W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois, called the father of pan-Africanism for his work on behalf of the emerging African nations, devoted his life to the struggle for equality for African Americans and all people of color. He ranks among the great American historians, and his commitment and intellectual depth made him one of the foremost reformers of the 20th century.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His father was of French and African descent; his mother, Mary Sylvina Burghardt, belonged to an African American family long in Great Barrington. Deserted by her husband, she brought up her son alone, working as a domestic. Though he was often the only African American child in his classes, Du Bois experienced little, if any, discrimination in the New England town. At 15, having shown a literary gift, he became a correspondent for a black newspaper, The New York Globe. A year later, after his mother died, local people undertook to pay for his education.

In 1885, Du Bois was introduced to racism when he went south to enter Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, an African American institution with, at that time, a white faculty. He also encountered the African American world of the South. His often humiliating experiences led him to an understanding of the dual consciousness of the African American. At Fisk, Du Bois wrote his senior thesis on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck, who had unified his nation. Du Bois saw unification under a trained leadership as the model for African Americans. In 1888, he entered Harvard University and earned master's degrees, studying with such professors as William James and Josiah Royce. On a grant, he spent two years in Europe, studying at the University of Berlin, where he first encountered socialist ideas.

In 1894, Du Bois returned to the United States and taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio. During two years there, he completed his Harvard dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (Ph.D., 1895), published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Series. Also in that year, he married Nina Gomer, a fellow student of part-German ancestry.

Du Bois accepted a year's nonteaching appointment at the University of Pennsylvania to prepare a study, commissioned by local liberals, of the African American population of Philadelphia. Living in a slum, he interviewed more than 5,000 people and compiled data on every aspect of their lives and relationship to the white population. The Philadelphia Negro (1899), one of the first studies based on empirical sociological research, emphasized Du Bois's view that a black elite (what he labeled the "Talented Tenth"), using scientific methods, should lead the black masses. His experience in Philadelphia reinforced his sense of "twoness," not only in his but in the African American personality.

In 1897, Du Bois went to Atlanta University as professor of economics, sociology, and history and leader of its annual Conference for the Study of Negro Problems. In London in 1900 for a pan-African conference, he prophesied in a celebrated address that "the problem of the twentieth century [would be] the problem of the ." Du Bois's consciousness of racial inequality had been deepened by the death of his infant son, for which he blamed the poor medical facilities for African Americans.

Du Bois took issue with the message of Booker T. Washington, when, in 1902, he reviewed Washington's autobiography. He recognized the value of Washington's work at the Tuskegee Institute, emphasizing vocational training, but he could not accept Washington's tolerance of social inequality and political subordination. Unlike Washington, Du Bois never compromised his insistence that African Americans be granted full political and civil rights. The next year, Du Bois published his most famous work, , essays presenting a complex picture of African Americans through a mixture of sociology, history, biography, and anecdote. His move toward radicalism was reflected in the , which he organized in 1905 to agitate against segregation in any form, and his biography of (1909), which extolled the abolitionist.

In 1910, Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York; he served as director of publications and research. He founded and for more than 20 years edited its influential monthly journal, . In World War I, Du Bois gave strong support to President Woodrow Wilson and the Allies. His editorial "Close Ranks," which urged African Americans to forget differences and join whites in the war effort, brought criticism from many African American readers. After the war, he took the lead in organizing several pan-African congresses seeking to influence the administration of colonies, though with little effect. Du Bois detested Marcus Garvey and his nationalist "Back to Africa" movement.

Du Bois encouraged the literary and artistic flowering in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance, though he criticized the work of some of its figures as being overly free and warned young African American writers against dependence upon white patrons.

In 1926, Du Bois visited the Soviet Union and deepened his sympathy with communism. During the Great Depression, his stand for African American self-sufficiency and self-help programs based on economic nationalism brought him into disfavor with NAACP advocates of integrated action and free enterprise. Another problem was Du Bois's often distant and cold manner, especially with whites. When he resigned in 1934, however, the NAACP praised his having created with Crisis "a Negro intelligentsia, and many who have never read a word of his writings are his spiritual descendants."

Having returned to Atlanta University as chairman of the sociology department, Du Bois produced a Marxist historical work, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935); carried on a weekly column in black newspapers; wrote an autobiography, (1940); and encouraged a new generation of social scientists, including Ralph Bunche.

When Du Bois's radical pronouncements caused the university's conservative administrators to retire him at the age of 76, and he had little security, the NAACP came to his aid with a modest job as special research director. Du Bois produced works criticizing capitalism and colonialism and urging pan-Africanism, and in 1948, the NAACP dismissed him. He became active in international peace and antinuclear movements and in 1951, was indicted as a foreign agent. Though he was acquitted, his passport was revoked. Du Bois had remarried after the death of his first wife, and at that point, he devoted several years to writing a three- volume novel. After the Department of State restored his passport in 1958, he toured Western Europe and the communist countries, receiving the Lenin Peace Prize in Moscow on May Day 1959.

In 1961, Du Bois joined the Communist Party and left the United States for Ghana at the invitation of its president, Kwame Nkrumah. Subsequently, he renounced American citizenship and became a Ghanaian. Du Bois died of natural causes in the capital, Accra, on August 27, 1963, and was buried there.

"W. E. B. Du Bois." World History: The Modern Era. ABC-CLIO, 2009. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .