W.E.B. DuBois: Godfather of an Institute

It is ironic that the man for whom the DuBois Institute was named was himself profoundly alienated for most of his life from the American black community and self-consciously isolated from the Harvard he attended some 85 years ago.

William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born in the small rural community of Great Barrington, Mass. on February 23, 1868. In his autobiography he remembered these years as being free of racial conflict or identity. His ancestry was mixed--his father, a shopkeeper, was of French and West Indian extraction, while his mother was African and Dutch.

DuBois got his first taste of the barriers that existed for blacks in America when he attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The experience of Jim Crow laws--being forced to ride in segregated transportation, eat in separate dining facilities, denied the right to vote--left DuBois with a sense of the "absolute division of the universe into black and white."

For this reason, DuBois was not unhappy at Harvard. His stay at Fisk had made him content to fraternize with his own race, in isolation from whites, a situation which he thought might not have satisfied him if he had come directly from Great Barrington. As it was he was interested only in the University's libraries and the tutelage of its teachers. For his social life he depended primarily upon the black community of Boston.

DuBois entered the Boylston prize-speaking contest in 1890 "because I needed the money" and came away with second prize. His friend Clement Morgan, also black, won first prize, and DuBois helped organize a small revolt in his class to elect Morgan Class Day speaker, breaking an unwritten rule which had traditionally reserved this distinction for students from fashionable Back Bay.

While DuBois had an instinctive reaction against the lily-white composition of Harvard, the distinguished academic community seems to have appealed to him. In his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, he recalled with fondness discussions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with George Santayana, and invitations to the house of William James, a personal friend.

DuBois received his B.A. in 1890, his M.A. in 1891, and his Ph.D. in 1895, submitting a thesis entitled "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870." It was published a year later as the first volume in Harvard Historical Studies. After travelling and studying in Europe for a couple of years under a grant from the John Slater Fund, he returned to America to join the faculty of Wilberforce Seminary in Ohio, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, and finally became a professor of Economics and History at Atlanta University, where he remained until 1944.

His formal education and natural eloquence made him an obvious spokesman for the black community. He entered into a bitter dispute with Booker T. Washington, who felt that blacks should forego political and social equality and instead concentrate their efforts upon the development of technical skills.

DuBois, on the other hand, felt that nothing could be achieved without a struggle for civil rights, and to this end he favored the cultivation of a small faction, a "Talented Tenth" as he called it, which would lead the masses of black people in their fight for equality. DuBois's program left him open to charges of elitism, and the Niagara Movement, which he organized in 1905 as a bulwark of opposition to Washington, failed because of those charges.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was a more successful venture, but DuBois's own relationship with the organization was tempestuous. He served as the editor of Crisis, NAACP's official publication until 1933, when he found that his program for "Negro self-sufficiency" and limited segregation was not acceptable to the group's liberal leadership. He returned in 1944, only to be dismissed by the NAACP in 1948 as part of a campaign to purge communists and communist sympathizers from its ranks.

DuBois then took the chairmanship of the Peace Information Center in New York City in 1949, an organization that the Attorney General listed as "subversive." He was indicted by a federal grand jury for "failure to register as a foreign agent," but was acquitted on the strength of the efforts of his defense attorney, Vito Marcantonio.

During the rest of his life, DuBois travelled extensively through the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. He was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952, the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959 and that same year was honored by Chou En-lai at a birthday dinner in Peking.

It was only in 1961, at the age of 93 that DuBois officially joined the American Communist Party. In a letter of application to Gus Hall, secretary of the Party, DuBois said that he had come to the conclusion that it was through the final victory of the proletariat that the American blacks would achieve racial equality.

Soon afterwards, DuBois accepted the invitation of President Kwane Nkrumah of Ghana to settle in his country. DuBois was working on an Encyclopedia Africana when he died on August 28, 1963. Simultaneously thousands were gathering for the march on Washington, the culmination of the struggle for civil rights which DuBois had proposed some 50 years before.