William E. B. DuBois: 1868-1963

William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868, the year the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. He died August 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana, on the eve of the Great March on Washington. In the 95 years of his life, Dr. DuBois combined the roles of historian, author, journalist, sociologist, politician, and educator, in an unremitting struggle against racial inequality, discrimination, and injustice. President Kwame Nkrumah, in his tributary message at the funeral in Ghana, described DuBois as "the greatest scholar the Negro race has produced."

He grew up in Massachusetts, the cradle of abolitionism, where he had little contact with open discrimination and dreamed of getting his higher education at Harvard. But he lacked the money for Harvard and the offer of a scholarship attracted him to a small Negro college in Nashville, Tennessee. At the age of 17 he entered Fisk University, which was for him "the new experience of being with my own group of people.

... While I was, in the long run, going to try and break down segregation and separateness, for the time I was willing to be a Negro and work within a Negro group."

Scholarship to Harvard

In 1888 DuBois' wishes were realized, for a scholarship made it possible for him to come to Harvard. Only one or two other Negroes were in the class of 300 students, and DuBois wrote "I never felt myself a Harvard man as I'd felt myself a Fisk man." The person whom be describes as "my closest friend as a teacher," William James, persuaded the industrious student to give up his desire to study philosophy. DuBois decided to concentrate in history and soon selected American Negro History as his special field. He received his bachelor's degree with distinction in 1890 and was one of the six Commencement speakers; the subject of his address was Jefferson Davis. His fellowship was renewed and he continued his studies at the Graduate School. In 1892 he became the first Negro to attain the degree of Ph.D. at Harvard.

DuBois was not the only prominent Negro then at Harvard. In this era Harvard was throwing off its strictly New England outlook and giving scholarships to people in the Midwest and the South. "In my class was a black man from St. Louis who was one of the best speakers of English That I ever knew, Tunent Morgan," DuBois recalled. "When it came to the election of class officers, always the class officers had been Lowells and Cabots and Saltonsalls and so forth and the class revolted and elected Morgan as the class orator which was unprecedented. They talked about it all over the United States."

With a grant from the Slater Fund, DuBois left the United States and studied in Germany for two years. "For the first time in my life I was just a human being and not a particular kind of human being." Returning from Berlin in 1894, Dr. DuBois began teaching at Wilburforce College, a small semi-religious Negro institution in Ohio. He taught Greek and Latin, but the subject he really wished to explore was sociology. And in two years this wish, also, was realized. The University of Pennsylvania invited him to do a study of the Negro in Philadelphia. After one and a half years of work he wrote The Philadelphia Negro, one of the first urban sociological studies in the world. At about the same time Harvard published his doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies.

Moves to Atlanta

In 1897 he joined the Sociology Department of the University of Atlanta, where he spent the next 13 years. He taught, continued his studies of the American Negro, and began to write the essays for the Atlantic Monthly, World's Work, and other journals, that were later to be combined in his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk. When this small book appeared in 1903 it had an enormous impact on Negroes. In the words of Langston Hughes, The Souls of Black Folk "was like a Bible to thousands of Negro students, writers, intellectuals, and just plain ordinary people."

Perhaps the most important feature of this new book was its attack on Booker T. Washington, who was the Negro leader of that time. Washington maintained that the Negro should accept second-class citizenship in return for the assurance that whites would give the Negroes industrial training and jobs. DuBois became part of the Negro outcry against this compromising policy. "We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights," he wrote. "We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free-born American: political, civil and social; and until we get these rights, we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone, but for all true Americans."

On July 9, 1905, 29 Negroes met secretly in Canada near Niagara Falls in a response to a letter from Dr. DuBois. The next year the "Niagara Movement" met at Harper's Ferry, and publicly commemorated John Brown. By 1910 this movement became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. DuBois left his Atlanta position, where his views were becoming too radical, and moved to New York. There he became the chief propagandist for the NAACP, acting for 23 years as the editor of Crises.

Edits Crises

Under the leadership of DuBois, Crises went to as many as 100,000 readers every month, reporting on the struggle for equality and urging readers to take courage and pride in their Negro-ness. Many a Negro writer was first published and encouraged by Crises. Because of the magazine's financial stability, DuBois was able to say what he felt, without threat of recrimination for the NAACP.

During his years at Atlanta and with Crises, DuBois' thought under-went an evolution. In the first quarter of the 20th century, 1,091 Negroes were lynched in the United States. Some were publicly burned at the stake. In the 1906 race riots in Atlanta, Mrs. DuBois was beaten so severely that she never fully recovered. Dr. DuBois had seen Negro poverty close at hand, first in Philidelphia, then in Georgia. These things made him turn away from the idealistic optimism that he had learned at Harvard and led him to reject the conciliation of Booker T. Washington.

Dr. DuBois became aware of two great thinkers whose views were to sharpen his outlook and influence his later actions: Freud and Marx. As early as 1904 he joined the Socialist Party, though he was soon to leave it to support Wilson. In 1926 DuBois made his first visit to the Soviet Union which "was for me a never-to-be-forgotten experience and it strengthened my belief in socialism as the one great road to progress." This development of DuBois' thought culminated when he joined the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1958.

The change of his ideas, which led him to believe that racism was only part of a greater injustice, is best described in the second introduction to The Souls of Black Folk, written in 1953, 50 years after the book's first publication: "I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and this is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race."

Colonial Africa

Another theme that entered his life in this period was an interest in the affairs of colonial Africa. In 1900 he attended a conference on African issues in London. Similar gatherings in 1911, 1919, 1921, and later, were held in Europe and at least partly organized by DuBois. These meetings, held in the capitals of Europe, began to include African leaders and were part of the beginnings of the modern emancipation of Africa. A 1945 pan-African conference in England enabled DuBois to meet such men as Nkrumah and Kenyatta. This American contact with Africa not only aided the struggling colonies and made DuBois beloved by all African peoples, but also brought home to DuBois and other American Negroes an awareness of their vast heritage and a growth of Negro interest in African affairs and African culture.

With the great depression Crises began to fail, and DuBois realized that when the NAACP began to support the magazine financially he would no longer control its policy. So in 1933 he returned to Atlanta University for 10 years of research and teaching. By now he had published nine books, including two novels, Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Dark Princess (1928). It was in 1935 that he finally brought forth his monumental study, Black Reconstruction in America.

DuBois went back to work for the NAACP in 1944, and became the group's consultant to the United Nations. At that time Paul Robeson was Chairman of the Council on American Affairs and Dubois became associated with this group. But in 1946 the Cold War began and in 1947 the Justice Department issued a list of "subversive" organizations; it included the Council in its witch-hunt. DuBois' refusal to eschew either his views or his associations led to his swift dismissal from the NAACP in 1948.

Runs for Senate

Soon afterwards, upon the invitation of Vito Marcantonio, Dr. DuBois ran in New York for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Progressive Party Ticket. He obtained only 270,000 of the 3,000,000 votes and soon after this defeat was asked by the Department of Justice to register as an agent of a foreign government. Marcantonio defended DuBois and he was finally acquitted, but he wrote, "the growl of a mob, the personal threat of murder ... nothing has cowed me as that day when I took my seat in a Washington courtroom as an indicted criminal." Shortly thereafter his wife died.

Despite these personal tragedies, DuBois did not leave his work. In the evening of his life he married a second wife, Shirley Graham. In a small house in Brooklyn, DuBois continued his research. Though in his own country he had been persecuted, peoples of the new nations did not forget him. Delegations from the United Nations visited his home. His 90th birthday was honored throughout the People's Republic of China. The Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin International Peace Prize. And at the end of his years Dr. Kwame Nkrumah invited him to come to Africa and begin what someday may be considered his greatest contribution, the Encyclopaedia Africana. He became a citizen of Ghana three years before his death. The New England boy, born when slavery died, died belonging to the re-birth of his people.

The following message was dated June 26, 1957, and had been given to his wife for safekeeping until the hour of his death:

"It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say the last goodbye to one's loved ones and friends and to all the familiar things of life.

"I am going to take a long, deep and endless sleep. This is not a punishment but a privilege to which I have looked forward for years.

"I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life; that what I have done III or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.

"And that peace will be my applause.

"One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.

"The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

"Good-bye."