History
WEB Dubois Books
W.E.B. Du Bois was a prominent African American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist. He is best known for his book "The Souls of Black Folk," which explores the experience of African Americans in the United States. Du Bois also wrote extensively on racial inequality, advocating for social and political change to address systemic racism. His works continue to be influential in the study of African American history and sociology.
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12 Key excerpts on "WEB Dubois Books"
eBook - ePub- Carl A. Grant(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Growing up in the Sunshine of W. E. B. Du BoisOur lives are about the stories we hear, the stories we tell about ourselves and about others, and the narrative thread that results when they are intertwined. Telling, leading, and participating in the story of the social and political development of African Americans was the primary focus of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s life. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois became a teacher, philosopher, sociologist, scholar, and political activist. His first book, The Philadelphia Negro , was the first case study of a Black community in the United States. Filled with graphs and statistics, it was an early and innovative example of statistically based social science. His next book, The Souls of Black Folk , combines ideologies, methodologies, histories, and critiques of race and racism. Souls introduced important ideas and concepts and terms that illuminated the thinking of Du Bois’s generation about theorizing about race and racism, and it continues to be relevant to the discussion of race and race relations today, and it will likely remain so in the future. When one considers America’s greatest intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois must be on the short list.Writing Du Bois and Education was presented to me by my editor and my publisher. The idea was not to regurgitate Du Bois’s scholarship and ideas, but to address the effects his work and life had on me personally and professionally. I was humbled by the invitation, but it brought with it challenges that I needed to consider. How had this great fighter for racial equality affected my life? I had never thought about it directly. I had learned about Du Bois as a child and read his publications in college. I found his writing illuminating and informative, and much of what he said about race was in line with my own thinking and action, and that of my immediate and extended family. I drew on his work as a professional, and in some cases expanded on, responded to, and critiqued his ideas. I knew writing Du Bois and Education
eBook - ePub- Gene Andrew Jarrett, Gene Andrew Jarrett, Gene Andrew Jarrett(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963)When The Souls of Black Folkappeared in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois had already established himself as one of the most prolific and intellectually formidable African Americans in the United States. He had, by dint of hard work and enormous talent, risen from obscurity in the predominantly white Massachusetts Berkshires to a position of educational and political leadership. Du Bois’s rapid emergence as a dominant figure in politics and scholarship is without parallel in the history of African American leadership. At perhaps the nadir of post-Reconstruction race relations, Du Bois intertwined academic, literary, and political careers to steer the discourse and politics of race and civil rights in the twentieth century. Long before his death in 1963 at the age of 94, Du Bois had secured his reputation as perhaps the most influential and erudite intellectual of his time. In 1934 the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) spoke true when it said, upon Du Bois’s resignation, that, nonetheless, “many who have never read a word of his writings are his spiritual disciples and descendants.”Born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the only child of Mary Sylvina Burghardt and Alfred Du Bois. On his mother’s side, the Burghardts were some of the oldest citizens of Great Barrington, having lived there since the mid-eighteenth century; his father was an itinerant who abandoned his family within a year of his birth. Though lacking a father figure, the young William benefited from the maternal attention he received in his family. Du Bois later wrote that “[a]ll the way back in these dim distances it is the mothers and mothers of mothers who seem to count, while fathers are shadowy memories.” Nevertheless, he was a happy child in an environment that, if not idyllic, was remarkably free of racial discrimination. The town’s African American population was relatively small – Du Bois attended a predominantly white secondary school and worshipped in the white First Congregational Church of Great Barrington. He graduated in 1884 with high honors, the first African American graduate of his high school, and immediately went to work to save money for college. In March of 1885, Mary Sylvina Du Bois died unexpectedly, leaving her son impoverished. The local white community came to his aid; his neighbors and the Congregational Church donated scholarship funds. The ambitious Du Bois hoped to attend Harvard University, but it was beyond his means. Instead, he enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
- Edward Carson, Gerald Horne, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Edward Carson, Gerald Horne, Phillip Luke Sinitiere(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
INTRODUCTION“If we neglect to mark this history, it may be distorted or forgotten”: Socialism and Democracy in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Life, Thought, and LegacyPhillip Luke Sinitiere, Edward Carson and Gerald HorneThe 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s birth in 2018 offers an opportunity to reflect on his remarkable life and legacy in light of his specific commitments to socialism and democracy. The current political period of neoliberalism’s extractive inequality, the debilitating reality of economic precarity, an expansive and invasive surveillance state, the grotesque injustice of the prison industrial complex, the ongoing crisis of police violence and the militarization of law enforcement, and a White House unashamedly spewing white supremacist, nationalist rhetoric in word and deed calls scholars and activists to undertake thoughtful and analytical explorations about how Du Bois’s fidelity to socialism and democracy can inform current methodology and praxis. Considering such contemporary conditions, this issue collectively ponders how Du Bois’s radicalism can shape and re-texture historical understanding and underscore a reflective urgency about the future.The act of commemoration—remembering history critically through the lens of current affairs in order to mobilize collective action—was a practice on which Du Bois regularly commented. From his earliest scholarly book published in 1896 on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to the newspaper columns he wrote for The Crisis, Amsterdam News and other periodicals, to the poetry, prayers and plays he composed, to the final volume of historical fiction in the Black Flame trilogy published in 1961, Du Bois never failed to craft historical narrative, offer historical observations, and even deploy historiographical arguments that attended deeply to the humanity of African descended peoples. For example, in January 1957, six years before his death, Du Bois wrote “Negro History Centenaries” for the radical periodical National Guardian. He called for black individuals and organizations to commemorate anniversaries “which deeply affect the history of the Negro race and of his country.” Du Bois listed the centenary of the Dred Scot decision that year, and the centennial of John Brown’s death that was to occur in 1959. He suggested commemorating the Civil War’s anniversary in 1961 and acknowledging Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 100th birthday in 1972. “There are many other significant anniversaries which recall Negro history and the cultural tie of the black man with American history,” Du Bois wrote. However, he also warned that “If we neglect to mark this history, it may be distorted or forgotten.” Of the centennial celebrations themselves, Du Bois suggested that these events “should be occasions for calm and scientific inquiry into the past” instead of triumphalist or bombastic rhetoric heated to stoke “controversies or exacerbation of race hate.” According to Du Bois “persons of authority, white and black, Northern and Southern” should lead commemorative events since “[w]e must only be sure that every point of view has adequate and worthy representation.”1
eBook - ePub- Reiland Rabaka(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Newark Reads Du Bois Newsletter. Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, Rutgers University-Newark. Retrieved February 3, 2003, from http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~history/Du Bois/rabaka.html .Rabaka, R. (2003b). W.E.B. Du Bois’s evolving Africana philosophy of education. Journal of Black Studies , 33(4), 399–449.Rabaka, R. (2003c). ‘Deliberately using the word colonial in a much broader sense’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of ‘semi-colonialism’ as critique of and contribution to postcolonialism. Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 7(2), 1—32.Rabaka, R. (2003d). W.E.B. Du Bois and/as Africana critical theory: Pan-Africanism, critical Marxism, and male-feminism. In J. L. Conyers (Ed.), Africa and the Academy (pp. 67–112). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.Rabaka, R. (2003e). W.E.B. Du Bois and ‘The Damnation of Women’: An essay on Africana anti-sexist critical social theory. Journal of African American Studies , 7(2), 39–62.Rabaka, R. (2004). The souls of Black female folk: W.E.B. Du Bois and Africana anti-sexist critical social theory. Africalogical Perspectives , 1(2), 100–141.Rabaka, R. (2005a). W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of the talented tenth. In M. K. Asante & A. Mazama (Eds.), The encyclopedia of Black studies (pp. 443–445). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Rabaka, R. (2005b). Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of accommodationism. In M. K. Asante & A. Mazama (Eds.), The encyclopedia of Black studies (pp. 1–3). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Rabaka, R. (2005c). W.E.B. Du Bois and decolonization: Pan-Africanism, postcolonialism, and radical politics. In J. L. Conyers (Ed.), W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and Pan-Africanism (pp. 123–154). Lewistown, NY: Mellen Press.Rabaka, R. (2006a). Africana critical theory of contemporary society: Ruminations on radical politics, social theory, and Africana philosophy. In M. K. Asante and M. Karenga (Eds.), The handbook of Black studies
eBook - ePubBooker T. Washington
A Life in American History
- Mark Christian(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- ABC-CLIO(Publisher)
The Souls of Black Folk is a classic American book of essays that still capture the minds of scholars¸ young and old. His activism in civil and human rights was unshakeable, and he is regarded as a beacon of scholarly righteousness in many circles. However, he was human and susceptible to the foibles of envy and insecurity. His relationship with Booker T. Washington is largely misunderstood to this day.The two men both had loving mothers, whom they adored, but Washington’s mother endured enslavement, while Du Bois’s experienced freedom. The preceding differences need to be alluded to just as if it was an analysis of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X from the 1960s. The fact remains that each individual has a particular history and biography that determines, most often, how each will progress in life. It is important to note these differences between Washington and Du Bois because, quite frankly, they are quite profound. Another aspect of difference that is crucial in understanding these two men relates to their specific education. Washington, as has been discussed in earlier chapters, struggled to attain a rudimentary level of education. He arrived at Hampton Institute disheveled, hungry, and penniless. He was sixteen years of age with what can be regarded as merely basic educational skills, though fortified with a spirit that has a special place, it seems, in few souls. He arrived with hope in a hopeless situation. He found what can be deemed an educational haven that broke his poverty, built his academic prowess, and gave him confidence to forge ahead. Although his knowledge was not profound, he left with a love of the Bible and a knowledge of the Protestant ethic, something the renowned sociologist Max Weber deemed was the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1992).
eBook - ePubLeadership in Colonial Africa
Disruption of Traditional Frameworks and Patterns
- B. Jallow, B. Jallow(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
21If the full scope of Du Bois’s work transgressed traditional disciplinary boundaries drawing on a host of theoretical approaches to pursue social and economic justice, then Rabaka maintains that Du Bois’s wide-ranging analysis of the colored peoples of the world should and must speak to contemporary issues. Rabaka’s exploration of the complex concerns surrounding reparations illustrates the third and final way he extends Du Bois’s Pan-African intellectual legacy. To make this claim, Rabaka turns specifically to Du Bois’s 1947 Appeal to the World , in which he finds the basis for Du Bois’s critical reparations theory. Composed during his second stint at the NAACP between 1944 and 1948 at the dawn of the cold war, Du Bois’s Appeal demanded the recognition of the humanity of African descended peoples. Most consequential for Rabaka’s formulation of Du Bois’s critical reparations theory is how Du Bois explains contemporary injustices of Jim Crow in light of racialized slavery’s legacy. Rabaka argues that Du Bois connected the technological and industrial prowess of the United States to “several centuries of coerced African labor under enslavement.” Du Bois thus implicated the American government in this racialized crime against African humanity “because the United States and its citizens have received economic and social benefits and privileges as a result of the enslavement of Africans, and because even after their enslavement African Americans’ human, civil, social, political, and economic rights continue to be violated.” Despite its mature argumentation, Rabaka points out that Du Bois’s critical reparations theory lacks teeth because it failed to address compensation. In this way, Rabaka fashions Du Bois’s critical reparations analysis as part of his Pan-African intellectual leadership legacy because it serves as a compelling “model and map for our liberation theory and praxis.”22
eBook - ePub- Marcel Stoetzler(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
8The double-consciousness: W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) had an unusual upbringing that, against a grim background, was also shaped by some benign aspects of American society of the time. He grew up in a small but prosperous, mostly white Anglo-Saxon industrial town in Massachusetts, New England, where only very few African-Americans lived, mostly as domestic servants. His own family background included black, Dutch, French and English ancestors. His father left him and his mother when Du Bois was still a small child, and she lived with the support of the local white upper class, who provided her with small jobs as well as charity, including a house to live in. She died when Du Bois was a teenager. Objectively, Du Bois and his mother were poor, but subjectively he grew up feeling almost a member of the local elite, where he seems not to have experienced much racial or even class discrimination. He is said to have assimilated well into the habitus of the Anglo-Saxon upper class: controlled manners, stiff white shirts and all that. He was a top student at high school and was given a scholarship to go to college. This was when reality kicked in: the college he attended was Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, a ‘historically black’ college in the segregationist South. (In the USA, a college is called ‘historically black’ if it was founded before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and had then been primarily for African-Americans.) He commented later that leaving small-town New England and moving to Nashville was what made him ‘a Negro’. The contrast between the two sets of social experiences also provided him with the principal theme of his life work: suddenly it was not his intelligence and genteel manners but his skin colour that placed him socially.
eBook - ePubStalking Sociologists
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology
- Mike Forrest Keen(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
2W.E.B. Du Bois: Sociologist beyond the VeilWilliam Edward Burghart Du Bois was born in 1868, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, in the small town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. An usually gifted child, Du Bois was the only Black student in his high school, and at age sixteen graduated among the top of his class. Though he wanted to go to Harvard, initially Du Bois was only able to attend the all-Black Fisk University, where, for the first time in his life, he entered what he described as “the land of the slaves ... a region where the world was split into white and black halves, where the darker half was held back by race prejudice and legal bonds, as well as by deep ignorance and dire poverty.”1Even though five to ten years younger than most of his classmates, upon entering Fisk, Du Bois placed as a sophomore. At Fisk, he became an impassioned orator and belligerent opponent of the color bar: “I was determined to make a scientific conquest of my environment, which would render the emancipation of the Negro race easier and quicker.”2 Following his graduation from Fisk in 1888, Du Bois received a scholarship and was admitted to Harvard as a junior. However, he was isolated from his fellow white students, rejected by the all-white Glee Club, and found himself “in Harvard, but not of it.”3 No doubt the bitterness from such rejection contributed to his being always on the move with little time for small talk, bare acknowledgment of the minimal pleasantries, and a reputation for abruptness, aloofness, and short-patience.4 Nevertheless, while there he became a devoted follower and friend of William James and upon graduating cum laude in 1890 was one of five students selected to speak at commencement. He spent the next two years as a Harvard fellow studying what would have been sociology had such a field been recognized at the time, but instead eventually received his Ph.D. in history in 1895. He was the first Black man to receive a doctorate degree from Harvard and went on to become the first Black sociologist in America.5
eBook - ePub- John White, Bruce J. Dierenfield(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism— scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.” Through all his ideological shifts and turns, Du Bois attempted to resolve what he experienced and regarded as being the fundamental dilemma of the African American— “one ever feels his two-ness.” Unlike Booker T. Washington, Du Bois always felt himself apart from the black masses and, for significant periods of his life was decidedly out of step with mainstream black responses to such ideologies as socialism, Marxism, and pan-Africanism. Nevertheless, Du Bois, as editor of the Crisis, was the outstanding agitator and propagandist of the protest movement that arose partly as a reaction against Washington’s power and policies. Essentially a man of letters, Du Bois, more than any other African-American leader, influenced the black intelligentsia and contributed to the formation of that black consciousness which had its flowering in the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois himself admired but was rejected by white society, and partly out of this rejection came his reasoned, but impassioned, hatred of racial discrimination and injustice. 58 From the formation of the Niagara Movement until his resignation from the NAACP in the 1930s, Du Bois put aside his preference for historical and sociological research to advance African-American life in order to become the singularly gifted spokesperson for black economic and political rights. With Booker T. Washington’s death, the continuing black exodus from the South, and the rising expectations of an educated black middle class, Du Bois achieved leadership of the talented tenth
eBook - ePub- Michael W. Apple(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
I am more than a little aware of the role that “absent presences” play in the construction of historical narratives. I also recognize the importance and the power of the question “From whose perspective are you answering the organizing question of this book?” Responding to the question of “Can education change society?” can be very different depending on one’s historical and current positioning in a society riven with a complex and often contradictory politics of (re)distribution and recognition. But in a book such as this, I cannot do everything, nor can I know everything no matter how hard I continue to try. This is a collective task of restoring collective memories and histories of struggles, of co-teaching one another about these histories and their current iterations, of finding spaces where these struggles have intersected and can intersect today and in the future, and of forming the decentered unities that are dialectically related to collectively learning from each other. Thankfully, there is a large and growing body of work that documents the multiplicity and power of these past and present movements, voices, and actors across a range of differences in this and other nations and nations to be. Thus, I focus here primarily on two figures and the people associated with them, knowing full well how much more needs to be said and how many more oppressed people there were and are whose voices could be heard.W. E. B. Du Bois and the Transformation of Culture and EducationI want to first take up one of the most significant African American scholar/activists who spoke powerfully through both in his content and his style about education and the constant struggle over cultural politics, W. E. B. Du Bois. No section of a book this size can do justice to the arguments and accomplishments of major figures such as Du Bois. His arguments are not only challenging, but they changed over his lifetime, in the process becoming more subtle, more radical, and more powerful as he faced and fought back against the national and international racialization of economic, political, and cultural assemblages of power. What I can do here is to once again remind those of us who need to be reminded that there are very real dangers associated with the commonly accepted view that George Counts’ book Dare the School Build a New Social Order?
eBook - ePub- E. Digby Baltzell(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The Philadelphia Negro written by a young scholar who subsequently became one of the three most famous Negro leaders in American history, surely meets this requirement. Though always referred to and frequently quoted by specialists, it is now seldom read by the more general student of sociology. For not only has the book been out of print for almost half a century; it has been virtually unobtainable, as my own experience of almost twenty years of searching in vain for a copy in secondhand bookstores attests. Even at the University of Pennsylvania, under whose sponsorship the research was undertaken and the book published, although one copy has been preserved in the archives and one on microfilm, the sole copy listed in the catalogue and available for students in the library has been unaccountably missing from the shelves for several years. In writing this introduction, I am using a copy lent me by my good friend, Professor Ira Reid of Haverford College, a one-time colleague and friend of the late Professor Du Bois at Atlanta University. Modern students, then, will certainly benefit from a readily available paperback edition of this study of the Negro community in Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century.In order to gain a full understanding of any book, one ought to know something of the life and intellectual background of its author, the place of the book in the history of the discipline (in this case sociology), as well as the climate of intellectual opinion and the social conditions of the era in which the book was written. Because The Philadelphia Negro —like all his other writings—was so intimately a part of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, I shall begin this introduction with a brief outline of his career. Du Bois himself wrote in his seventies: “My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a problem; but that problem was, as I continue to think, the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world.”2It is one of the coincidences of American history that in the year 1895, Frederick Douglass, a crusading abolitionist and the first great leader of the Negro people, died, and Booker T. Washington rose to national leadership, with his “compromise” speech at Atlanta, in which he made the famous statement that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to human progress.” In that same year, which marked the passing of Negro leadership from the fiery and moralistic Douglass to the compromising and pragmatic Washington, a young New Englander, W.E.B. Du Bois, obtained the first Ph.D. degree ever awarded a Negro by Harvard University.
eBook - ePubProtest and Propaganda
W. E. B. Du Bois, the CRISIS, and American History
- Amy Helene Kirschke, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Amy Helene Kirschke, Phillip Luke Sinitiere(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- University of Missouri(Publisher)
How could he aid in defining the race by articulating the past, while a racist South and an at best apathetic country claimed a different history? Du Bois understood the struggle, which he articulated in Souls of Black Folk : “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. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.” 36 To right the wrong of a forgotten and revised history, Du Bois saw his duty as a historian to reclaim the historical past of African Americans. Some black Americans were more comfortable with a more positive “spin” on the events of the past to advocate social change, even if it seemed they were trying to avoid it. 37 Du Bois’s commitments as a print propagandist did not see the merit of anything but an honest appraisal of both past and present. African Americans, even if they were not active in commemorative activities, had to define both an individual and collective memory that took into account their rights as American citizens and their unique experience as a race of people who shared a history of oppression. As one scholar put it, “More specific to the question of collective memory, blacks had to balance the need to preserve, interpret and disseminate the positive elements in their history with the desire to eradicate many of the more painful and degrading aspects of that history
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