William Edward Burghardt DuBois (he pronounced it DueBoys) was born on February 23, 1868, less than three years after the 13th Amendment had outlawed slavery. The DuBois family, however, was several generations removed from bondage. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small town with only a few black families. As a youth, his teachers liked him and most of his playmates were white. While in Nashville, Tennessee, attending Fisk University, he discovered his black identity. He spent his summers teaching in rural schools. It was there that he met "the real seat of slavery." Never before had he encountered such overwhelming poverty. "I touched intimately the lives of the commonest of mankind--people who ranged from barefooted dwellers on dirt floors, with patched rags for clothes, to rough hard-working farmers, with plain clean plenty." Unlike Massachusetts, Nashville was a southern town that exposed DuBois to the everyday bigotry he had escaped growing up. He accidentally bumped into a white woman who spurned his apology: "How dare you speak to me, you impudent nigger!" By the end of his college years DuBois had begun to take pride in his heritage. "I am a Negro; and I glory in the name."

DuBois graduated from Fisk and entered Harvard University, where he received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, the first African-American to receive a doctorate from that university. He also spent two years studying at the University of Berlin, which was at the time the world's most distinguished center for advanced research in history. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the efforts to suppress the African slave trade. He accepted a position teaching at Wilberforce University, a college for black students in Ohio. After an unhappy year, he left to be a researcher at the University in Pennsylvania. There he studied the African-American immigrants to Philadelphia. He published The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study in 1899, the first serious sociological study of the emerging black urban population.

In 1897 DuBois accepted a new position at Atlanta University. It was there that he began to enter the realm of political activism that would dominate the rest of his life. He began to help black people devise a strategy for confronting the growing pattern of discrimination that they were facing.

Beginning in 1863 large numbers of African-Americans won their freedom. The 13th Amendment formalized what had already taken place: slavery was no more. During the Reconstruction years, black people secured additional rights. In 1868 the 14th Amendment required states to provide "equal protection" without regard to race. In 1870 the 15th Amendment prohibited states from denying anyone the vote because of race. But African-Americans soon lost most of these rights. By the 1870s groups like the Ku Klux Klan were using violence to terrorize black people from voting or asserting their other constitutional rights. In some years lynch mobs killed over 100 black people. During the 1890s and early 1900s southern states passed "Jim Crow Laws" which required black people to stay out of public places that served whites. Separate restaurants, hotels, railroad cars, toilets, drinking fountains, etc. began to appear. Southern states passed laws that required voters to take confusing tests to qualify to vote. In some states these also excluded uneducated whites. Other states passed "grandfather clauses" which gave the vote to those persons whose grandfathers had qualified to vote in 1867 -- before black people had won the right to vote.

African-Americans responded to these conditions in a variety of ways. One response was to leave the South for a more desirable environment, where their rights would be respected and where there was economic opportunity. During the 1870s and early 1880s thousands of black people moved to Kansas, some of whom participated in the great "Kansas Exodus" and became known as "Exodusters." By the 1890s, however, northern cities had become the destination for black people leaving the South. Between 1890 and 1910 200,000 black people migrated to northern cities. These were the migrants whom DuBois studied while at the University of Pennsylvania.

A second response was to seek some kind of accommodation within the limited opportunities whites were offering. In 1895 Booker T. Washington gave a speech in Atlanta that spelled out his approach. Black people should set aside their goals for social and political equality and concentrate on economic advancement. He criticized the day when "a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden." Washington urged that African-Americans acquire industrial skills such as carpentry and masonry. Once they held these skills, he believed, whites would give them the opportunities they deserved. "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house."

DuBois proposed a third alternative. He attacked Washington's claim that "with freedom, Negro leadership should have begun at the plow and not in the Senate."

That claim is a:

"foolish and mischievous lie; two hundred and fifty years that black serf toiled at the plow and yet that toiling was in vail till the Senate passed the war amendments; and two hundred and fifty years more the half-free serf of today may toil at his plow, but unless he have political rights . . . he will still remain the poverty-stricken and ignorant plaything of rascals, that he now is."

DuBois met with black critics of Washington, who were calling themselves "anti-Bookerties." In 1905 they met on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, and created the "Niagara Movement." They declared that all discrimination is "barbarous." Their solution was to call for "persistent manly agitation." They denounced legal segregation, the exclusion of black people from labor unions, and the denial of voting and civil rights.

The Niagara Movement failed to get a significant following. Booker T. Washington used his influence to undermine the effort. Personal conflicts between DuBois and some members led to its ultimate demise. But in 1909 DuBois attended a National Negro Conference held by white progressives, sympathetic to the idea of challenging Washington's leadership. DuBois joined the interracial organization that emerged from this meeting. In 1910 he left Atlanta University and became director of publicity and research for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Until 1934 he would edit the organization's magazine, the Crisis. By 1914 the NAACP had fifty branch offices and over six thousand members. By the end of the decade DuBois's editorials were being read by over 100,000 people. He had finally achieved something of a mass following. His position allowed him to critique all aspects of discrimination and to demand that white America accept black people on equal terms. He had crossed the boundaries that were before him and had made vital connections.

DuBois's tenure at the Crisis saw the triumph of the women's suffrage movement. He devoted several issues of the Crisis to women's rights. He believed that the struggle for democracy required the emancipation of all women and of black people. Several prominent suffragists, Florence Kelley and Jane Addams, were active supporters of the NAACP. But DuBois also recognized that many suffragists were willing to seek segregationist votes for their cause. A Mississippi suffragist advocated giving women the vote to insure "immediate and durable white supremacy." Nevertheless he continued to support the call for suffrage, "As an intelligent, self-supporting human being, a woman had just as good a right to a voice in her own government as has any man."

DuBois believed that his work for equality went beyond the needs of black people in the United States. Throughout the world, people of African dissent were under the control of Europeans. By the early 20th century most of Africa was a colony of Europe. As early as 1900 DuBois was participating in meetings of Africans and African-Americans. In 1918 the NAACP asked him to investigate the treatment of black soldiers in France, fighting in World War I. While there he helped organize the first meeting of the Pan-African Congress, which met in Paris in 1919. The Congress considered how to handle the African colonies of the now defeated German army. DuBois's resolutions called for turning over the German colonies to an international organization that would begin to prepare them for independence. DuBois believed that the "dark majority of mankind," would not always be "ruled by the white minority." Throughout his life he linked the strivings of black people in America to those in Africa. In so doing he helped inspire Africans to demand ful independence from their European colonizers.

DuBois's sense of a common identity among all African people grew out of his beliefs on race. He always urged black people to take pride in their heritage. He also recognized that to be both black and an American was to have a kind of dual experience. "It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eys of others." He claimed that "One ever feels his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body."

Consequently, DuBois developed a theory that emphasized race as a distinct quality. Most scientists today maintain that race is a social creation that does not have any biological meaning. Studies of genes reveal that people with "black" skin are more likely to share common characteristics with "white" people than with their fellow members of their so-called race. But in DuBois's time, most scientists believed that race was a concept that defined important qualities in individuals. They believed that certain behaviors and values were inherent attributes of members of certain races. DuBois did not challenge these beliefs. He believed that black people possessed a certain genius. Africans and their descendants were a spiritual people in the midst of materialistic America. Far from trying to destroy color consciousness, DuBois came to celebrate it. He came to believe that black people should support black businesses, churches, schools, and newspapers and become a self-segregated community.

This notion proved to be the issue that led to DuBois's break with the NAACP. In the Crisis in 1934 he editorialized in support of separate schools. He argued that black people needed to control their own education. This would require separate schools and separate communities to "increase economic cooperation, organized self-defense and necessary self- confidence." African-Americans, "must stop being stampeded by the word segregation." NAACP Executive Director, Walter White, rejected this argument. The NAACP had always "resolutely fought" segregation. To accept this would mean "inferior accommodations and a distinctly inferior position in national and communal life." DuBois responded with a personal attack on the very light-skinned leader: "In the first place, Walter White is white. He has more white companions and friends than colored." In May 1934, the NAACP board voted to censure DuBois who promptly resigned.

For the next decade DuBois served as professor and chairman of the sociology department at Atlanta University. During this period he wrote extensively, publishing a major work on the history of the Reconstruction period. He also took an extensive world tour, and founded a journal, Phylon, which examined issues of race. His years after leaving the NAACP saw DuBois growing closer to an organization that many Americans considered a major threat: the Communist Party.

Since around World War I DuBois had been advocating some form of socialism. His primary attraction was that socialism appealed to universal "brotherhood" beyond the veil of color. He believed that society would naturally evolve into a more cooperative manner of organization. Initially he was critical of the newly formed Soviet Union. But he grew more supportive and visited it in 1926. He claimed that he had never seen "such public interest in social matters on the part of men, women and children." Part of the conflict DuBois had with the NAACP stemmed from his growing radicalism. In 1930 he charged that after fighting against discrimination, the NAACP needed to fight for "economic equality" which would include the "socialization of wealth." His study of Reconstruction reflected his growing intellectual debt to Marxism. The central issue of the era concerned the control of labor. The Southern black "proletariat" essentially staged a "general strike" against the master class and created the institutions for democracy. Although white historians largely ignored his work when it was first written, most major historians working in the field today accept many of his ideas.

In the years after World War II a great fear of Communism swept across the United States. Government officials and many private citizens attacked the patriotism of those who spoke out against this fear. DuBois did not join the Communist Party until 1961. But his criticisms of American policy and his praises for Soviet achievements led many to conclude that he was. DuBois denounced the "Cold War" between the United States and the Soviet Union and became chairman of the Peace Information Center. In 1950 he ran for the United States Senate as the candidate of the American Labor Party. Running on a peace platform, DuBois received over 200,000 votes. This level of support pleased him. But the government's relentless attacks on him and his organization nearly cost him his freedom. In 1951 a federal grand jury indicted DuBois and other officers of the Peace Information Center for "failure to register as agent of a foreign principal." The organization, as its attorney pointed out, "was conceived and conformed" by Americans and had no ties to foreign governments. Nevertheless the assumption was that only a Soviet agent would be advocating peace. When the government's case collapsed, the judge granted the defense request for a directed acquittal. Although he was never convicted of any crime, the United States government took away his passport and prohibited him from the leaving the country between 1952 and 1958.

With his passport restored in 1958, DuBois took another world tour visiting the Soviet Union, China, and several western European countries. In 1961 a long-time comrade from the Pan-African movement invited him to live in Ghana. Kwame Nkrumah had led the fight for independence in what became the first black African nation. Now the President of Ghana, Nkrumha welcomed his long-time friend and co-worker. DuBois accepted the invitation in order to work on what he hoped would be a ten-volume Encyclopedia Africana. In 1963 he became a citizen of Ghana and died on August 27 at age ninety-five. The following day 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial as part of a great "march on Washington." Martin Luther King gave his passionate "I Have a Dream" speech. Other speakers called for unrelenting protest to demand government action to protect the rights of black people. But DuBois was not forgotten. NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins announced that DuBois had died the previous day. He told the gathered throng to remember that "his was the voice that was calling you to gather here today in this cause." The civil right movement, the subsequent gains that have occurred in the present, and those that will occur in the future, are the fruits of the seeds which William Edward Burghardt DuBois planted.

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

The Freedmen's Bureau by W.E.B. DuBois

The W.E.B. DuBois Instiute for Afro-American Research