W. E. B. Du Bois

12 Key excerpts on "W. E. B. Du Bois"

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  Sociology and Military Studies

  Classical and Current Foundations

  • Joseph Soeters(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6      W. E. B. Du Bois Race, diversity and inclusion, in society and the military

  W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) has been proclaimed to be ‘the first sociologist of race’, and even though race relations in earlier times were much worse than they seem to be today, it may be safe to say that race continues to be a problem in societies all over the world (Nkomo, 2009). There are many examples to underline this contention. The racial background of many of today’s tensions between the population and the police – in the USA and elsewhere – is just one of them. In the armed forces this may not be different, although Charles Moskos and others have contended that the US military organization works as a ‘race equalizer’, providing social mobility to African-American personnel that was absent in other sectors for too long. Even so, there is a long history of painful – and hopeful! – events since multi-racial integration began to develop in the military, in the USA and certainly also elsewhere in the world.

  But first, let’s turn to the life and works of W. E. B. Du Bois himself (e.g. Blackwell and Janowitz, 1974; Nkomo, 2009; Morris and Ghaziani, 2005; Morris, 2015). At the end of the nineteenth century Du Bois was among the first scholars in the USA to start working on something called sociology. Trained in the humanities and history in particular, he soon developed a penchant for modern social sciences, including the accompanying methodologies. This change in professional orientation was enhanced by his two-year stay in Berlin, where he studied under Gustav Schmoller and other famous professors and where he became a friend of Max Weber. He maintained friendly relations with Weber until the latter’s untimely death in 1920; during this friendship he influenced Weber’s thinking about race and ethnicity (Morris, 2015: 149–167).

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  Socialism and Democracy in W.E.B. Du Bois's Life, Thought, and Legacy

  • Edward Carson, Gerald Horne, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Edward Carson, Gerald Horne, Phillip Luke Sinitiere(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Earl Wright III, The First American School of Sociology: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (London: Ashgate, 2016); Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds., W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Recent representative articles that advance scholarship on Du Bois, social science, education, and literature include Shirley Moody-Turner, ““Dear Doctor Du Bois”: Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing,” MELUS 40/3 (Fall 2015): 47-68; Lawrence J. Oliver, “Apocalyptic and Slow Violence: The Environmental Vision of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22/3 (Summer 2015): 466-484; Dan S. Green and Robert A. Wortham, “Sociology Hesitant: The Continuing Neglect of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Sociological Spectrum 35/6 (Nov/Dec 2015): 518-533; Marcus Anthony Hunter, “W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Heterogeneity: How The Philadelphia Negro Shaped American Sociology,” American Sociologist 46 (2015): 219-233; José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown, “Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity,” Du Bois Review 12/2 (Fall 2015): 231-248; Les Black and Maggie Tate, “For a Sociological Reconstruction: W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall and Segregated Sociology,” Sociological Research Online 20/3 (2015); Michael J. Beilfuss, “Iconic Pastorals and Beautiful Swamps: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Troubled Landscapes of the American South,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22/3 (Summer 2015): 486-506; Kerry Burch, “Platonic & Freierean Interpretations of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John,”” Educational Studies 52/1 (2016): 38-50; Tommy J. Curry, “It’s for the Kids: The Sociological Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Brownies’ Books and Their Philosophical Relevance for our Understanding of Gender in the Ethnological Age,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36/1 (2015): 27–57; Andrew J. Douglas, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society,” Du Bois Review 12/1 (January 2015): 25-40; Derrick P. Alridge, “On the Education of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Paradox of Segregation,” Journal of African American History

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  SUNY series in New Political Science

  Reflections on Hatred, Rage, Revolution, and Revolt

  • William W. Sokoloff(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Even though Du Bois seems to prefer moderate approaches to correcting the race problem in America, Du Bois as time went on gravitated to revolt as a way of life as a call to explore all available options for social, political, and economic transformation to improve race relations. 11 W.E.B. Du Bois Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868, William Edward Burghardt “W.E.B.” Du Bois was an academic, activist, historian, poet, sociologist, and pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to fighting for people of color. Du Bois attained a classical liberal arts education at Fisk University, continued his education at Harvard University, where he was mentored by William James, and then Du Bois studied in Berlin at Humbolt University. For his entire life Du Bois continued to study, write, and fight for people of color positioned at the bottom of the social order. Du Bois had a long and distinguished teaching career, and he was also constantly engaged with progressive political movements. He taught at Wilberforce University, Atlanta University, and joined the Niagra Movement. In 1910, Du Bois joined the NAACP and became editor of its magazine, The Crisis. Du Bois received the International Peace Prize and Lenin Peace Prize. Since Du Bois was denied a passport by the US government (1952‒58), he could not travel abroad for speaking engagements during this time. Du Bois’s intellectual accomplishments and productivity as an author were massive and reflected his evolving understanding of the role of value commitments in research, the global significance of racial problems, and opportunities for progressive social and political transformation. On August 29, 1963, Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana. Du Bois lived through the failure of Reconstruction, World War I, the Red Scare, World War II, the Depression, and McCarthyism, but never surrendered his critical voice

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  Stalking 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 Veil

  William 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.”1

  Even 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

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  Radical Interactionism and Critiques of Contemporary Culture

  • Norman K. Denzin, Norman K. Denzin, Norman K Denzin(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  Musolf, 2014 ). Scholars of theoretical rationality since then have worked to universalize conceptualizations of democracy and human rights. The project of political emancipation is an unending journey. New forms of social consciousness, fresh ways to expand human rights and even the rights of other species, and brave new worlds of social justice that we cannot yet imagine await. Social structure and culture are far more egalitarian, and human rights are increasingly more universal, today than they were when the project of political emancipation began. Struggles punctuated by setbacks and turning points define the political landscape. In the United States, the standard bearers of political emancipation – the end of slavery and Jim Crow, the rise of the New Deal and feminism, and the constitutional legalization of same-sex marriage – are turning points. Many other turning points have changed history.

  Max Weber argued that ideas are transformative. Durkheim argued that moral individualism, the idea of the individual as a sacred object, has transformed our political system so that constitutional, social, cultural, and behavioral norms have been institutionalized that embody it. Progressives and radicals have advanced the idea that individuals deserve subjectivities and identities free from malicious construction; that desire is far from achieved. W. E. B. Du Bois's social theory has made a contribution toward that potential turning point through his formation of the concept of “double consciousness.” This concept enhances our understanding of how subjectivities of inferiority are constituted by domination and subjugation; hence, it contributes to the perspective of radical interactionism.

  W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

  This essay lacks the space to present a biography of Du Bois or to delineate the social context of the times that influenced his writings. It is limited, instead, to exploring Du Bois's concept of double consciousness expounded in The Souls of Black Folk, originally published in 1903. Inferences from the concept will allow me to reflect on the repercussions of racialization, meritocracy, and the subjectivity struggles embedded in self-formation, consequences of living life in a social structure and culture in which the color line still dominates.

  Lewis (2009, p. 4)

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  Discourse and Culture

  The Creation of America, 1870-1920

  • Alun Munslow(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 The black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois and the black divided consciousness Part of the work of the organic intellectual is to reveal their groups’ misreading of their positions in society. In the process they should, according to Gramsci’s prescription, attempt to create a counter hegemony. For this reason it is important to fix, as we have done, the intellectual in relation to his or her text, its content, genre, referential authority, as well as describing the context or world within which author and text existed. While Washington’s ideological subjection as revealed in his conservative race jeremiad precluded his creation of a counter-hegemony, the other great race leader, William E.B. Du Bois, was ultimately similarly constrained but in a far more complex fashion which arose paradoxically from his even more keen awareness of the divided consciousness of black Americans. Gramsci criticised criteria that categorised people or classes as ‘intellectual’ or ‘non-intellectual’ based on estimations of the brain-work involved in any activity. He said ‘Each man … carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a “philosopher”, an artist, a man of taste’. 1 Black leader William E.B. Du Bois, however, believed the history of black Americans was in fact made for them only by an elite of men of taste. For Du Bois not everyone could be a philosopher. 2 Black cultural and intellectual self-determination must be planned and undertaken not primarily by artisans, technicians, industrial managers and administrators, but by the college educated – the artists, poets, scholars – the race’s exceptional men

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  Leadership in Colonial Africa

  Disruption of Traditional Frameworks and Patterns

  • B. Jallow, B. Jallow(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  African Identities , Vol. 2, No. 2 (2004), p.151–171.

  Shapiro, Herbert, ed., African American History & Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker , Minneapolis: Marxist Educational Press, 1998.

  Sinitiere, Phillip Luke, “A Legacy of Scholarship and Struggle: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Political Affairs of His Twilight Years,” Political Affairs , August 27, 2013, http://politicalaffairs.net/a-legacy-of-scholarship-and-struggle-w-e-b-du-bois-and-the-political-affairs-of-his-twilight-years-2/ .

  Stewart, James B, “The Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois for Contemporary Black Studies,” The Journal of Negro Education , Vol. 53, No. 3 (1984), p. 296–311.

  Taylor, Ula, “Introduction: The Shaping of an Activist and Scholar,” The Journal of African American History , Vol. 96, No. 2 (2011), p. 204–214.

  ———, “Combing the Archive, Tracing the Diaspora: The Scholarship of Gerald Horne,” The Journal of African American History , Vol. 96, No. 2 (2011), p. 215–220.

  Troyanovsky, Oleg A., “An Advocate of Peace and Friendship among Peoples,” in Clarke (Ed.), in Pan-Africanism and the Liberation of Southern Africa: International Tribute to William E. B. DuBois . New York: United Nations Centre against Apartheid, 1978, p. 9–10.

  Turner, James, and C. Steven McGann, “Black Studies as an Integral Tradition in African-American Intellectual History,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion , Vol. 6. No. 2–3 (1976), p. 73–78.

  Young, Andrew, “An Advocate of Black Reconstruction in America,” in Clarke (Ed.), in Pan-Africanism and the Liberation of Southern Africa: International Tribute to William E. B. DuBois,

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  Worlds Within

  National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

  • Vilashini Cooppan(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Soul of Nationhood: W.E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place

  What is the black man but America’s Belgium? —W. E. B. Du Bois, “THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK” (1910)

  In a 1924 essay titled “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” and published a year later in Alain Locke’s influential collection of essays, The New Negro , W. E. B. Du Bois denounced Belgium’s colonial policies, as Conrad had done only a quarter century before him. “One might indeed read the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a matter of colonial shadows, speculating on what might happen if Europe became suddenly shadowless—if Asia and Africa and the islands were cut permanently away.”1 The spectral haunting of empire finds another articulation here. Through a catalogue of Portugal, Belgium, France, and England, Du Bois’s essay—“likening and contrasting each land and its far-off shadow”—effects the double vision for which Du Bois is perhaps most famous. Connecting or reaching out from the space of the national to that of the global was, for Du Bois, essential to critiquing and changing the meaning of race and racialized subjection. In the mirror of this method, Du Bois revealed both the dehumanizing reigns of European colonialism and U.S. racism and, through a glass decidedly darkly, an India, Africa, and Asia that together with black America constituted an insurgent “darker world” (409).

  Born five days after the 1868 Emancipation Proclamation and laid to rest ninety-five years later, on the eve of the 1963 March On Washington for Civil Rights, in the shadow of Castle Osu, once the holding pen of slave traders and now the state residence of newly independent Ghana, Du Bois defined a century of black liberation. The most influential African American intellectual and political figure of the twentieth century was also its most penetrating, prescient, and haunting anatomist of racial subjectivity within and outside the veil of discrimination. He was a sociologist of black culture who stood alone in the early twentieth-century United States; a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis , for a quarter century; a sometime integrationist who would go on to advocate African American economic, institutional, and cultural self-sufficiency; a nationalist as well as a Pan-Africanist, a socialist, and, in his nineties, a communist. Throughout his life, he was a race leader, an advocate for blacks in the United States and, across the global color line, for what he was wont to call the darker races of the world. Critical discussions of Du Bois have all too often depicted him not as straddling disparate geographies and allegiances so much as migrating, even progressing , from one voice and place to the next. Thus Du Bois’s 1910 departure from Atlanta University and academic sociology for an executive position at the NAACP has been thematized by critics, historians, and Du Bois himself as a farewell to social science in the face of Jim Crow disenfranchisement, white supremacist attacks, and the unmistakable call for social action.2 A world of political difference would thus appear to separate the academic sociology and nationalist bent of early studies of slavery, segregation, and the black community, such as “The Conservation of Races” (1897), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and the Atlanta University Publications (1897–1914), from the global proletarian sympathies and anticolonial, Pan-Africanist politics of later works, such as The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924), Dark Princess (1928), Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), The World and Africa (1947), and The Black Flame (1957–61). Critical narratives of conversion from science to politics, art to ideology, or racial nationalism to Third World globalism no doubt have a certain thematic tidiness and chronological certitude. But they bifurcate at their peril. For as a close examination of Du Bois’s writings reveals, he was shaped not just by the transition from one intellectual and political framework to another but also, possibly more so, by their ongoing contention, collusion, and coexistence.3

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  A History of African-American Leadership

  • John White, Bruce J. Dierenfield(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  were pressing for equality, too readily assumed that they would be prepared to suspend their agitation. His plan for segregated cooperatives of consumers and producers was unrealistic. He viewed Africa through a haze of romanticism, yet also inspired African nationalists. His politics alternated between a radical optimism and a gloomy conservatism, and, at the end of his life, he embraced the tenets of totalitarian regimes. But through all his ideological searchings, Du Bois was the keeper of America’s moral conscience on the question of race and racial inequality. In a real sense, Du Bois was the father of the modern civil rights era. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the last major address before his assassination, delivered a fitting tribute to Du Bois, marking the centennial of his birth:

  Dr. Du Bois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for the truth about his own people. . . . Whatever else he was, with his multitude of careers and professional titles, he was first and always a black man. . . . Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a communist in his later years. . . . It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a communist. Our irrational obsessive anticommunism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking. . . . Dr. Du Bois’s greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice. 61

  References

  1 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), p. 13.

  2 Paul Robeson, “The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois,” in Philip S. Foner, ed., Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, and Interviews, 1918–1974 (1978), pp. 474–475.

  3 Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans

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  American Philosophy

  Immigration and Multiculturalism in American Pragmatism

  • José-Antonio Orosco(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  DURING the United States Bicentennial, President Gerald R. Ford officially expanded Negro History Week into a national Black History Month. In his official remarks, Ford noted how historian Carter G. Woodson created the holiday in 1926 to mark the significance of African American contributions to US history. Woodson established this commemoration during the same period in which many pragmatist philosophers were trying to envision the nature of a culturally pluralistic democracy that could honor the gifts of many diverse peoples to US American society. President Ford suggests that Black History Month represents our country’s efforts toward the full realization of the Founding Father’s democratic aspirations. Its purpose is to showcase the ways in which African Americans have helped to enshrine freedom and individual rights in everyday life. African Americans, in other words, have assisted the United States to achieve its potential.

  W. E. B. Du Bois would not have entirely disagreed with Ford’s assessment about the role of African Americans in US history; they have helped the United States to become a better society and to reach some of the democratic ideals that were stifled by the institutions of slavery and segregation. Yet, Du Bois believes that the struggle of African Americans is about more than just the fight to integrate themselves into an already articulated framework of rights, duties, and civic responsibilities. In an article in the Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, published the same year as the establishment of Negro History Week, Du Bois alludes to the possibility that African Americans collectively possess a utopian vision that can press the United States to become a richer society than what the Founding Fathers envisioned. He suggests US American democracy has the potential to grow and change in response to the culturally specific insights of this group of people:

  Do we simply want to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what American really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals? … [P]ushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us … a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world … a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America.1

  In this chapter, I turn to Du Bois to help understand the meaning of the idea of a racial contribution to democracy. As we saw in chapter 2 , Dewey’s conception of a culturally pluralistic democracy contains a Principle of Cultural Contribution. He envisions a society in which different ethnic communities bring their common cultural values, social practices, moral beliefs, and ideals of excellence and human flourishing into conversation with one another, learning from one another, and articulating a shared conception of civic cooperation within deep democracy. As I suggested in chapter 3 , Louis Adamic’s studies of the US labor movement indicated to him that the cultural traditions and practices of some immigrant communities might transform more than just the popular culture of the United States. They might be able to influence our public political culture, that is, our ways of understanding and conceiving of political power and democratic institutions. Yet, while Adamic did spend some time investigating and documenting the ways in which African Americans influenced US American society, he was unique. Very few of the classical pragmatists even studied race, or the cultural contributions of non-European people to US American democracy, in any systematic way.2

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  Racial Structure and Radical Politics in the African Diaspora

  Volume 2, Africana Studies

  • James L. Conyers(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5

  In Critical Race Theory (1995), Richard Delgado states that though it began organizing as a “self-conscious entity” in 1989, critical race theory’s “intellectual origins go back much further” (xiv). He states: “The movement has predecessors—Critical Legal Studies, to which it owes a great debt, feminism, and Continental social and political philosophy. It [also] derives its inspiration from the American civil rights tradition, including Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez, and from nationalist movements, including Malcolm X and the Panthers” (xiv). What I wish to highlight here is, first, though it generously draws from European and white American thought-traditions, African American political thought and social movements have been at the heart of and enormously influential on critical race theory’s discourse and debates. This is an important point to make since there has been a relative silence regarding critical race theory in African American Studies in specific, and Africana Studies more generally. If, in fact, African American radical intellectuals, social critics, and political activists have been at the heart of this discourse, central to its formation, and many of its major advocates and practitioners, then, African American Studies scholars and students would be remiss to continue to allow critical race theory to go unengaged.6

  A second issue I wish to emphasize here involves Du Bois’s place in critical race scholarship. Many, if not all, of the key concerns of critical race theory are prefigured in Du Bois’s discourse on race and racism in ways that makes one wonder whether critical race theory is simply a continuation, or a contemporary version of Du Boisian race theory by another name. For instance, Du Bois’s critique of European modernity, albeit often masked and muted, found it, Euro-modernity, morally weak and wanting because each of its inventions and innovations were accompanied by unprecedented human domination and environmental destruction. Put another way, Du Bois’s contributions to critical race theory accent the fact that when and where whites broke new ground, in whatever technical capacity and in whichever area of existence, they did so on the graves of people of color, imperially embalming the earth and making the life-worlds, countries, and continents of people of color a massive mortuary. From Du Bois’s optic, no amount of racial naïveté could (or can) save people of color. They, therefore, had no other recourse but to argue for and embrace, as Du Bois did time and time again throughout his long career, race consciousness

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  Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory

  Seeing the Social World

  • Kenneth Allan, Sarah Daynes(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Through most of his life, Du Bois generally favored integration, but toward the end he became discouraged at the lack of progress and increasingly turned toward Black Nationalism: He encouraged blacks to work together to create their own culture, art, and literature, and to create their own group economy of black producers and consumers. The cultural stand was directed at creating black pride and identity; the formation of a black economic community was the weapon to fight discrimination and black poverty. Du Bois was also a principal force in the Pan-African movement, which was founded on the belief that all black people share a common descent and should therefore work collectively around the globe for equality. As I mentioned, in the latter part of his life, Du Bois became disheartened at the lack of change regarding the color line in the United States. In the end, he renounced his citizenship; joined the Communist Party; and moved to Ghana, Africa.

  More than any other single person, Du Bois was responsible for black consciousness in America and probably the world during the twentieth century. His book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903/1996d), defined the problem of the color line. He was a founding member of the NAACP and its chief spokesperson during its most formative years. Du Bois also produced the first scientific studies of the black condition in America.

  I have listed the major points in Du Bois’s life in the timeline below. I encourage you to not skip over this information; read it and let it sink in. The timeline is but an outline of a life that spanned almost a century and helped to change the face of American society.

  • February 23, 1868: Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
  • 1888: Received his BA from Fisk University, Nashville (turned down by Harvard)—taught two summers in rural Tennessee, which introduced him to the deep poverty of the Southern black person
  • 1888–1895: Completed second BA and PhD at Harvard, during which time he spent 2 years in Berlin, attending lectures by Max Weber and becoming friends with both Marianne and Max Weber
  • 1894–1910: Taught at Wilberforce, University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University (where he was a professor of economics and history for 14 years); published 16 research monographs
  • 1899: Published The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (the first ethnography of a black community in the United States)
  • 1900: Led the first Pan-African conference, in London
  • 1903: Published The Souls of Black Folk,

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