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William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.)
DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23,
1868. He is considered by most historians to be one of the most
influential African Americans that ever lived and one of the greatest
intellectuals of any race.
Dubois received his primary schooling
in Great Barrington. In 1890 he earned his bachelor's degree from Fisk
University in Nashville, Tennessee. Dubois studied for his
master's under the tutelage of Harvard professors George Santayana,
William James and Josiah Royce. During this time he also attended the
University of Berlin for two years. He received his doctorate from
Harvard University in 1895. His thesis, The Suppression of
the African Slave Trade to the United States 1638-1870, became the
first volume in the Harvard Historical Studies.
Dubois taught at Wilberforce College in
Ohio from 1895 to 1896. It was here that he met and married Nina Gomer,
one of his students. In 1896 he moved to Philadelphia and began a
sociological study of the city's Black neighborhoods for the
University of Pennsylvania. After concluding this study he took
a position at Atlanta University in 1897 where he wrote The
Philadelphia Negro in 1899, the first sociological text on a Black
community ever published. In 1903 he published a collection of
essays called The Souls of Black folk in which he describes the
Black experience, especially the efforts of African Americans to
reconcile their African heritage with their pride in being U.S.
citizens.
Dubois opposed the views of Booker T.
Washington who advocated accommodation. He wrote in his essays, "When
Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he does not rightly value the
privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of
caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of
our higher minds. We must unceasingly and firmly oppose him."
On February 12, 1909 Dubois and a group
of black and white intellectuals met in New York, New York and founded
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples,
(NAACP). Dubois became the editor of the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis
and also headed the publicity and research department. He resigned
from the organization in 1934 because he was unwilling to accept the
NAACP position on Racial Integration. He believed that Blacks should
join together, separate from Whites to start their own businesses and
industries and allow Blacks to advance themselves economically.
Dubois returned to Atlanta University
in 1934 where he began a new journal called Phylon. He was
forced to retire in 1944 because of continued conflicts with
university staff. He wrote a Marxist interpretation of the
reconstruction era called Black Reconstruction in 1935 and an
autobiography, Dusk of Dawn in 1940.
He rejoined the NAACP and headed it's
research department in 1944 but was fired in 1948 after he accused the
executive director of the NAACP of selling out the cause of Black
civil rights for his own advancement.
Dubois became the chairman of The
Peace Information Center in 1950, an organization dedicated to the
banning of nuclear weapons. The Secretary of State, Dean Acheson
labeled the organization a Communist-front. Dubois was brought to
trial as an agent of the U.S.S.R. in 1951. He was acquitted after a
highly publicized trial. However, the government and the FBI continued
to harass him and even denied him a passport to travel abroad.
Dubois was finally granted a passport
in 1958 and traveled to Russia and China. His passport was revoked
once more after he returned to the U.S. He also received the Lenin
Peace Prize that year.
Totally fed up by this time, Dubois
moved to Ghana in 1961, joining the U.S. Communist party before he
left in one last act of defiance. After he arrived in Ghana he began
work on the Encyclopedia Africana, a work completed by Harvard
professors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and titled Africana
- The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.
Dubois renounced his U.S. citizenship
in 1963 and became a citizen of Ghana. He died a few months later on
August 27, 1963 in Accra.
Sources:
Encyclopedia
Britannica
Encyclopedia
Africana
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