Biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Activist and Scholar

On August 27, 1963, W. E. B. Du Bois, American civil rights activist, writer (Souls of Black Folk), and founder of the NAACP, died at the age of 95 in Accra, Ghana. An excerpt from the article:

"W.E.B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt; February 23, 1868–August 27, 1963) was a pivotal sociologist, historian, educator, and sociopolitical activist who argued for immediate racial equality for African Americans. His emergence as a Black leader paralleled the rise of the Jim Crow laws of the South and the Progressive Era. He was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and has been called the Father of Social Science and the Father of Pan-Africanism...

...Early Life and Education
Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. The Du Bois family was one of the few Black families living in the predominantly White town in the western part of the state. In high school, Du Bois was already focusing on racial inequality. At age 15, he became the local correspondent for The New York Globe and gave lectures and wrote editorials, spreading his ideas that Black people needed to politicize themselves.

Du Bois attended an integrated school where he excelled. Upon his graduation from high school, members of his community awarded Du Bois with a scholarship to attend Fisk University. While at Fisk, Du Bois' experience of racism and poverty was markedly different from his life in Great Barrington. As a result, he decided to dedicate his life to ending racism and uplifting Black Americans.

In 1888, Du Bois graduated from Fisk and was accepted into Harvard University, where he earned a master’s degree, a doctorate, and a fellowship to study for two years at the University of Berlin in Germany. He was the first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard.

Academic Teaching Career
Du Bois followed his first teaching job at Wilberforce University with a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a research project in Philadelphia’s seventh ward neighborhood. Researching racism as a social system, he was determined to learn as much as he could in an attempt to find the “cure” for prejudice and discrimination. His investigation, statistical measurements, and sociological interpretation of this endeavor were published as "The Philadelphia Negro." This was the first time such a scientific approach to studying social phenomenon was undertaken, which is why Du Bois is often called the Father of Social Science.

Du Bois next taught at Atlanta University, where he remained for 13 years. While there, he studied and wrote about morality, urbanization, business and education, the church, and crime as it affected Black society. His main goal was to encourage and help social reform.

Opposition to Booker T. Washington
Initially, Du Bois agreed with the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, the preeminent leader of Black Americans during the Progressive Era. Washington's activism and life work were all aimed to help Black Americans become skilled in industrial and vocational trades so they could open businesses, assimilate into American society as engaged citizens, and become self-reliant.

Du Bois, however, came to greatly disagree with Washington's incremental, compromising approach and he outlined his arguments in his collection of essays, "The Souls of Black Folk," published in 1903. In these writings, Du Bois argued that White Americans needed to take responsibility for their contributions to the problem of racial inequality. He delineated the flaws he saw in Washington’s argument, but he also agreed that Black Americans must take better advantage of educational opportunities to uplift their race as they simultaneously fought racism directly.

In "The Souls of Black Folk," he elaborated on his concept of "double-consciousness":

'It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—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.'"