Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)

(1868–1963) editor, historian, sociologist, political activist, author; born in Great Barrington, Mass. Supported by the local school headmaster and the Congregational Church in Great Barrington, he was educated at Fisk University (1885–88), where he was shocked by the racial segregation he experienced in the South. He went on to take a Ph.D. at Harvard (1895), with two years at the University of Berlin (1892–94). Under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, he studied black life in the Philadelphia ghetto, writing The Philadelphia Negro (1899). A professor of economics, history, and sociology at Atlanta University (1898–1910), he sponsored an annual conference for the Study of the Negro Problem and wrote essays, compiled in The Soul of Black Folk (1903), calling for an activist African-American middle class to change racial politics. Founding the Niagara Movement (1905) to fight segregation, he also organized its official magazine, Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (1907–10). He resigned from teaching (1910) to serve as director of publications and research for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York, editing Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (1910–34), a magazine that was credited with encouraging many early civil rights activists. However, when he argued that African-Americans should voluntarily segregate themselves to organize economically during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he alienated the NAACP leadership, so he resigned in 1934. He returned to Atlanta University to chair the sociology department (1934–44), where he founded a scholarly journal, Phylon: A Review of Race and Culture (1940–44), and completed his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn (1940). Forced to retire at age 76, he returned to the NAACP, serving as director of special research (1944–48), leaving when his Marxist politics became a liability. Chairman of the Peace Information Center, an antinuclear weapons group, he was indicted as a foreign agent in 1951 and although acquitted, his passport was revoked (1952–58). He later toured Europe, China, and the Soviet Union, where he received the Lenin Peace Prize (1959). After joining the Communist Party (1961), he moved to Accra, Ghana, becoming a naturalized citizen just before he died.

References in periodicals archive

As many contemplate how marginalization can be eliminated in the twenty-first century, the charts of W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits offer guidance into how sociology can draw attention to unnoticed inequities as well as under-celebrated progress.

W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits; Visualizing Black America

"Whites in Africa after Negro autonomy 1962" (W. E. B. Du Bois

The Admiration and Complementary Africana Historical Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and Joel Augustus Rogers

The book is divided into four parts and twelve chapters: part 1, "Was W. E. B. Du Bois Religious"; part 2, "The Importance of Souls" (a reference to the title of his important book, The Souls of Black Folk [1903], and the meaning of "souls" as a religious and spiritual term in Du Bois's capacious vocabulary); part 3, "Rhetorics of Religion and Redeeming Lynch Victims"; part 4, "Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism" (which is principally a reflection on what Du Bois knew of these religions and how they figured in some of his writings).

The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections

As Du Bois (1903) stated, "It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American." Alridge's book effectively captivates this sentiment in The Educational Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History by stressing the clarity and need for continued work on equity and fairness in a society of diverse ethnicities.

Alridge, D. P. (2008). The Educational Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

(1.) W. E. B. Du Bois, "Close Ranks," The Crisis 16 (July 1918): 111.

The crisis in the Great War: W. E. B. Du Bois and his perception of African-American participation in World War I

In his ground-breaking study of reconstruction during the period, W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized the part that slaves played in their own emancipation and set the stage for a new interpretation of the Civil War and reconstruction, which would gain increasing acceptance among white scholars during the postwar years.

Reflections on the African American experience, social history, and the resurgence of conservatism in American society

This book is designed to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois's work in the founding of the discipline.

Morris, Alson D.: The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

The life, thought, and activities of W. E. B. Du Bois have been treated from many angles by scholars in a range of disciplines.

W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet

(4.) See, among others, Cornel West, "W. E. B. Du Bois: An Interpretation," in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africanism in Liberia, 1919-1924