W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, and he spent seven decades turning scholarship into a weapon against the color line. He pioneered the empirical sociology of Black American life, co-founded the NAACP and edited its magazine The Crisis for nearly a quarter century, and in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935) produced two of the most consequential books in American letters.
At a Glance
- Born
- 23 February 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts
- Died
- 27 August 1963, Accra, Ghana
- Birth name
- William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
- Known for
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903); editor of The Crisis (1910–1934); Black Reconstruction in America (1935); the Niagara Movement and the NAACP
- HBCU ties
- Fisk University (Bachelor’s degree, 1888); Wilberforce University (Taught classics, 1894–1896); Clark Atlanta University (Professor at predecessor Atlanta University from 1897 until joining the NAACP in 1910, and again 1934–1944)
- Fields
- Education · Literature · Civil Rights
- Era
- Turn of the Century
Early Life
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on 23 February 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small New England town with a handful of Black families. His mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt, came from a family of free Black landholders long settled in the Housatonic Valley; his father, Alfred Du Bois, left the family when William was a child. He was raised by his mother and her relatives, attended the town’s integrated public schools, and graduated from high school in 1884.
With help from local churches he enrolled in 1885 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Teaching in rural Tennessee schools during summers gave the Massachusetts-born student his first sustained encounter with Jim Crow and with the poverty of Black Southern life. After graduating from Fisk in 1888 he entered Harvard, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree cum laude in 1890 and was chosen as a commencement speaker.
Du Bois continued in graduate study at Harvard and, from 1892 to 1894, at the University of Berlin, where he studied history and the emerging social sciences. In 1895 he became the first African American to receive a Harvard PhD. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies.
Life and Work
He first taught classics at Wilberforce University in Ohio and in 1896 married Nina Gomer. The University of Pennsylvania then engaged him to study the city’s Seventh Ward; the result, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), drew on door-to-door interviews with thousands of residents and is regarded as a founding work of urban sociology. In 1897 he joined the faculty of Atlanta University, where he directed the annual Atlanta University Studies of Black social and economic conditions. For the 1900 Paris Exposition he and Thomas J. Calloway assembled an exhibit on Black American life that included hundreds of photographs and a series of hand-drawn data charts, now held by the Library of Congress.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) announced that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” and described the “double-consciousness” of Black Americans. One chapter openly challenged Booker T. Washington, whose 1895 Atlanta address Du Bois came to regard as a surrender of political and civil rights. In 1905 Du Bois and a group of like-minded activists organized the Niagara Movement to demand full citizenship. In 1909 many of its members joined white progressives to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois became its director of publicity and research and in 1910 launched The Crisis, which he edited until 1934 and built into a magazine with a national readership.
Through The Crisis Du Bois campaigned against lynching, published young writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and advanced Pan-Africanism, organizing a series of Pan-African Congresses beginning in Paris in 1919. His books from these years include Darkwater (1920) and the novel Dark Princess (1928). His growing interest in economic self-organization and voluntary separation put him at odds with NAACP leadership, and he resigned in 1934.
Returning to Atlanta University (1934–1944), he published Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), which demolished the prevailing academic portrait of Reconstruction as a failure caused by Black incapacity and placed freedpeople at the center of the story. He founded the journal Phylon in 1940, the year he also published the autobiography Dusk of Dawn. He rejoined the NAACP as director of special research in 1944 but was dismissed in 1948 after disputes with its leadership.
In the early Cold War his peace activism and leftist politics brought federal persecution. In 1950 he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York on the American Labor Party ticket; Nina Du Bois died that year. In 1951 he was indicted, with colleagues from the Peace Information Center, for failing to register as a foreign agent; a federal judge acquitted them later that year. He married the writer Shirley Graham in 1951. The State Department denied him a passport until 1958. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and moved to Ghana at President Kwame Nkrumah’s invitation to direct the Encyclopedia Africana project, and in 1963 he became a citizen of Ghana.
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”
Legacy
Du Bois died in Accra on 27 August 1963, at 95, on the eve of the March on Washington, where his death was announced to the crowd. He was given a state funeral, and his grave in Accra is now part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture. The site of his boyhood home in Great Barrington is a National Historic Landmark, and his papers are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose library bears his name.
His reputation suffered during the McCarthy era, but scholars now regard him as a founder of American sociology and of modern African American historiography. Black Reconstruction anticipated the revisionist scholarship that transformed the field after the 1960s, and The Souls of Black Folk remains among the most widely read and taught works of American nonfiction. His concept of the “Talented Tenth,” his debates with Washington, and his insistence on full political equality shaped the strategy of the civil rights movement that followed.
W. E. B. Du Bois used rigorous scholarship as a weapon against the color line, and his debate with Booker T. Washington framed a lasting question about how an oppressed people should pursue freedom. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 23 February 1868 Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
- 1895 Becomes the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard.
- 1899 Publishes The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study.
- 1903 Publishes The Souls of Black Folk.
- 1905 Organizes the Niagara Movement.
- 1909–1910 Co-founds the NAACP and launches The Crisis.
- 1919 Organizes the Pan-African Congress in Paris.
- 1935 Publishes Black Reconstruction in America.
- 1951 Indicted as an unregistered foreign agent; acquitted the same year.
- 27 August 1963 Dies in Accra, Ghana, the day before the March on Washington.
Sources and Further Reading
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). Link
- David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993).
- David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
- PBS American Masters, “W. E. B. Du Bois Biography and Career Timeline.” Link
- Library of Congress, African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition. Link
- Social Welfare History Project, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, “W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963).” Link
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