Du Bois, W.E.B. (1868–1963), African‐American scholar, polemicist, activist, and intellectual. Born and reared in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in 1888. Enrolling as a junior at Harvard, he remained to earn a Ph.D. in history in 1895, with two years of study (1892–1894) at the University of Berlin. In 1896, Harvard published his dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade. That same year, during a brief teaching stint at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he married a student, Nina Gomer; they had two children. A fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (1896–1897) resulted in a pathbreaking sociological study,
The Philadelphia Negro (1899). From 1897 to 1910, he taught sociology at Atlanta University.
At this time, most southern blacks could not vote and faced racial
segregation in public facilities; scores were lynched each year. Before 1900, Du Bois tended to agree with Booker T.
Washington, who advised blacks not to protest social and political inequality but instead to focus on vocational training and economic advancement. However, in
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of essays on race that included one on Washington, Du Bois rejected accommodationism and sided with the growing ranks of Washington's opponents. He soon emerged as leader of the Niagara Movement, an organization that opposed Washington and promoted political activism. When this organization broke up, Du Bois in 1910 joined with a group of liberal whites to form an organization with similar aims, the New York‐based
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As editor of its journal,
The Crisis, Du Bois exerted great influence as the NAACP's public voice. In monthly unsigned editorials he demanded social, economic, and political
equality for all blacks and an end to
lynching; promoted his idea of a “talented tenth” of liberally educated black leaders; and encouraged the development of African‐American arts and the preservation of black folk culture.
During the 1920s, Du Bois focused increasingly on Pan‐Africanism,
socialism, and economic issues while questioning the NAACP's exclusive focus on legal challenges to segregation. Increasingly at odds with the NAACP leadership, he resigned in 1934 and returned to Atlanta University. He rejoined the NAACP staff in 1944, but his increasingly radical politics ran counter to the postwar climate of
anticommunism and led to his resignation again, in 1948. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in New York in 1950 on the Progressive party ticket and the following year stood trial on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign power in connection with his activities in a peace organization. Though acquitted, Du Bois was banned from traveling abroad (1952–1958). Upon retrieving his passport, he visited Eastern Europe, China, and the Soviet Union, where he received the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, having officially joined the Communist Party, Du Bois left the United States for good. He spent his remaining years in Ghana, assembling an “Encyclopedia Africana.”
The author of seventeen books, including five novels and one masterpiece of American literature,
The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois contributed significantly to many fields as an activist, scholar, critic, sponsor of African‐American letters, and, above all, spokesman for African‐American rights. At a time when Booker T. Washington's accommodationism seemed the most viable response to systematic racial oppression, Du Bois eloquently and persuasively described an alternative. He became the leading advocate of racial justice in the early twentieth century, helping to assure the victory of militant protest over accommodationism.
Yet Du Bois's legacy is complicated by the complexity of his thought and his later radicalism. Some historians characterize Du Bois's thinking as riddled with contradiction. Indeed, he championed the NAACP's campaign for integration, equality, and color‐blind institutions while also promoting black cultural nationalism and even positing racial essentialism, most strikingly in his 1897 essay “The Conservation of the Races.” His 1934 break with the NAACP came after he had begun to promote economic nationalism for blacks. Some see this break, and his increased interest in racial separatism, Pan Africanism, and Marxism, as at odds with his earlier liberal integrationism. Yet through most of his career, Du Bois was attracted to socialism, grappled with ideological dilemmas, and sought to balance competing ideas and approaches, taking intermediate positions between idealism and pragmatism, integration and separation, self‐help and demands for reparation, liberal education and vocational training. He often concluded that such dilemmas could never be fully resolved. As he put it in a much‐quoted statement on African‐American identity in an 1897
Atlantic Monthly essay reprinted in
The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his two‐ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
See also
African Americans;
Black Nationalism;
Civil Rights Movement;
Communist Party—USA;
Garvey, Marcus;
Progressive Party of 1948;
Race, Concept of;
Racism.
Bibliography
Elliott Rudwick , W.E.B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership, 1960.
Arnold Rampersad , The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1976.
Gerald Horne , Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro‐American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963, 1986.
Manning Marable , W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, 1986.
David Levering Lewis , W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, 1993.
David Levering Lewis , W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963, 2000.
William Jordan , “Getting America Told”: Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914–1920, 2001.
William Jordan
