisis magazine in November 1910. He edited it for twenty-four years. Its circulation reached over 100,000 at its peak in the 1920s. It was the most widely read Black magazine in America.

He organized the First Pan-African Congress in Paris in February 1919, convening it alongside the Versailles peace conference and over the objections of the United States State Department, which denied passports to most of the American delegates. He would organize four more: London and Brussels in 1921, London and Lisbon in 1923, New York in 1927, and Manchester in 1945. The Manchester Congress, which Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta helped organize, is now studied as the political origin point of African decolonization.

He resigned from the NAACP in 1934 after a dispute with Walter White over whether Black institutions ought to be strengthened under segregation or only dismantled. He returned to Atlanta University to teach. Black Reconstruction in America appeared in 1935. The book ran 720 pages and argued, against the consensus of American historiography at the time, that the formerly enslaved had been the decisive political actors of the Reconstruction era and that the failure of Reconstruction was a counter-revolution by white capital. It was ignored by most white historians for three decades. It is now considered a foundational text of American history.

He returned to the NAACP briefly in the 1940s and was forced out again in 1948 after clashing with Walter White over the direction of the United Nations delegation. He grew more openly Pan-Africanist and more openly socialist. In February 1951, at age eighty-three, he was indicted by a federal grand jury as an unregistered foreign agent for his work with the Peace Information Center. The case was dismissed in November 1951. His passport was withheld for eight years. He did not travel internationally again until 1958.

He joined the Communist Party of the United States in October 1961 at the age of ninety-three. That same month he accepted Kwame Nkrumah's invitation to move to Accra, Ghana, and supervise the editing of the Encyclopedia Africana, a project he had proposed in 1909 and finally funded by the Ghanaian government. Nina Gomer Du Bois, his first wife of fifty-five years, had died in 1950. Shirley Graham Du Bois, the novelist and playwright he had married in 1951, moved with him to Accra.

He became a Ghanaian citizen in February 1963. He died in his sleep at his Accra residence on August 27, 1963, at ninety-five. Roy Wilkins announced the death from the Lincoln Memorial podium the next afternoon, in the opening moments of the March on Washington, and asked the crowd to observe a moment of silence. He was buried with state honors outside the Castle Gardens in Accra. His grave and the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture are a pilgrimage site for the African diaspora.