William Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on 23rd February, 1868. His father, Alfred Du Bois, left his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt, soon after his birth. When his mother died in 1884 Du Bois was forced to find work at a timekeeper in a local mill.

Encouraged by Frank Hosmer, the principal of Great Barrington High School, Du Bois won a scholarship to Fisk University in Nashville. To help pay for his studies Du Bois taught in rural Tennessee during summer vacations. This gave him first-hand experience of Jim Crow laws and turned him into a civil rights activist.

After graduating in 1885 Du Bois spent two years at the University of Berlin before returning to the United States. Du Bois now had a strong interest in African American history and went to Harvard University to work on his dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. In 1895 Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard.

In 1897 Du Bois began teaching economics and history at Atlanta University and in 1903 published his ground-breaking The Souls of Black Folks. This included an attack on Booker T. Washington for not doing more in the campaign for African American civil rights. Du Bois own solution to this problem was to form the Niagara Movement in 1905. The group drew up a plan for aggressive action and demanded: manhood suffrage, equal economic and educational opportunities, an end to segregation and full civil rights.

The Niagara Movement had little impact on influencing those in power and in February, 1909, Du Bois joined with other campaigners for African American civil rights to form the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Other members included Mary White Ovington, William English Walling, Josephine Ruffin, Mary Talbert, Mary Church Terrell, Inez Milholland, Jane Addams, Mary McLeod Bethune, George Henry White, Charles Edward Russell, John Dewey, William Dean Howells, Charles Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Fanny Garrison Villard, Oswald Garrison Villard and Ida Wells-Barnett.

In 1910 Du Bois returned to his attack on Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute movement and along with twenty-two other prominent African Americans signed a statement claiming: "We are compelled to point out that Mr. Washington's large financial responsibilities have made him dependent on the rich charitable public and that, for this reason, he has for years been compelled to tell, not the whole truth, but that part of it which certain powerful interests in America wish to appear as the whole truth."

The NAACP started its own magazine, Crisis, in November, 1910. The magazine was edited by Du Bois and contributors to the first issue included Oswald Garrison Villard and Charles Edward Russell. The magazine soon built up a large readership amongst black people and white sympathizers. By 1919 Crisis was selling 100,000 copies a month.

In Crisis Du Bois campaigned against lynching, Jim Crow laws, sexual inequality. He told his readers in October, 1911, that "every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage." In 1912 he supported Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president. He particularly admired the way that Debs refused to address segregated audiences in the South.

Du Bois supported United States involvement in the First World War. This caused him to break with the editors of other African American journals such as Chandler Owen, Philip Randolph and Hubert Harrison. Harrison was particularly upset by an article in The Crisis where he argued that: "Let, us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks."

Although Du Bois had originally been sympathetic to Black Nationalism, after the First World War he became highly critical of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Du Bois described the leader of the UNIA as "a lunatic or traitor" and Garvey retaliated by calling him a "white man's nigger".

Du Bois continued to edit Crisis until 1934 when he became chairman of the Department of Sociology at Atlanta University. He remained active in the NAACP and in 1945 was its representative at the San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations. In the same year he also presided at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester.

Du Bois wrote a number of books on civil rights issues including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), The Negro (1915), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Dusk of Dawn (1940) and Colour and Democracy (1945). A former member of the Socialist Party, Du Bois began to develop a Marxist interpretation of race relations in the 1930s.

A supporter of Henry Wallace for president in 1948, Du Bois unsuccessfully stood as a Progressive Party candidate for Senate in 1950. Du Bois, a victim of McCarthyism, was indicted as an agent for the Soviet Union in 1951. Although Du Bois was acquitted of the charge, the State Department denied him a passport until 1958.

Du Bois joined the Communist Party in 1961 and at the age of 91 moved to Ghana where he became a naturalized citizen. William Du Bois died in Ghana on 27th August, 1963. He was honoured by a state funeral and buried in Accra.

 

Forum Debates

Tommie Smith and the Olympic Games

Who Killed Martin Luther King?

Rosa Parks

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

Segregation in the United States

Ku Klux Klan

Lynchings in the United States

Bobby Seale

James Earl Ray

Poems and Lyrics: The Civil Rights Movement

 

(1) Ray Stannard Baker, American Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)

Dr. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts of a family that had no history that had no history of Southern slavery. He has a large intermixture of white blood. Broadly educated at Harvard and in the universities of Germany, he is today one of the most able sociologists of this country.

His economic studies of the Negro made for the United States Government and for the Atlanta University conference (which he organised) are works of sound scholarship and furnish the student with the best single source of accurate information regarding the Negro at present obtainable in this country. And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

Dr. Du Bois has the temperament of the scholar and idealist - critical, sensitive, humorous, impatient, often covering its deep feeling with sarcasm and cynicism. "What shall the Negro do about discrimination?" his answer was the exact reverse of Washington's: it was the voice of Massachusetts: "Do not submit! agitate, object, fight."

 

(2) William Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899)

Such discrimination is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it, and to do so primarily for their own sakes. Industrial freedom of opportunity has by long experience been proven to be generally best for all. Moreover the cost of crime and pauperism, the growth of slums, and the pernicious influence of idleness and lewdness, cost the public far more than would the hurt to the feelings of a carpenter to work beside a black man, or a shop girl to start beside a darker mate. This does not contemplate the wholesale replacing of white workmen before Negroes out of sympathy or philanthropy; it does mean that talent should be rewarded, and aptness used in commerce and industry whether its owner be black or white.

 

(3) William Du Bois, speech at second meeting of the Niagara Movement (15th August, 1906)

We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free-born American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans.

 

(4) Statement on Booker T. Washington signed by William Du Bois and twenty-two other African Americans (26th October, 1910)

The undersigned Negro-Americans have heard, with great regret, the recent attempt to assure England and Europe that their condition in America is satisfactory. They sincerely wish that such were the case, but it becomes their plan duty to say that Mr. Booker T. Washington, or any other person, is giving the impression abroad that the Negro problem in America is in process of satisfactory solution, he is giving an impression which is not true.

We say this without personal bitterness toward Mr. Washington. He is a distinguished American and has a perfect right to his opinions. But we are compelled to point out that Mr. Washington's large financial responsibilities have made him dependent on the rich charitable public and that, for this reason, he has for years been compelled to tell, not the whole truth, but that part of it which certain powerful interests in America wish to appear as the whole truth.

Today in eight states where the bulk of the Negroes live, black men of property and university training can be, and usually are, by law denied the ballot, while the most ignorant white man votes. This attempt to put the personal and property rights of the best of the blacks at the absolute political mercy of the worst of the whites is spreading each day.

 

(5) William Du Bois, The Crisis (October, 1911)

Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage; every argument for women's suffrage is an argument for Negro suffrage; both are great moments in democracy. There should be on the part of Negroes absolutely no hesitation whenever and wherever responsible human beings are without voice in their government. The man of Negro blood who hesitates to do them justice is false to his race, his ideals and his country.

 

(6) When Booker T. Washington died, William Du Bois wrote an article about him in The Crisis (14th November, 1915)

Booker T. Washington was the greatest Negro leader since Frederick Douglass, and the most distinguished man, white or black who has come out of the South since the Civil War. On the other hand, in stern justice, we must lay on the soul of this man, a heavy responsibility for the consummation of Negro disfranchisement, the decline of the Negro college and the firmer establishment of color caste in this land.

 

(7) Hubert Harrison, The Voice (25th July, 1918)

The essence of the present situation lies in the fact that the people whom our white masters have "recognized" as our leaders (without taking the trouble to consult us) and those who, by our own selection, has actually attained to leadership among us are being revaluated and, in most cases, rejected. The most striking instance from the latter class is Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of the Crisis. Du Bois's case is the more significant because his former services to his race have been undoubtedly of a high and courageous sort.

Dr. Du Bois first palpably sinned in his editorial, "Close Ranks". But this offense lies in a single sentence: "Let, us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks." It is felt by all his critics that Du Bois, of all Negroes, knows best that our "special grievances", which the War Department Bulletin describes as justifiable, consists of lynching, segregation and disfranchisement and that the Negroes of America cannot preserve either their lives, their manhood or their vote (which is their political lives and liberties) with these things in existence.

 

(8) William Du Bois, application to join the Communist Party (1st October, 1961)

Capitalism cannot reform itself. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life.

 

(9) Roy Wilkins, speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (28th August, 1963)

Just be your presence here today we have spoken loudly and eloquently to our legislature. When we return home, keep up the speaking by letters and telegrams and telephone and, wherever possible, by personal visit. Remember that this has been a long fight. We were reminded of it by the news of the death yesterday in Africa of Dr. W. E. B. DuBois. Now, regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. DuBois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by DuBois published in 1903.

 

 

 

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk

Educational Websites Standards Site, BBC History, PBS Online, Open Directory Project, Virtual Library, Education Forum, History GCSE, Design & Technology, Learn History, Music Teacher Resource, Freepedia, Teach It, Science Active, Geography IST, Brighton Photographers, Sussex Photo History, Compton History, Universal Teacher, English Teaching, English Online, History Learning Site, History on the Net, Black History, Greenfield History, School History, Active History, I Love History, E-HELP, Ed Podesta Blog, Macgregorish History, Historiasiglo20, Sintermeerten, ICT4LT

News and Search Guardian Unlimited, Times Online, Daily Telegraph, The Independent, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CNN, Yahoo News, New Scientist, Google News, Channel 4, ZDNet, Google, Excite, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AOL Search, Hotbot, Metacrawler, Netscape, Ask, Search, Go, Looksmart, Dogpile, Raging Search, All the Web, Kartoo, Search Engine Watch, About