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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (/duːˈbɔɪs/ doo-BOYSS; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Before that, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.
Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice in the United States military.
Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."
He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.
Early life
An old brick church surrounded by trees
As a child, Du Bois attended the Congregational Church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Church members collected donations to pay Du Bois's college tuition.[1]
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred and Mary Silvina (née Burghardt) Du Bois.[2] Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state. She was descended from Dutch, African and English ancestors.[3] William Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave (born in West Africa around 1730) who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, which may have been how he gained his freedom during the late 18th century.[4] His son Jack Burghardt was the father of Othello Burghardt, who in turn was the father of Mary Silvina Burghardt.[4]
William Du Bois claimed Elizabeth Freeman as his relative; he wrote that she had married his great-grandfather Jack Burghardt.[5][6] But Freeman was 20 years older than Burghardt, and no record of such a marriage has been found. It may have been Freeman's daughter, Betsy Humphrey, who married Burghardt after her first husband, Jonah Humphrey, left the area "around 1811", and after Burghardt's first wife died (c. 1810). If so, Freeman would have been William Du Bois's step-great-great-grandmother. Anecdotal evidence supports Humphrey's marrying Burghardt; a close relationship of some form is likely.[7]
William Du Bois's paternal great-grandfather was James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, an ethnic French-American of Huguenot origin who fathered several children with slave women.[8] One of James' mixed-race sons was Alexander, who was born on Long Cay in the Bahamas in 1803; in 1810 he immigrated to the United States with his father.[9] Alexander Du Bois traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, with a mistress. Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother.[10]
Sometime before 1860, Alfred Du Bois immigrated to the United States, settling in Massachusetts. He married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic.[10] Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after their son William was born.[11] Mary Du Bois moved with her son back to her parents' house in Great Barrington, and they lived there until he was five. She worked to support her family (receiving some assistance from her brother and neighbors), until she suffered a stroke in the early 1880s. She died in 1885.[12]
Great Barrington had a majority European American community, who generally treated Du Bois well. He attended the local integrated public school and played with white schoolmates. As an adult, he wrote about racism which he felt as a fatherless child and the experience of being a minority in the town. But teachers recognized his ability and encouraged his intellectual pursuits, and his rewarding experience with academic studies led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans.[13] Du Bois graduated from the town's Searles High School. When Du Bois decided to attend college, the congregation of his childhood church, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, raised the money for his tuition.[14]
University education
Relying on money donated by neighbors, Du Bois attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1885 to 1888.[15] His travel to and residency in the South was Du Bois's first experience with Southern racism, which at the time encompassed Jim Crow laws, bigotry, suppression of black voting, and lynchings; the lattermost reached a peak in the next decade.[16] After receiving a bachelor's degree from Fisk, he attended Harvard College (which did not accept course credits from Fisk) from 1888 to 1890, where he was strongly influenced by his professor William James, prominent in American philosophy.[17] Du Bois paid his way through three years at Harvard with money from summer jobs, an inheritance, scholarships, and loans from friends. In 1890, Harvard awarded Du Bois his second bachelor's degree, cum laude, in history.[18] In 1891, Du Bois received a scholarship to attend the sociology graduate school at Harvard.[19]
In 1892, Du Bois received a fellowship from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen to attend the University of Berlin for graduate work.[20] While a student in Berlin, he traveled extensively throughout Europe. He came of age intellectually in the German capital while studying with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists, including Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitschke.[21] After returning from Europe, Du Bois completed his graduate studies; in 1895 he was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.[22]
Wilberforce and Philadelphia
In the summer of 1894, Du Bois received several job offers, including one from the prestigious Tuskegee Institute; he accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio.[24] At Wilberforce, Du Bois was strongly influenced by Alexander Crummell, who believed that ideas and morals are necessary tools to effect social change.[25] While at Wilberforce, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, one of his students, on May 12, 1896.[26]
After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in the summer of 1896.[27] He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, research which formed the foundation for his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899 while he was teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a black community in the United States.[28] By the 1890s, Philadelphia's black neighborhoods had a negative reputation in terms of crime, poverty, and mortality. Du Bois's book undermined the stereotypes with empirical evidence and shaped his approach to segregation and its negative impact on black lives and reputations. The results led Du Bois to realize that racial integration was the key to democratic equality in American cities.[29]
While taking part in the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass's plea for black Americans to integrate into white society. He wrote: "we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland".[30] In the August 1897 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Du Bois published "Strivings of the Negro People", his first work aimed at the general public, in which he enlarged upon his thesis that African Americans should embrace their African heritage while contributing to American society.[31]
Atlanta University
In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University in Georgia.[32] His first major academic work was his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on the field work he did in 1896–1897. The work was a breakthrough in scholarship because it was the first scientific study of African Americans and a major contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S.[33][34] In the study, Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass. Later in 1903 he popularized the term, the "Talented Tenth", applied to society's elite class.[35] Du Bois's terminology reflected his opinion that the elite of a nation, both black and white, were critical to achievements in culture and progress.[35] Du Bois wrote in this period in a dismissive way of the underclass, describing them as "lazy" or "unreliable", but – in contrast to other scholars – he attributed many of their societal problems to the ravages of slavery.[36]
Du Bois's output at Atlanta University was prodigious, in spite of a limited budget: he produced numerous social science papers and annually hosted the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems.[37] Du Bois also received grants from the U.S. government to prepare reports about African-American workforce and culture.[38] His students considered him to be a brilliant, but aloof and strict, teacher.[39]
First Pan-African Conference
In 1900 Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London from July 23 to 25. (This was just before the Paris Exhibition of 1900 "to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events".)[40] It was organized by men from the Caribbean: Haitians Anténor Firmin and Bénito Sylvain and Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams.[41] Du Bois played a leading role in drafting a letter ("Address to the Nations of the World") to European leaders appealing to them to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government and to demand political and other rights for African Americans.[42] By this time, southern states were passing new laws and constitutions to disfranchise most African Americans, an exclusion from the political system that lasted into the 1960s.
At the conclusion of the conference, delegates unanimously adopted the "Address to the Nations of the World", and sent it to various heads of state where people of African descent were living and suffering oppression.[43] The address implored the United States and the imperial European nations to "acknowledge and protect the rights of people of African descent" and to respect the integrity and independence of "the free Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, etc."[44] It was signed by Bishop Alexander Walters (President of the Pan-African Association), the Canadian Rev. Henry B. Brown (Vice-President), Williams (General Secretary) and Du Bois (Chairman of the Committee on the Address).[45] The address included Du Bois's observation, "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line." He used this again three years later in the "Forethought" of his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).[46]
Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise
In the first decade of the new century, Du Bois emerged as a spokesperson for his race, second only to Booker T. Washington.[47] Washington was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and wielded tremendous influence within the African-American and white communities.[48] Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal he struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction. Essentially the agreement provided that Southern blacks, who overwhelmingly lived in rural communities, would submit to the current discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement, and non-unionized employment; that Southern whites would permit blacks to receive a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; and that Northern whites would invest in Southern enterprises and fund black educational charities.[49]
Despite initially sending congratulations to Washington for his Atlanta Exposition Speech,[50][51] Du Bois later came to oppose Washington's plan, along with many other African Americans, including Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar – representatives of the class of educated blacks that Du Bois would later call the "talented tenth".[52] Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights and higher opportunities, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise.[53]
Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred near Atlanta in 1899.[54] Hose was tortured, burned and hung by a mob of two thousand whites.[54] When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display.[54] The episode stunned Du Bois, and he resolved that "one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved".[55] Du Bois realized that "the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth".[56]
In 1901, Du Bois wrote a review critical of Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery,[57] which he later expanded and published to a wider audience as the essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" in The Souls of Black Folk.[58] Later in life, Du Bois regretted having been critical of Washington in those essays.[59] One of the contrasts between the two leaders was their approach to education: Washington felt that African-American schools should focus primarily on industrial education topics such as agricultural and mechanical skills, to prepare southern blacks for the opportunities in the rural areas where most lived.[60] Du Bois felt that black schools should focus more on liberal arts and academic curriculum (including the classics, arts, and humanities), because liberal arts were required to develop a leadership elite.[61] However, as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and economists Gunnar Myrdal and Thomas Sowell have argued, such disagreement over education was a minor point of difference between Washington and Du Bois; both men acknowledged the importance of the form of education that the other emphasized.[62][63][64] Sowell has also argued that, despite genuine disagreements between the two leaders, the supposed animosity between Washington and Du Bois actually formed among their followers, not between Washington and Du Bois themselves.[65] Du Bois himself also made this observation in an interview published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1965.[66]
Niagara Movement
In 1905, Du Bois and several other African-American civil rights activists – including Fredrick L. McGhee, Jesse Max Barber and William Monroe Trotter – met in Canada, near Niagara Falls.[67] There they wrote a declaration of principles opposing the Atlanta Compromise, and incorporated as the Niagara Movement in 1906.[68]
Du Bois and the other "Niagarites" wanted to publicize their ideals to other African Americans, but most black periodicals were owned by publishers sympathetic to Washington. Du Bois bought a printing press and started publishing Moon Illustrated Weekly in December 1905.[68] It was the first African-American illustrated weekly, and Du Bois used it to attack Washington's positions, but the magazine lasted only for about eight months.[69] Du Bois soon founded and edited another vehicle for his polemics, The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, which debuted in 1907. Freeman H. M. Murray and Lafayette M. Hershaw served as The Horizon's co-editors.[70]
The Niagarites held a second conference in August 1906, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's birth, at the West Virginia site of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.[69] Reverdy C. Ransom spoke and addressed the fact that Washington's primary goal was to prepare blacks for employment in their current society: "Today, two classes of Negroes, ... are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations; ... The other class believe that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place ... it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain."[71]
The souls of black folk
In an effort to portray the genius and humanity of the black race, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of 14 essays.[72] James Weldon Johnson said the book's effect on African Americans was comparable to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.[73] The introduction famously proclaimed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line".[74] Each chapter begins with two epigraphs – one from a white poet, and one from a black spiritual – to demonstrate intellectual and cultural parity between black and white cultures.[75] A major theme of the work was the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future: "Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation."[76]
Jonathon S. Kahn in Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of Du Bois shows how Du Bois, in his The Souls of Black Folk, represents an exemplary text of pragmatic religious naturalism. On page 12 Kahn writes: "Du Bois needs to be understood as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist. By this I mean that, like Du Bois the American traditional pragmatic religious naturalism, which runs through William James, George Santayana and John Dewey, seeks religion without metaphysical foundations." Kahn's interpretation of religious naturalism is very broad but he relates it to specific thinkers. Du Bois's anti-metaphysical viewpoint places him in the sphere of religious naturalism as typified by William James and others.[77]
Racial violence
Two calamities in the autumn of 1906 shocked African Americans, and they contributed to strengthening support for Du Bois's struggle for civil rights to prevail over Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. First, President Teddy Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 black soldiers because they were accused of crimes as a result of the Brownsville Affair. Many of the discharged soldiers had served for 20 years and were near retirement.[78] Second, in September, riots broke out in Atlanta, precipitated by unfounded allegations of black men assaulting white women. This was a catalyst for racial tensions based on a job shortage and employers playing black workers against white workers.[79] Ten thousand whites rampaged through Atlanta, beating every black person they could find, resulting in over 25 deaths.[80] In the aftermath of the 1906 violence, Du Bois urged blacks to withdraw their support from the Republican Party, because Republicans Roosevelt and William Howard Taft did not sufficiently support blacks. Most African Americans had been loyal to the Republican Party since the time of Abraham Lincoln.[81]
Du Bois wrote the essay, "A Litany at Atlanta", which asserted that the riot demonstrated that the Atlanta Compromise was a failure. Despite upholding their end of the bargain, blacks had failed to receive legal justice in the South.[82] Historian David Levering Lewis has written that the Compromise no longer held because white patrician planters, who took a paternalistic role, had been replaced by aggressive businessmen who were willing to pit blacks against whites.[82] These two calamities were watershed events for the African-American community, marking the ascendancy of Du Bois's vision of equal rights.[83]
Academic work
In addition to writing editorials, Du Bois continued to produce scholarly work at Atlanta University. In 1909, after five years of effort, he published a biography of abolitionist John Brown. It contained many insights, but also contained some factual errors.[84] The work was strongly criticized by The Nation, which was owned by Oswald Villard, who was writing his own, competing biography of John Brown.[85] Du Bois's work was largely ignored by white scholars.[85] After publishing a piece in Collier's magazine warning of the end of "white supremacy", Du Bois had difficulty getting pieces accepted by major periodicals. But he did continue to publish columns regularly in The Horizon magazine.[86]
Du Bois was the first African American invited by the American Historical Association (AHA) to present a paper at their annual conference. He read his paper, Reconstruction and Its Benefits, to an astounded audience at the AHA's December 1909 conference.[88] The paper went against the mainstream historical view, promoted by the Dunning School of scholars at Columbia University, that Reconstruction was a disaster, caused by the ineptitude and sloth of blacks. To the contrary, Du Bois asserted that the brief period of African-American leadership in the South accomplished three important goals: democracy, free public schools, and new social welfare legislation.[89] He asserted that it was the federal government's failure to manage the Freedmen's Bureau, to distribute land, and to establish an educational system, that doomed African-American prospects in the South.[89] When Du Bois submitted the paper for publication a few months later in the American Historical Review, he asked that the word Negro be capitalized. The editor, J. Franklin Jameson, refused, and published the paper without the capitalization.[90] The paper was mostly ignored by white historians.[89] Du Bois later developed his paper as his ground-breaking 1935 book, Black Reconstruction, which marshaled extensive facts to support his assertions.[88] The AHA did not invite another African-American speaker until 1940.[91]
NAACP era
In May 1909, Du Bois attended the National Negro Conference in New York.[92] The meeting led to the creation of the National Negro Committee, chaired by Oswald Villard, and dedicated to campaigning for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities.[93] The following spring, in 1910, at the second National Negro Conference, the attendees created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[94] At Du Bois's suggestion, the word "colored", rather than "black", was used to include "dark skinned people everywhere".[95] Dozens of civil rights supporters, black and white, participated in the founding, but most executive officers were white, including Mary Ovington, Charles Edward Russell, William English Walling, and its first president, Moorfield Storey.[96]
The Crisis
NAACP leaders offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research.[97] He accepted the job in the summer of 1910, and moved to New York after resigning from Atlanta University. His primary duty was editing the NAACP's monthly magazine, which he named The Crisis.[98] The first issue appeared in November 1910, and Du Bois pronounced that its aim was to set out "those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people".[99] The journal was phenomenally successful, and its circulation would reach 100,000 in 1920.[100] Typical articles in the early editions included one that inveighed against the dishonesty and parochialism of black churches, and one that discussed the Afrocentric origins of Egyptian civilization.[101]
An important Du Bois editorial from 1911 helped initiate a nationwide push to induce the Federal government to outlaw lynching. Du Bois, employing the sarcasm he frequently used, commented on a lynching in Pennsylvania: "The point is he was black. Blackness must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes ... It is therefore necessary, as every white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this crime of crimes. Of course if possible, the pretext should be great and overwhelming – some awful stunning crime, made even more horrible by the reporters' imagination. Failing this, mere murder, arson, barn burning or impudence may do."[102]
The Crisis carried editorials by Du Bois that supported the ideals of unionized labor but excoriated the racism demonstrated by its leaders, who systematically excluded blacks from membership.[103] Du Bois also supported the principles of the Socialist Party (he was briefly a member of the party from 1910 to 1912), but he denounced the racism demonstrated by some socialist leaders.[104] Frustrated by Republican president Taft's failure to address widespread lynching, Du Bois endorsed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential race, in exchange for Wilson's promise to support black causes.[105]
Throughout his writings, Du Bois supported women's rights,[106] but he found it difficult to publicly endorse the women's right-to-vote movement because leaders of the suffragism movement refused to support his fight against racial injustice.[107] A Crisis editorial from 1913 broached the taboo subject of interracial marriage: although Du Bois generally expected persons to marry within their race, he viewed the problem as a women's rights issue, because laws prohibited white men from marrying black women. Du Bois wrote "[anti-miscegenation] laws leave the colored girls absolutely helpless for the lust of white men. It reduces colored women in the eyes of the law to the position of dogs. As low as the white girl falls, she can compel her seducer to marry her ... We must kill [anti-miscegenation laws] not because we are anxious to marry the white men's sisters, but because we are determined that white men will leave our sisters alone."[108]
During the years 1915 and 1916, some leaders of the NAACP – disturbed by financial losses at The Crisis, and worried about the inflammatory rhetoric of some of its essays – attempted to oust Du Bois from his editorial position. Du Bois and his supporters prevailed, and he continued in his role as editor.[109] In a 1919 column titled "The True Brownies", he announced the creation of The Brownies' Book, the first magazine published for African-American children and youth, which he founded with Augustus Granville Dill and Jessie Redmon Fauset.[110][111]
Historian and author
The 1910s were a productive time for Du Bois. In 1911 he attended the First Universal Races Congress in London[112] and he published his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece.[113] Two years later, Du Bois wrote, produced, and directed a pageant for the stage, The Star of Ethiopia.[114] In 1915, Du Bois published The Negro, a general history of black Africans, and the first of its kind in English.[115] The book rebutted claims of African inferiority, and would come to serve as the basis of much Afrocentric historiography in the 20th century.[115] The Negro predicted unity and solidarity for colored people around the world, and it influenced many who supported the Pan-African movement.[115]
In 1915, The Atlantic Monthly carried an essay by Du Bois, "The African Roots of the War", which consolidated Du Bois's ideas on capitalism and race.[116] In it, he argued that the scramble for Africa was at the root of World War I. He also anticipated later Communist doctrine, by suggesting that wealthy capitalists had pacified white workers by giving them just enough wealth to prevent them from revolting, and by threatening them with competition by the lower-cost labor of colored workers.[117]
Combating racism
Du Bois used his influential role in the NAACP to oppose a variety of racist incidents. When the silent film The Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, Du Bois and the NAACP led the fight to ban the movie, because of its racist portrayal of blacks as brutish and lustful.[119] The fight was not successful, and possibly contributed to the film's fame, but the publicity drew many new supporters to the NAACP.[120]
The private sector was not the only source of racism: under President Wilson, the plight of African Americans in government jobs suffered. Many federal agencies adopted whites-only employment practices, the Army excluded blacks from officer ranks, and the immigration service prohibited the immigration of persons of African ancestry.[121] Du Bois wrote an editorial in 1914 deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts, and he supported William Monroe Trotter when Trotter brusquely confronted Wilson about Wilson's failure to fulfill his campaign promise of justice for blacks.[122]
The Crisis continued to wage a campaign against lynching. In 1915, it published an article with a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914.[123] The April 1916 edition covered the group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia.[118] Later in 1916, the "Waco Horror" article covered the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American.[118] The article broke new ground by utilizing undercover reporting to expose the conduct of local whites in Waco, Texas.[124]
The early 20th century was the era of the Great Migration of blacks from the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest and West. Du Bois wrote an editorial supporting the Great Migration, because he felt it would help blacks escape Southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society.[125]
Also in the 1910s the American eugenics movement was in its infancy, and many leading eugenicists were openly racist, defining Blacks as "a lower race". Du Bois opposed this view as an unscientific aberration, but still maintained the basic principle of eugenics: that different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the "stocks" of humanity.[126][127][128]
World War I
As the United States prepared to enter World War I in 1917, Du Bois's colleague in the NAACP, Joel Spingarn, established a camp to train African Americans to serve as officers in the United States military.[129] The camp was controversial, because some whites felt that blacks were not qualified to be officers, and some blacks felt that African Americans should not participate in what they considered a white man's war.[130] Du Bois supported Spingarn's training camp, but was disappointed when the Army forcibly retired one of its few black officers, Charles Young, on a pretense of ill health.[131] The Army agreed to create 1,000 officer positions for blacks, but insisted that 250 come from enlisted men, conditioned to taking orders from whites, rather than from independent-minded blacks that came from the camp.[132] Over 700,000 blacks enlisted on the first day of the draft, but were subject to discriminatory conditions which prompted vocal protests from Du Bois.[133]
After the East St. Louis riots occurred in the summer of 1917, Du Bois traveled to St. Louis to report on the riots. Between 40 and 250 African Americans were massacred by whites, primarily due to resentment caused by St. Louis industry hiring blacks to replace striking white workers.[134] Du Bois's reporting resulted in an article "The Massacre of East St. Louis", published in the September issue of The Crisis, which contained photographs and interviews detailing the violence.[135] Historian David Levering Lewis concluded that Du Bois distorted some of the facts in order to increase the propaganda value of the article.[136] To publicly demonstrate the black community's outrage over the riots, Du Bois organized the Silent Parade, a march of around 9,000 African Americans down New York City's Fifth Avenue, the first parade of its kind in New York, and the second instance of blacks publicly demonstrating for civil rights.[137]
The Houston riot of 1917 disturbed Du Bois and was a major setback to efforts to permit African Americans to become military officers. The riot began after Houston police arrested and beat two black soldiers; in response, over 100 black soldiers took to the streets of Houston and killed 16 whites. A military court martial was held, and 19 of the soldiers were hung, and 67 others were imprisoned.[138] In spite of the Houston riot, Du Bois and others successfully pressed the Army to accept the officers trained at Spingarn's camp, resulting in over 600 black officers joining the Army in October 1917.[139]
Federal officials, concerned about subversive viewpoints expressed by NAACP leaders, attempted to frighten the NAACP by threatening it with investigations.[140] Du Bois was not intimidated, and in 1918 he predicted that World War I would lead to an overthrow of the European colonial system and to the "liberation" of colored people worldwide – in China, in India, and especially in America.[140] NAACP chairman Joel Spingarn was enthusiastic about the war, and he persuaded Du Bois to consider an officer's commission in the Army, contingent on Du Bois writing an editorial repudiating his anti-war stance.[141] Du Bois accepted this bargain and wrote the pro-war "Close Ranks" editorial in June 1918[142] and soon thereafter he received a commission in the Army.[143] Many black leaders, who wanted to leverage the war to gain civil rights for African Americans, criticized Du Bois for his sudden reversal.[144] Southern officers in Du Bois's unit objected to his presence, and his commission was withdrawn.[145]
After the war
When the war ended, Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1919 to attend the first Pan-African Congress and to interview African-American soldiers for a planned book on their experiences in World War I.[146] He was trailed by U.S. agents who were searching for evidence of treasonous activities.[147] Du Bois discovered that the vast majority of black American soldiers were relegated to menial labor as stevedores and laborers.[148] Some units were armed, and one in particular, the 92nd Division (the Buffalo soldiers), engaged in combat.[149] Du Bois discovered widespread racism in the Army, and concluded that the Army command discouraged African Americans from joining the Army, discredited the accomplishments of black soldiers, and promoted bigotry.[150]
After returning from Europe, Du Bois was more determined than ever to gain equal rights for African Americans.[151] Black soldiers returning from overseas felt a new sense of power and worth, and were representative of an emerging attitude referred to as the New Negro.[151] In the editorial "Returning Soldiers" he wrote: "But, by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if, now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land."[152] Many blacks moved to northern cities in search of work, and some northern white workers resented the competition. This labor strife was one of the causes of the Red Summer of 1919, a horrific series of race riots across America, in which over 300 African Americans were killed in over 30 cities.[153] Du Bois documented the atrocities in the pages of The Crisis, culminating in the December publication of a gruesome photograph of a lynching that occurred during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot.[154]
The most egregious episode during the Red Summer was a vicious attack on blacks in Elaine, Arkansas, in which nearly 200 blacks were murdered.[155] Reports coming out of the South blamed the blacks, alleging that they were conspiring to take over the government. Infuriated with the distortions, Du Bois published a letter in the New York World, claiming that the only crime the black sharecroppers had committed was daring to challenge their white landlords by hiring an attorney to investigate contractual irregularities.[156] Over 60 of the surviving blacks were arrested and tried for conspiracy, in the case known as Moore v. Dempsey.[157] Du Bois rallied blacks across America to raise funds for the legal defense, which, six years later, resulted in a Supreme Court victory authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[114] Although the victory had little immediate impact on justice for blacks in the South, it marked the first time the Federal government used the 14th amendment guarantee of due process to prevent states from shielding mob violence.[158]
Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, first edition cover, 1920
In 1920, Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, the first of three autobiographies he would write.[159] The "veil" was that which covered colored people around the world. In the book, he hoped to lift the veil and show white readers what life was like behind the veil, and how it distorted the viewpoints of those looking through it – in both directions.[160] The book contained Du Bois's feminist essay, "The Damnation of Women", which was a tribute to the dignity and worth of women, particularly black women.[161]
Concerned that textbooks used by African-American children ignored black history and culture, Du Bois created a monthly children's magazine, The Brownies' Book. Initially published in 1920, it was aimed at black children, who Du Bois called "the children of the sun".[162]
Pan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey
Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1921 to attend the second Pan-African Congress.[163] The assembled black leaders from around the world issued the London Resolutions and established a Pan-African Association headquarters in Paris.[164] Under Du Bois's guidance, the resolutions insisted on racial equality, and that Africa be ruled by Africans (not, as in the 1919 congress, with the consent of Africans).[164] Du Bois restated the resolutions of the congress in his Manifesto To the League of Nations, which implored the newly formed League of Nations to address labor issues and to appoint Africans to key posts. The League took little action on the requests.[165]
Another important African-American leader of the 1920s was Marcus Garvey, promoter of the Back-to-Africa movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).[166] Garvey denounced Du Bois's efforts to achieve equality through integration, and instead endorsed racial separatism.[167] Du Bois initially supported the concept of Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping company that was intended to facilitate commerce within the African diaspora.[168] But Du Bois later became concerned that Garvey was threatening the NAACP's efforts, leading Du Bois to describe him as fraudulent and reckless.[169] Responding to Garvey's slogan "Africa for the Africans", Du Bois said that he supported that concept, but denounced Garvey's intention that Africa be ruled by African Americans.[170]
Du Bois wrote a series of articles in The Crisis between 1922 and 1924 attacking Garvey's movement, calling him the "most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world."[171] Du Bois and Garvey never made a serious attempt to collaborate, and their dispute was partly rooted in the desire of their respective organizations (NAACP and UNIA) to capture a larger portion of the available philanthropic funding.[172]
Harvard's decision to ban blacks from its dormitories in 1921 was decried by Du Bois as an instance of a broad effort in the U.S. to renew "the Anglo-Saxon cult; the worship of the Nordic totem, the disfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander – the world rule of Nordic white through brute force."[173] When Du Bois sailed for Europe in 1923 for the third Pan-African Congress, the circulation of The Crisis had declined to 60,000 from its World War I high of 100,000, but it remained the preeminent periodical of the civil rights movement.[174] President Coolidge designated Du Bois an "Envoy Extraordinary" to Liberia[175] and – after the third congress concluded – Du Bois rode a German freighter from the Canary Islands to Africa, visiting Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal.[176]
Harlem Renaissance
Du Bois frequently promoted African-American artistic creativity in his writings, and when the Harlem Renaissance emerged in the mid-1920s, his article "A Negro Art Renaissance" celebrated the end of the long hiatus of blacks from creative endeavors.[177] His enthusiasm for the Harlem Renaissance waned as he came to believe that many whites visited Harlem for voyeurism, not for genuine appreciation of black art.[178] Du Bois insisted that artists recognize their moral responsibilities, writing that "a black artist is first of all a black artist."[179] He was also concerned that black artists were not using their art to promote black causes, saying "I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda."[180] By the end of 1926, he stopped employing The Crisis to support the arts.[181]
More on the link above........
Before that, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.
Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice in the United States military.
Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."
He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.
Early life
An old brick church surrounded by trees
As a child, Du Bois attended the Congregational Church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Church members collected donations to pay Du Bois's college tuition.[1]
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred and Mary Silvina (née Burghardt) Du Bois.[2] Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state. She was descended from Dutch, African and English ancestors.[3] William Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave (born in West Africa around 1730) who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, which may have been how he gained his freedom during the late 18th century.[4] His son Jack Burghardt was the father of Othello Burghardt, who in turn was the father of Mary Silvina Burghardt.[4]
William Du Bois claimed Elizabeth Freeman as his relative; he wrote that she had married his great-grandfather Jack Burghardt.[5][6] But Freeman was 20 years older than Burghardt, and no record of such a marriage has been found. It may have been Freeman's daughter, Betsy Humphrey, who married Burghardt after her first husband, Jonah Humphrey, left the area "around 1811", and after Burghardt's first wife died (c. 1810). If so, Freeman would have been William Du Bois's step-great-great-grandmother. Anecdotal evidence supports Humphrey's marrying Burghardt; a close relationship of some form is likely.[7]
William Du Bois's paternal great-grandfather was James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, an ethnic French-American of Huguenot origin who fathered several children with slave women.[8] One of James' mixed-race sons was Alexander, who was born on Long Cay in the Bahamas in 1803; in 1810 he immigrated to the United States with his father.[9] Alexander Du Bois traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, with a mistress. Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother.[10]
Sometime before 1860, Alfred Du Bois immigrated to the United States, settling in Massachusetts. He married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic.[10] Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after their son William was born.[11] Mary Du Bois moved with her son back to her parents' house in Great Barrington, and they lived there until he was five. She worked to support her family (receiving some assistance from her brother and neighbors), until she suffered a stroke in the early 1880s. She died in 1885.[12]
Great Barrington had a majority European American community, who generally treated Du Bois well. He attended the local integrated public school and played with white schoolmates. As an adult, he wrote about racism which he felt as a fatherless child and the experience of being a minority in the town. But teachers recognized his ability and encouraged his intellectual pursuits, and his rewarding experience with academic studies led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans.[13] Du Bois graduated from the town's Searles High School. When Du Bois decided to attend college, the congregation of his childhood church, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, raised the money for his tuition.[14]
University education
Relying on money donated by neighbors, Du Bois attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1885 to 1888.[15] His travel to and residency in the South was Du Bois's first experience with Southern racism, which at the time encompassed Jim Crow laws, bigotry, suppression of black voting, and lynchings; the lattermost reached a peak in the next decade.[16] After receiving a bachelor's degree from Fisk, he attended Harvard College (which did not accept course credits from Fisk) from 1888 to 1890, where he was strongly influenced by his professor William James, prominent in American philosophy.[17] Du Bois paid his way through three years at Harvard with money from summer jobs, an inheritance, scholarships, and loans from friends. In 1890, Harvard awarded Du Bois his second bachelor's degree, cum laude, in history.[18] In 1891, Du Bois received a scholarship to attend the sociology graduate school at Harvard.[19]
In 1892, Du Bois received a fellowship from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen to attend the University of Berlin for graduate work.[20] While a student in Berlin, he traveled extensively throughout Europe. He came of age intellectually in the German capital while studying with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists, including Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitschke.[21] After returning from Europe, Du Bois completed his graduate studies; in 1895 he was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.[22]
Wilberforce and Philadelphia
In the summer of 1894, Du Bois received several job offers, including one from the prestigious Tuskegee Institute; he accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio.[24] At Wilberforce, Du Bois was strongly influenced by Alexander Crummell, who believed that ideas and morals are necessary tools to effect social change.[25] While at Wilberforce, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, one of his students, on May 12, 1896.[26]
After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in the summer of 1896.[27] He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, research which formed the foundation for his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899 while he was teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a black community in the United States.[28] By the 1890s, Philadelphia's black neighborhoods had a negative reputation in terms of crime, poverty, and mortality. Du Bois's book undermined the stereotypes with empirical evidence and shaped his approach to segregation and its negative impact on black lives and reputations. The results led Du Bois to realize that racial integration was the key to democratic equality in American cities.[29]
While taking part in the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass's plea for black Americans to integrate into white society. He wrote: "we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland".[30] In the August 1897 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Du Bois published "Strivings of the Negro People", his first work aimed at the general public, in which he enlarged upon his thesis that African Americans should embrace their African heritage while contributing to American society.[31]
Atlanta University
In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University in Georgia.[32] His first major academic work was his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on the field work he did in 1896–1897. The work was a breakthrough in scholarship because it was the first scientific study of African Americans and a major contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S.[33][34] In the study, Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass. Later in 1903 he popularized the term, the "Talented Tenth", applied to society's elite class.[35] Du Bois's terminology reflected his opinion that the elite of a nation, both black and white, were critical to achievements in culture and progress.[35] Du Bois wrote in this period in a dismissive way of the underclass, describing them as "lazy" or "unreliable", but – in contrast to other scholars – he attributed many of their societal problems to the ravages of slavery.[36]
Du Bois's output at Atlanta University was prodigious, in spite of a limited budget: he produced numerous social science papers and annually hosted the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems.[37] Du Bois also received grants from the U.S. government to prepare reports about African-American workforce and culture.[38] His students considered him to be a brilliant, but aloof and strict, teacher.[39]
First Pan-African Conference
In 1900 Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London from July 23 to 25. (This was just before the Paris Exhibition of 1900 "to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events".)[40] It was organized by men from the Caribbean: Haitians Anténor Firmin and Bénito Sylvain and Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams.[41] Du Bois played a leading role in drafting a letter ("Address to the Nations of the World") to European leaders appealing to them to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government and to demand political and other rights for African Americans.[42] By this time, southern states were passing new laws and constitutions to disfranchise most African Americans, an exclusion from the political system that lasted into the 1960s.
At the conclusion of the conference, delegates unanimously adopted the "Address to the Nations of the World", and sent it to various heads of state where people of African descent were living and suffering oppression.[43] The address implored the United States and the imperial European nations to "acknowledge and protect the rights of people of African descent" and to respect the integrity and independence of "the free Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, etc."[44] It was signed by Bishop Alexander Walters (President of the Pan-African Association), the Canadian Rev. Henry B. Brown (Vice-President), Williams (General Secretary) and Du Bois (Chairman of the Committee on the Address).[45] The address included Du Bois's observation, "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line." He used this again three years later in the "Forethought" of his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).[46]
Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise
In the first decade of the new century, Du Bois emerged as a spokesperson for his race, second only to Booker T. Washington.[47] Washington was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and wielded tremendous influence within the African-American and white communities.[48] Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal he struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction. Essentially the agreement provided that Southern blacks, who overwhelmingly lived in rural communities, would submit to the current discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement, and non-unionized employment; that Southern whites would permit blacks to receive a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; and that Northern whites would invest in Southern enterprises and fund black educational charities.[49]
Despite initially sending congratulations to Washington for his Atlanta Exposition Speech,[50][51] Du Bois later came to oppose Washington's plan, along with many other African Americans, including Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar – representatives of the class of educated blacks that Du Bois would later call the "talented tenth".[52] Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights and higher opportunities, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise.[53]
Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred near Atlanta in 1899.[54] Hose was tortured, burned and hung by a mob of two thousand whites.[54] When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display.[54] The episode stunned Du Bois, and he resolved that "one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved".[55] Du Bois realized that "the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth".[56]
In 1901, Du Bois wrote a review critical of Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery,[57] which he later expanded and published to a wider audience as the essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" in The Souls of Black Folk.[58] Later in life, Du Bois regretted having been critical of Washington in those essays.[59] One of the contrasts between the two leaders was their approach to education: Washington felt that African-American schools should focus primarily on industrial education topics such as agricultural and mechanical skills, to prepare southern blacks for the opportunities in the rural areas where most lived.[60] Du Bois felt that black schools should focus more on liberal arts and academic curriculum (including the classics, arts, and humanities), because liberal arts were required to develop a leadership elite.[61] However, as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and economists Gunnar Myrdal and Thomas Sowell have argued, such disagreement over education was a minor point of difference between Washington and Du Bois; both men acknowledged the importance of the form of education that the other emphasized.[62][63][64] Sowell has also argued that, despite genuine disagreements between the two leaders, the supposed animosity between Washington and Du Bois actually formed among their followers, not between Washington and Du Bois themselves.[65] Du Bois himself also made this observation in an interview published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1965.[66]
Niagara Movement
In 1905, Du Bois and several other African-American civil rights activists – including Fredrick L. McGhee, Jesse Max Barber and William Monroe Trotter – met in Canada, near Niagara Falls.[67] There they wrote a declaration of principles opposing the Atlanta Compromise, and incorporated as the Niagara Movement in 1906.[68]
Du Bois and the other "Niagarites" wanted to publicize their ideals to other African Americans, but most black periodicals were owned by publishers sympathetic to Washington. Du Bois bought a printing press and started publishing Moon Illustrated Weekly in December 1905.[68] It was the first African-American illustrated weekly, and Du Bois used it to attack Washington's positions, but the magazine lasted only for about eight months.[69] Du Bois soon founded and edited another vehicle for his polemics, The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, which debuted in 1907. Freeman H. M. Murray and Lafayette M. Hershaw served as The Horizon's co-editors.[70]
The Niagarites held a second conference in August 1906, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's birth, at the West Virginia site of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.[69] Reverdy C. Ransom spoke and addressed the fact that Washington's primary goal was to prepare blacks for employment in their current society: "Today, two classes of Negroes, ... are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations; ... The other class believe that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place ... it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain."[71]
The souls of black folk
In an effort to portray the genius and humanity of the black race, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of 14 essays.[72] James Weldon Johnson said the book's effect on African Americans was comparable to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.[73] The introduction famously proclaimed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line".[74] Each chapter begins with two epigraphs – one from a white poet, and one from a black spiritual – to demonstrate intellectual and cultural parity between black and white cultures.[75] A major theme of the work was the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future: "Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation."[76]
Jonathon S. Kahn in Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of Du Bois shows how Du Bois, in his The Souls of Black Folk, represents an exemplary text of pragmatic religious naturalism. On page 12 Kahn writes: "Du Bois needs to be understood as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist. By this I mean that, like Du Bois the American traditional pragmatic religious naturalism, which runs through William James, George Santayana and John Dewey, seeks religion without metaphysical foundations." Kahn's interpretation of religious naturalism is very broad but he relates it to specific thinkers. Du Bois's anti-metaphysical viewpoint places him in the sphere of religious naturalism as typified by William James and others.[77]
Racial violence
Two calamities in the autumn of 1906 shocked African Americans, and they contributed to strengthening support for Du Bois's struggle for civil rights to prevail over Booker T. Washington's accommodationism. First, President Teddy Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 black soldiers because they were accused of crimes as a result of the Brownsville Affair. Many of the discharged soldiers had served for 20 years and were near retirement.[78] Second, in September, riots broke out in Atlanta, precipitated by unfounded allegations of black men assaulting white women. This was a catalyst for racial tensions based on a job shortage and employers playing black workers against white workers.[79] Ten thousand whites rampaged through Atlanta, beating every black person they could find, resulting in over 25 deaths.[80] In the aftermath of the 1906 violence, Du Bois urged blacks to withdraw their support from the Republican Party, because Republicans Roosevelt and William Howard Taft did not sufficiently support blacks. Most African Americans had been loyal to the Republican Party since the time of Abraham Lincoln.[81]
Du Bois wrote the essay, "A Litany at Atlanta", which asserted that the riot demonstrated that the Atlanta Compromise was a failure. Despite upholding their end of the bargain, blacks had failed to receive legal justice in the South.[82] Historian David Levering Lewis has written that the Compromise no longer held because white patrician planters, who took a paternalistic role, had been replaced by aggressive businessmen who were willing to pit blacks against whites.[82] These two calamities were watershed events for the African-American community, marking the ascendancy of Du Bois's vision of equal rights.[83]
Academic work
In addition to writing editorials, Du Bois continued to produce scholarly work at Atlanta University. In 1909, after five years of effort, he published a biography of abolitionist John Brown. It contained many insights, but also contained some factual errors.[84] The work was strongly criticized by The Nation, which was owned by Oswald Villard, who was writing his own, competing biography of John Brown.[85] Du Bois's work was largely ignored by white scholars.[85] After publishing a piece in Collier's magazine warning of the end of "white supremacy", Du Bois had difficulty getting pieces accepted by major periodicals. But he did continue to publish columns regularly in The Horizon magazine.[86]
Du Bois was the first African American invited by the American Historical Association (AHA) to present a paper at their annual conference. He read his paper, Reconstruction and Its Benefits, to an astounded audience at the AHA's December 1909 conference.[88] The paper went against the mainstream historical view, promoted by the Dunning School of scholars at Columbia University, that Reconstruction was a disaster, caused by the ineptitude and sloth of blacks. To the contrary, Du Bois asserted that the brief period of African-American leadership in the South accomplished three important goals: democracy, free public schools, and new social welfare legislation.[89] He asserted that it was the federal government's failure to manage the Freedmen's Bureau, to distribute land, and to establish an educational system, that doomed African-American prospects in the South.[89] When Du Bois submitted the paper for publication a few months later in the American Historical Review, he asked that the word Negro be capitalized. The editor, J. Franklin Jameson, refused, and published the paper without the capitalization.[90] The paper was mostly ignored by white historians.[89] Du Bois later developed his paper as his ground-breaking 1935 book, Black Reconstruction, which marshaled extensive facts to support his assertions.[88] The AHA did not invite another African-American speaker until 1940.[91]
NAACP era
In May 1909, Du Bois attended the National Negro Conference in New York.[92] The meeting led to the creation of the National Negro Committee, chaired by Oswald Villard, and dedicated to campaigning for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities.[93] The following spring, in 1910, at the second National Negro Conference, the attendees created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[94] At Du Bois's suggestion, the word "colored", rather than "black", was used to include "dark skinned people everywhere".[95] Dozens of civil rights supporters, black and white, participated in the founding, but most executive officers were white, including Mary Ovington, Charles Edward Russell, William English Walling, and its first president, Moorfield Storey.[96]
The Crisis
NAACP leaders offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research.[97] He accepted the job in the summer of 1910, and moved to New York after resigning from Atlanta University. His primary duty was editing the NAACP's monthly magazine, which he named The Crisis.[98] The first issue appeared in November 1910, and Du Bois pronounced that its aim was to set out "those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people".[99] The journal was phenomenally successful, and its circulation would reach 100,000 in 1920.[100] Typical articles in the early editions included one that inveighed against the dishonesty and parochialism of black churches, and one that discussed the Afrocentric origins of Egyptian civilization.[101]
An important Du Bois editorial from 1911 helped initiate a nationwide push to induce the Federal government to outlaw lynching. Du Bois, employing the sarcasm he frequently used, commented on a lynching in Pennsylvania: "The point is he was black. Blackness must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes ... It is therefore necessary, as every white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this crime of crimes. Of course if possible, the pretext should be great and overwhelming – some awful stunning crime, made even more horrible by the reporters' imagination. Failing this, mere murder, arson, barn burning or impudence may do."[102]
The Crisis carried editorials by Du Bois that supported the ideals of unionized labor but excoriated the racism demonstrated by its leaders, who systematically excluded blacks from membership.[103] Du Bois also supported the principles of the Socialist Party (he was briefly a member of the party from 1910 to 1912), but he denounced the racism demonstrated by some socialist leaders.[104] Frustrated by Republican president Taft's failure to address widespread lynching, Du Bois endorsed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential race, in exchange for Wilson's promise to support black causes.[105]
Throughout his writings, Du Bois supported women's rights,[106] but he found it difficult to publicly endorse the women's right-to-vote movement because leaders of the suffragism movement refused to support his fight against racial injustice.[107] A Crisis editorial from 1913 broached the taboo subject of interracial marriage: although Du Bois generally expected persons to marry within their race, he viewed the problem as a women's rights issue, because laws prohibited white men from marrying black women. Du Bois wrote "[anti-miscegenation] laws leave the colored girls absolutely helpless for the lust of white men. It reduces colored women in the eyes of the law to the position of dogs. As low as the white girl falls, she can compel her seducer to marry her ... We must kill [anti-miscegenation laws] not because we are anxious to marry the white men's sisters, but because we are determined that white men will leave our sisters alone."[108]
During the years 1915 and 1916, some leaders of the NAACP – disturbed by financial losses at The Crisis, and worried about the inflammatory rhetoric of some of its essays – attempted to oust Du Bois from his editorial position. Du Bois and his supporters prevailed, and he continued in his role as editor.[109] In a 1919 column titled "The True Brownies", he announced the creation of The Brownies' Book, the first magazine published for African-American children and youth, which he founded with Augustus Granville Dill and Jessie Redmon Fauset.[110][111]
Historian and author
The 1910s were a productive time for Du Bois. In 1911 he attended the First Universal Races Congress in London[112] and he published his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece.[113] Two years later, Du Bois wrote, produced, and directed a pageant for the stage, The Star of Ethiopia.[114] In 1915, Du Bois published The Negro, a general history of black Africans, and the first of its kind in English.[115] The book rebutted claims of African inferiority, and would come to serve as the basis of much Afrocentric historiography in the 20th century.[115] The Negro predicted unity and solidarity for colored people around the world, and it influenced many who supported the Pan-African movement.[115]
In 1915, The Atlantic Monthly carried an essay by Du Bois, "The African Roots of the War", which consolidated Du Bois's ideas on capitalism and race.[116] In it, he argued that the scramble for Africa was at the root of World War I. He also anticipated later Communist doctrine, by suggesting that wealthy capitalists had pacified white workers by giving them just enough wealth to prevent them from revolting, and by threatening them with competition by the lower-cost labor of colored workers.[117]
Combating racism
Du Bois used his influential role in the NAACP to oppose a variety of racist incidents. When the silent film The Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, Du Bois and the NAACP led the fight to ban the movie, because of its racist portrayal of blacks as brutish and lustful.[119] The fight was not successful, and possibly contributed to the film's fame, but the publicity drew many new supporters to the NAACP.[120]
The private sector was not the only source of racism: under President Wilson, the plight of African Americans in government jobs suffered. Many federal agencies adopted whites-only employment practices, the Army excluded blacks from officer ranks, and the immigration service prohibited the immigration of persons of African ancestry.[121] Du Bois wrote an editorial in 1914 deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts, and he supported William Monroe Trotter when Trotter brusquely confronted Wilson about Wilson's failure to fulfill his campaign promise of justice for blacks.[122]
The Crisis continued to wage a campaign against lynching. In 1915, it published an article with a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914.[123] The April 1916 edition covered the group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia.[118] Later in 1916, the "Waco Horror" article covered the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American.[118] The article broke new ground by utilizing undercover reporting to expose the conduct of local whites in Waco, Texas.[124]
The early 20th century was the era of the Great Migration of blacks from the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest and West. Du Bois wrote an editorial supporting the Great Migration, because he felt it would help blacks escape Southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society.[125]
Also in the 1910s the American eugenics movement was in its infancy, and many leading eugenicists were openly racist, defining Blacks as "a lower race". Du Bois opposed this view as an unscientific aberration, but still maintained the basic principle of eugenics: that different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the "stocks" of humanity.[126][127][128]
World War I
As the United States prepared to enter World War I in 1917, Du Bois's colleague in the NAACP, Joel Spingarn, established a camp to train African Americans to serve as officers in the United States military.[129] The camp was controversial, because some whites felt that blacks were not qualified to be officers, and some blacks felt that African Americans should not participate in what they considered a white man's war.[130] Du Bois supported Spingarn's training camp, but was disappointed when the Army forcibly retired one of its few black officers, Charles Young, on a pretense of ill health.[131] The Army agreed to create 1,000 officer positions for blacks, but insisted that 250 come from enlisted men, conditioned to taking orders from whites, rather than from independent-minded blacks that came from the camp.[132] Over 700,000 blacks enlisted on the first day of the draft, but were subject to discriminatory conditions which prompted vocal protests from Du Bois.[133]
After the East St. Louis riots occurred in the summer of 1917, Du Bois traveled to St. Louis to report on the riots. Between 40 and 250 African Americans were massacred by whites, primarily due to resentment caused by St. Louis industry hiring blacks to replace striking white workers.[134] Du Bois's reporting resulted in an article "The Massacre of East St. Louis", published in the September issue of The Crisis, which contained photographs and interviews detailing the violence.[135] Historian David Levering Lewis concluded that Du Bois distorted some of the facts in order to increase the propaganda value of the article.[136] To publicly demonstrate the black community's outrage over the riots, Du Bois organized the Silent Parade, a march of around 9,000 African Americans down New York City's Fifth Avenue, the first parade of its kind in New York, and the second instance of blacks publicly demonstrating for civil rights.[137]
The Houston riot of 1917 disturbed Du Bois and was a major setback to efforts to permit African Americans to become military officers. The riot began after Houston police arrested and beat two black soldiers; in response, over 100 black soldiers took to the streets of Houston and killed 16 whites. A military court martial was held, and 19 of the soldiers were hung, and 67 others were imprisoned.[138] In spite of the Houston riot, Du Bois and others successfully pressed the Army to accept the officers trained at Spingarn's camp, resulting in over 600 black officers joining the Army in October 1917.[139]
Federal officials, concerned about subversive viewpoints expressed by NAACP leaders, attempted to frighten the NAACP by threatening it with investigations.[140] Du Bois was not intimidated, and in 1918 he predicted that World War I would lead to an overthrow of the European colonial system and to the "liberation" of colored people worldwide – in China, in India, and especially in America.[140] NAACP chairman Joel Spingarn was enthusiastic about the war, and he persuaded Du Bois to consider an officer's commission in the Army, contingent on Du Bois writing an editorial repudiating his anti-war stance.[141] Du Bois accepted this bargain and wrote the pro-war "Close Ranks" editorial in June 1918[142] and soon thereafter he received a commission in the Army.[143] Many black leaders, who wanted to leverage the war to gain civil rights for African Americans, criticized Du Bois for his sudden reversal.[144] Southern officers in Du Bois's unit objected to his presence, and his commission was withdrawn.[145]
After the war
When the war ended, Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1919 to attend the first Pan-African Congress and to interview African-American soldiers for a planned book on their experiences in World War I.[146] He was trailed by U.S. agents who were searching for evidence of treasonous activities.[147] Du Bois discovered that the vast majority of black American soldiers were relegated to menial labor as stevedores and laborers.[148] Some units were armed, and one in particular, the 92nd Division (the Buffalo soldiers), engaged in combat.[149] Du Bois discovered widespread racism in the Army, and concluded that the Army command discouraged African Americans from joining the Army, discredited the accomplishments of black soldiers, and promoted bigotry.[150]
After returning from Europe, Du Bois was more determined than ever to gain equal rights for African Americans.[151] Black soldiers returning from overseas felt a new sense of power and worth, and were representative of an emerging attitude referred to as the New Negro.[151] In the editorial "Returning Soldiers" he wrote: "But, by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if, now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land."[152] Many blacks moved to northern cities in search of work, and some northern white workers resented the competition. This labor strife was one of the causes of the Red Summer of 1919, a horrific series of race riots across America, in which over 300 African Americans were killed in over 30 cities.[153] Du Bois documented the atrocities in the pages of The Crisis, culminating in the December publication of a gruesome photograph of a lynching that occurred during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot.[154]
The most egregious episode during the Red Summer was a vicious attack on blacks in Elaine, Arkansas, in which nearly 200 blacks were murdered.[155] Reports coming out of the South blamed the blacks, alleging that they were conspiring to take over the government. Infuriated with the distortions, Du Bois published a letter in the New York World, claiming that the only crime the black sharecroppers had committed was daring to challenge their white landlords by hiring an attorney to investigate contractual irregularities.[156] Over 60 of the surviving blacks were arrested and tried for conspiracy, in the case known as Moore v. Dempsey.[157] Du Bois rallied blacks across America to raise funds for the legal defense, which, six years later, resulted in a Supreme Court victory authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes.[114] Although the victory had little immediate impact on justice for blacks in the South, it marked the first time the Federal government used the 14th amendment guarantee of due process to prevent states from shielding mob violence.[158]
Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, first edition cover, 1920
In 1920, Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil, the first of three autobiographies he would write.[159] The "veil" was that which covered colored people around the world. In the book, he hoped to lift the veil and show white readers what life was like behind the veil, and how it distorted the viewpoints of those looking through it – in both directions.[160] The book contained Du Bois's feminist essay, "The Damnation of Women", which was a tribute to the dignity and worth of women, particularly black women.[161]
Concerned that textbooks used by African-American children ignored black history and culture, Du Bois created a monthly children's magazine, The Brownies' Book. Initially published in 1920, it was aimed at black children, who Du Bois called "the children of the sun".[162]
Pan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey
Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1921 to attend the second Pan-African Congress.[163] The assembled black leaders from around the world issued the London Resolutions and established a Pan-African Association headquarters in Paris.[164] Under Du Bois's guidance, the resolutions insisted on racial equality, and that Africa be ruled by Africans (not, as in the 1919 congress, with the consent of Africans).[164] Du Bois restated the resolutions of the congress in his Manifesto To the League of Nations, which implored the newly formed League of Nations to address labor issues and to appoint Africans to key posts. The League took little action on the requests.[165]
Another important African-American leader of the 1920s was Marcus Garvey, promoter of the Back-to-Africa movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).[166] Garvey denounced Du Bois's efforts to achieve equality through integration, and instead endorsed racial separatism.[167] Du Bois initially supported the concept of Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping company that was intended to facilitate commerce within the African diaspora.[168] But Du Bois later became concerned that Garvey was threatening the NAACP's efforts, leading Du Bois to describe him as fraudulent and reckless.[169] Responding to Garvey's slogan "Africa for the Africans", Du Bois said that he supported that concept, but denounced Garvey's intention that Africa be ruled by African Americans.[170]
Du Bois wrote a series of articles in The Crisis between 1922 and 1924 attacking Garvey's movement, calling him the "most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world."[171] Du Bois and Garvey never made a serious attempt to collaborate, and their dispute was partly rooted in the desire of their respective organizations (NAACP and UNIA) to capture a larger portion of the available philanthropic funding.[172]
Harvard's decision to ban blacks from its dormitories in 1921 was decried by Du Bois as an instance of a broad effort in the U.S. to renew "the Anglo-Saxon cult; the worship of the Nordic totem, the disfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander – the world rule of Nordic white through brute force."[173] When Du Bois sailed for Europe in 1923 for the third Pan-African Congress, the circulation of The Crisis had declined to 60,000 from its World War I high of 100,000, but it remained the preeminent periodical of the civil rights movement.[174] President Coolidge designated Du Bois an "Envoy Extraordinary" to Liberia[175] and – after the third congress concluded – Du Bois rode a German freighter from the Canary Islands to Africa, visiting Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal.[176]
Harlem Renaissance
Du Bois frequently promoted African-American artistic creativity in his writings, and when the Harlem Renaissance emerged in the mid-1920s, his article "A Negro Art Renaissance" celebrated the end of the long hiatus of blacks from creative endeavors.[177] His enthusiasm for the Harlem Renaissance waned as he came to believe that many whites visited Harlem for voyeurism, not for genuine appreciation of black art.[178] Du Bois insisted that artists recognize their moral responsibilities, writing that "a black artist is first of all a black artist."[179] He was also concerned that black artists were not using their art to promote black causes, saying "I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda."[180] By the end of 1926, he stopped employing The Crisis to support the arts.[181]
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W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro (Full)
W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro. The venerable W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), historian and activist, gives an address to the Wisconsin ...
Thank you, my friend TSgt Joe C. for making us aware that on February 23, 1868 American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois was born in in Great Barrington, Massachusetts,.
He was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Rest in peace W. E. B. Du Bois!
He was an avowed socialist. I expect benighted congresswoman AOC is a fan of his.
"W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro. The venerable W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), historian and activist, gives an address to the Wisconsin Socialist Club in Madison on socialism and the struggle of Black people in America. This speech was given on April 9, 1960 when DuBois was over 90 years of age and just months before his removal to Africa where he died Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95.
In the speech Du Bois asserts that African Americans must learn the truth about socialism that they may "preserve their culture, get rid of poverty, ignorance and disease, and help America live up at least to a shadow of its vain boast as the land of the free and the home of the brave."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKXglS90qn4
Background from tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/w-e-b-du-bois-william-edward-burghardt/
"W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt)
Written by Richard A. Couto
5 minutes to read
W. E. B. Du Bois was a prolific writer and profoundly original thinker who was influenced by his years in Tennessee as a student at Fisk University and by his public school teaching in rural Tennessee communities. Du Bois in his career produced studies on American democracy and race relations that were decades ahead of the scholarship in several academic disciplines. As editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he advanced and advocated the culture and history of, by, and for African Americans.
Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He came to Nashville in 1884 with a scholarship to study at Fisk University, where he finished his degree in 1888. Du Bois then studied at Harvard, the University of Berlin, and earned his Ph.D. in 1895 from Harvard, the first African American to do so. He was the student and colleague of some of the most brilliant men of his time, including William James and Max Weber. Establishing his leadership and legacy in civil rights for African Americans primarily and uniquely through the written word, he was a prodigious scholar. His twenty-two books, fifteen edited books, and almost two thousand essays, articles, and poems analyzed and chronicled American race relations more extensively and insightfully than any other writer.
Du Bois's intellectual and social development at Fisk shaped a brilliant mind and indomitable spirit. Much later, he would assert emphatically that African American colleges, as places where African Americans created an “inner culture,” provided salvation for both the South and blacks. This certainly applied to Du Bois. At Fisk, during the morning prayers attended by two to three hundred fellow students, he realized “that this great assembly of youth and intelligence are the representatives of a race which twenty years ago was in bondage.” He found increased pride in his race and solace that he could stand among colleagues who did not judge him by the color of his skin. Teaching stints in rural Wilson County at the Wheeler School significantly influenced his later work, especially the classic The Souls of Black Folk. Because institutions such as Fisk had their own cultural identity, Du Bois regarded them as the best space for an exchange of the views of black and white Americans.
Du Bois's scholarship led the way in several fields. His dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade was published as the first volume in the Harvard Historical Monograph Series. His book The Philadelphia Negro pioneered the field of urban sociology for which the University of Chicago would become famous. While on the faculty of Atlanta University he conducted studies and conferences that documented the condition and institutions of African Americans, including economics, health, family, and church. This work preceded the monumental study of American race relations by Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by more than forty years. Myrdal recognized the scholarship and scholarly contributions of Du Bois much more than most other white social scientists and historians. Myrdal even included an appendix to his study that chastised American social science for its aversion to questions of racial equality and its giving legitimacy to racial inequality. This was a mild rebuke compared to Du Bois's essay, “The Propaganda of History.” In piercing prose that penetrated the mind and heart, Du Bois analyzed the falsification of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction to cover the shame of the Southern battle to perpetuate slavery and the Northern reliance on black troops to “save the Union, abolish slavery, and establish democracy.” Only with the advent of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s would his work Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 win the level of recognition and acceptance Myrdal provided it.
Du Bois wrote for general audiences as well as scholars in order to create shared spaces for blacks and whites. His series of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, used the image of a “veil” as a literary device to explain the meaning of being African American in the early twentieth century. Du Bois sought to explain both sides of the veil to enable readers of both races to see the other more clearly.
In Souls he chose to explain life “within the Veil” of race through his personal experiences as a teacher in Tennessee near Watertown. As was customary for the students of Fisk, Du Bois taught school to about thirty children for two summers in rural Wilson County. His schoolhouse was a log crib used otherwise to store corn, and his instruction provided the only schooling for area African American children. Attending services at Seay Chapel Methodist Church in Alexandria influenced Du Bois's understanding of the preacher and the power of African American religion in rural communities. Ten years later, during a visit to Fisk, Du Bois returned to Watertown to renew acquaintances and learn how his students had fared. His favorite student, Josie, had died, one event in the “heap of trouble” her family had endured since Du Bois's departure. Josie's brother had fled from the legal enforcement of unfair labor arrangements of blacks and whites. The school remained derelict except for the now regular class sessions. While some families prospered, others had lost their farms, or made a poor living from the stingy soil. Others had moved to Nashville to find work. Marriage, children, and violence were intertwined in the lives of the community. Du Bois reflected on his time near Watertown and wrote in a style that inspired major African American writers of the twentieth Century: “How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and how human and real! And all this life and live, and strife and failure,–is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow Car.”
Souls catapulted Du Bois into national prominence. An essay critical of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent African American leader of the time, initiated a break in the public deference accorded Washington. Du Bois articulated the views of professional, intellectual, and wealthy African Americans who experienced racial repression of the Jim Crow era as caste restrictions. Du Bois chided Washington for accommodating these repressive measures in exchange for support of incremental changes, including support for the schools and activities Washington sponsored. The emerging polemicist appeared in this essay, as Du Bois prophesied, “A double life with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.”
Du Bois used his new national stature to establish organizations to advocate revolt and radicalism and to litigate for the rights of African Americans. In 1905 he led in the formation of the Niagara Movement, and in 1909 he helped found the NAACP. He served as editor of the organization's journal The Crisis from 1910 to 1934. More an agitator than an organization man, Du Bois spent his time in the NAACP and at Atlanta University mired in controversy exacerbated by his conflicts with federal authorities. He argued that desegregation was not enough and advocated a distinctly African American culture to resist assimilation into white institutions. By the time he left the NAACP in 1934, he was championing changes on behalf of the lower classes of African Americans, having moved beyond the mere removal of caste restrictions for the elite. He moved around–Atlanta University, back to the NAACP, international travel–looking for a platform for ideas that became more radical in the context of incremental integration and civil rights.
By the time of his death in 1963, Du Bois had bridged a century from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement. Du Bois had undergone a journey as well. He began as a scholar; evolved to a political critic of the gap between the ideals and practice of American democracy; and finally became an expatriate. After profound harassment during the McCarthy era, he joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he became a citizen. He died there on August 27, 1963. The next day, as Ghana conducted a state funeral for him, the greatest civil rights demonstration in American history, the March on Washington, occurred. Undoubtedly, had he been there, he would have praised and goaded the leaders of that demonstration by reminding them of the principal ideal of Frederick Douglass that was his own beacon of thought and action: “ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms.”
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Orlando Illi LTC (Join to see) LTC Ivan Raiklin, Esq. Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell Capt Jeff S. CPT Jack Durish MSgt Robert C Aldi SFC Stephen King MSgt Danny Hope SGT Gregory Lawritson Cpl Craig Marton SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT (Join to see) Maj Marty Hogan
He was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Rest in peace W. E. B. Du Bois!
He was an avowed socialist. I expect benighted congresswoman AOC is a fan of his.
"W.E.B. DuBois Speaks! Socialism and the American Negro. The venerable W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), historian and activist, gives an address to the Wisconsin Socialist Club in Madison on socialism and the struggle of Black people in America. This speech was given on April 9, 1960 when DuBois was over 90 years of age and just months before his removal to Africa where he died Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95.
In the speech Du Bois asserts that African Americans must learn the truth about socialism that they may "preserve their culture, get rid of poverty, ignorance and disease, and help America live up at least to a shadow of its vain boast as the land of the free and the home of the brave."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKXglS90qn4
Background from tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/w-e-b-du-bois-william-edward-burghardt/
"W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt)
Written by Richard A. Couto
5 minutes to read
W. E. B. Du Bois was a prolific writer and profoundly original thinker who was influenced by his years in Tennessee as a student at Fisk University and by his public school teaching in rural Tennessee communities. Du Bois in his career produced studies on American democracy and race relations that were decades ahead of the scholarship in several academic disciplines. As editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he advanced and advocated the culture and history of, by, and for African Americans.
Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He came to Nashville in 1884 with a scholarship to study at Fisk University, where he finished his degree in 1888. Du Bois then studied at Harvard, the University of Berlin, and earned his Ph.D. in 1895 from Harvard, the first African American to do so. He was the student and colleague of some of the most brilliant men of his time, including William James and Max Weber. Establishing his leadership and legacy in civil rights for African Americans primarily and uniquely through the written word, he was a prodigious scholar. His twenty-two books, fifteen edited books, and almost two thousand essays, articles, and poems analyzed and chronicled American race relations more extensively and insightfully than any other writer.
Du Bois's intellectual and social development at Fisk shaped a brilliant mind and indomitable spirit. Much later, he would assert emphatically that African American colleges, as places where African Americans created an “inner culture,” provided salvation for both the South and blacks. This certainly applied to Du Bois. At Fisk, during the morning prayers attended by two to three hundred fellow students, he realized “that this great assembly of youth and intelligence are the representatives of a race which twenty years ago was in bondage.” He found increased pride in his race and solace that he could stand among colleagues who did not judge him by the color of his skin. Teaching stints in rural Wilson County at the Wheeler School significantly influenced his later work, especially the classic The Souls of Black Folk. Because institutions such as Fisk had their own cultural identity, Du Bois regarded them as the best space for an exchange of the views of black and white Americans.
Du Bois's scholarship led the way in several fields. His dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade was published as the first volume in the Harvard Historical Monograph Series. His book The Philadelphia Negro pioneered the field of urban sociology for which the University of Chicago would become famous. While on the faculty of Atlanta University he conducted studies and conferences that documented the condition and institutions of African Americans, including economics, health, family, and church. This work preceded the monumental study of American race relations by Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by more than forty years. Myrdal recognized the scholarship and scholarly contributions of Du Bois much more than most other white social scientists and historians. Myrdal even included an appendix to his study that chastised American social science for its aversion to questions of racial equality and its giving legitimacy to racial inequality. This was a mild rebuke compared to Du Bois's essay, “The Propaganda of History.” In piercing prose that penetrated the mind and heart, Du Bois analyzed the falsification of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction to cover the shame of the Southern battle to perpetuate slavery and the Northern reliance on black troops to “save the Union, abolish slavery, and establish democracy.” Only with the advent of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s would his work Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 win the level of recognition and acceptance Myrdal provided it.
Du Bois wrote for general audiences as well as scholars in order to create shared spaces for blacks and whites. His series of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, used the image of a “veil” as a literary device to explain the meaning of being African American in the early twentieth century. Du Bois sought to explain both sides of the veil to enable readers of both races to see the other more clearly.
In Souls he chose to explain life “within the Veil” of race through his personal experiences as a teacher in Tennessee near Watertown. As was customary for the students of Fisk, Du Bois taught school to about thirty children for two summers in rural Wilson County. His schoolhouse was a log crib used otherwise to store corn, and his instruction provided the only schooling for area African American children. Attending services at Seay Chapel Methodist Church in Alexandria influenced Du Bois's understanding of the preacher and the power of African American religion in rural communities. Ten years later, during a visit to Fisk, Du Bois returned to Watertown to renew acquaintances and learn how his students had fared. His favorite student, Josie, had died, one event in the “heap of trouble” her family had endured since Du Bois's departure. Josie's brother had fled from the legal enforcement of unfair labor arrangements of blacks and whites. The school remained derelict except for the now regular class sessions. While some families prospered, others had lost their farms, or made a poor living from the stingy soil. Others had moved to Nashville to find work. Marriage, children, and violence were intertwined in the lives of the community. Du Bois reflected on his time near Watertown and wrote in a style that inspired major African American writers of the twentieth Century: “How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and how human and real! And all this life and live, and strife and failure,–is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow Car.”
Souls catapulted Du Bois into national prominence. An essay critical of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent African American leader of the time, initiated a break in the public deference accorded Washington. Du Bois articulated the views of professional, intellectual, and wealthy African Americans who experienced racial repression of the Jim Crow era as caste restrictions. Du Bois chided Washington for accommodating these repressive measures in exchange for support of incremental changes, including support for the schools and activities Washington sponsored. The emerging polemicist appeared in this essay, as Du Bois prophesied, “A double life with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.”
Du Bois used his new national stature to establish organizations to advocate revolt and radicalism and to litigate for the rights of African Americans. In 1905 he led in the formation of the Niagara Movement, and in 1909 he helped found the NAACP. He served as editor of the organization's journal The Crisis from 1910 to 1934. More an agitator than an organization man, Du Bois spent his time in the NAACP and at Atlanta University mired in controversy exacerbated by his conflicts with federal authorities. He argued that desegregation was not enough and advocated a distinctly African American culture to resist assimilation into white institutions. By the time he left the NAACP in 1934, he was championing changes on behalf of the lower classes of African Americans, having moved beyond the mere removal of caste restrictions for the elite. He moved around–Atlanta University, back to the NAACP, international travel–looking for a platform for ideas that became more radical in the context of incremental integration and civil rights.
By the time of his death in 1963, Du Bois had bridged a century from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement. Du Bois had undergone a journey as well. He began as a scholar; evolved to a political critic of the gap between the ideals and practice of American democracy; and finally became an expatriate. After profound harassment during the McCarthy era, he joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he became a citizen. He died there on August 27, 1963. The next day, as Ghana conducted a state funeral for him, the greatest civil rights demonstration in American history, the March on Washington, occurred. Undoubtedly, had he been there, he would have praised and goaded the leaders of that demonstration by reminding them of the principal ideal of Frederick Douglass that was his own beacon of thought and action: “ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms.”
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Orlando Illi LTC (Join to see) LTC Ivan Raiklin, Esq. Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell Capt Jeff S. CPT Jack Durish MSgt Robert C Aldi SFC Stephen King MSgt Danny Hope SGT Gregory Lawritson Cpl Craig Marton SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT (Join to see) Maj Marty Hogan
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