W. B. DuBois E.

Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. W. E. B. Du Bois — A Chronology —

1868 Born, February 23rd, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. 1880-1884 Attends Great Barrington High School; Western Massachusetts Correspondent for the New York Age, the New York Globe and the Springfield Republican; graduates as class valedictorian. 1885-1888 Attends Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; teaches in rural school districts during the summers; editor of the Fisk Herald; receives B.A. in 1888. 1888-1890 Enters Harvard as a junior and receives B.A., graduating cum laude. 1890-1892 Begins graduate study at Harvard. 1892-1894 Studies at the University of Berlin with a fellowship from the Slater Fund. 1894-1896 Teaches Latin and Greek at Wilberforce University in Ohio; marries Nina Gomer. 1896 Receives Ph.D. from Harvard; his dissertation “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade” is published by Harvard University Press. 1896-1897 Instructor of Sociology, the University of Pennsylvania; publishes The Philadelphia Negro; son Burghardt Gomer Du Bois born on October 2, 1897. 1897-1910 Teaches history and economics, Atlanta University; initiates the Atlanta University Studies. 1899 Son Burghardt Gomer Du Bois dies on May 24, 1899. 1900 Daughter Yolande Du Bois born in 1900. 1903 Publishes The Souls of Black Folk. 1905-1909 Founder and General Secretary of The Niagara Movement. 1910-1934 Director of Publicity and Research, Member Board of Directors, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 1910-1934 Founder and Editor of The Crisis, monthly magazine of the NAACP. 1919 Calls Pan-African Congress in Paris. 1920 Receives the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP. 1923 Special Ambassador Representing the United States at the inauguration of President King of Liberia. 1934 Resigns from the NAACP. 1934-1944 Returns to Atlanta University as Head, Department of Sociology; publishes Black Reconstruction. 1944-1948 Returns to NAACP as Director of Publicity and Research. 1945 Attends founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco as representative of the NAACP. 1948 Co-chairman, Council on African Affairs. 1950 Chairman, Peace Information Center in New York City; candidate for U.S. Senate for New York Progressive Party. Wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, dies and is buried in Great Barrington. 1951 Indictment, trial, and acquittal of subversive activities charges brought against him by the Justice Department; marries Shirley Graham. 1951-1959 Extensive speaking, writing, and international travel; wins Lenin Peace Prize in 1958. 1960 Daughter Yolande Du Bois dies in 1960. 1961 Becomes member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Invited to Ghana by President Kwame Nkrumah to edit the Encyclopedia Africana. 1963 Becomes citizen of Ghana. Dies on August 27th and is buried with a state funeral in Accra. Du Bois’s death is announced by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP as the March on Washington begins on August 28th. W. E. B. Du Bois — A Brief Biography —

Scholar, teacher, activist, leader, author... W. E. B. Du Bois’s accomplishments are almost too numerous to name. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois was born in the small Massachusetts village of Great Barrington, in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. Unlike most black Americans, his family had not just emerged from slavery. His great-grandfather had fought in the American Revolution, and the Burghardts had been an accepted part of the community for generations. Du Bois’ father left home soon after Du Bois was born, and the boy was raised largely by his mother, who imparted to her child the sense of a special destiny. She encouraged his studies and his adherence to the Victorian virtues of 19th century rural New England. Du Bois excelled at school and outshone his white contemporaries, but as he reached adolescence, he began to notice the subtle social boundaries which he was expected to observe. The influential leaders of his community recognized his academic promise and quietly decided his future. They saw an opportunity to perform an act of Christian generosity toward a promising student, and they arranged for him to attend Fisk University in Nashville. Du Bois had always wanted to go to Harvard and he was initially disappointed, but his experience at Fisk changed his life. It helped to clarify his identity and pointed him in the direction of his life’s work. At Fisk he encountered children of former slaves who had suffered oppression but had also nourished a rich cultural and spiritual tradition that Du Bois recognized as his own. Du Bois also encountered the White South, where the achievements of Reconstruction were being destroyed. He encountered the suffering as well as the dignity of rural blacks when he taught school during the summers in East Tennessee, and he resolved that in some way his life would be dedicated to a struggle against racial and economic oppression. His determination to continue his education was rewarded when he was offered a scholarship to study at Harvard University. Du Bois’ life was a struggle of warring ideas and ideals. He entered Harvard during a progressive era; he was smitten with the ideal of science – that objective truth that could dispel the irrational prejudices and ignorance that stood in the way of a just social order. From the University of Berlin he brought back the German scientific ideal. At Atlanta University he created landmarks in the scientific study of race relations. Du Bois’s faith in the detached role of the scientist was shaken as he saw the nation retreating into barbarism. Repressive segregation laws, lynching, and terror were on the increase, despite the march of science. After the Atlanta Riot of 1906, Du Bois’s “Litany at Atlanta” passionately challenged the forces of repression and destruction. He was one of the founders of the Niagara Movement and later the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He became an impassioned opponent of a legal, political, and economic system that thrived on the exploitation of the poor and the powerless. As he pointed out the connections between the plight of Afro- Americans and those who suffered under colonial rule in other areas of the world, his struggle assumed international proportions. The Pan-African Movement that flowered after World War I was the beginning of the creation of a third world consciousness. Du Bois’ style of leadership was intensely personal. He sought no mass following like Marcus Garvey, and the fierceness and unyielding determination with which he fought for his ideals alienated many who counseled less direct means of achieving limited political goals. He had fought for many progressive causes but after World War II saw them consumed by a cold war mentality that silenced rational debate. As he became more of an international figure, Du Bois was accepted less and less by his contemporaries at home. Yet when he left the United States to become a citizen of Ghana in 1961, he saw it not as a rejection of his countrymen but as a return to the land of his forefathers. Du Bois’ mature vision was a reconciliation of the “sense of double consciousness” — the “two warring ideals” of being both black and an American — that he had written about fifty years earlier. He came to accept struggle and conflict as essential elements of life, but he continued to believe in the inevitable progress of the human race ─ that out of individual struggles against a divided self and political struggles of the oppressed against their oppressors, a broader and fuller human life would emerge that would benefit all of mankind. from a longer biography by Kerry W. Buckley / Special Collections and University Archives at UMass Amherst