William Edward Burghardt DuBois: historian, social critic, activist.

Abstract

PERHAPS THE MOST brilliant and influential African American intellectual of the 20th century, William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) DuBois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Mass. He was the son of Alfred DuBois, a Haitian-born barber and itinerant laborer, and of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a descendant of a freed Dutch slave who had fought briefly in the American Revolution. DuBois attended a racially integrated public high school and graduated with a classical college preparatory education. With scholarship funds provided by Great Barrington citizens, he then enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn, a southern college founded after the Civil War to educate freed slaves. While at Fisk, DuBois had his first extended encounters with African American culture and southern American racism.1 After graduating from Fisk in 1888, DuBois enrolled as a junior at Harvard, received a BA cum laude in 1890, an MA in 1891, and a PhD in 1895. He was deeply influenced by historian Albert Bushnell Hart and the philosopher-psychologist William James. His PhD dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896 as the inaugural volume of the Harvard Historical Studies series. From 1892 to 1894, DuBois traveled in Germany and completed a monograph on the history of southern US agriculture. In 1896, the University of Pennsylvania invited him to conduct a detailed sociological study of African Americans in Philadelphia, which was published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro.2 This study combined advocacy and careful empirical scholarship, emphasizing historical and circumstantial rather than hereditary explanations for the conditions of the African American community. In 1897, DuBois moved to Atlanta University in Georgia, where he taught history, sociology, and economics and became corresponding secretary and editor of the annual Atlanta University conferences for the “Study of the Negro Problems.” The proceedings of the 11th such conference, held in May 1906, were published as The Health and Physique of the Negro American, the source of this reprinted excerpt. One of DuBois’ major goals in this publication was to discredit the theories of Black racial inferiority—their extreme vulnerability to cold northern climates, for example—recently advanced by statistician and insurance company executive Frederick L. Hoffman.3 At the same time, DuBois argued that the genuine health disparities between Whites and Blacks were a consequence of the poorer economic, social, and sanitary conditions facing African Americans. DuBois had long been committed to social reform by means of social science. But he now became more directly engaged in advocacy and political action, especially in response to the rising tide of southern racial violence. He helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and in 1910 he left Atlanta to become an officer of the NAACP, its only Black board member, and the editor of its monthly magazine, the Crisis. DuBois served as editor of the Crisis for 24 years, taking on such issues as legal and political rights, discrimination and race relations, African American cultural and intellectual advancement, and Pan-Africanism. He also became increasingly interested in the Soviet Union, Marxism, and racially based Black economic initiatives. This led to conflict with his more moderate NAACP colleagues and to his resignation from that organization and return to Atlanta in 1934. In 1944, DuBois rejoined the NAACP, acknowledging that it had become more aggressive in the pursuit of economic and legal rights. But by 1948 his overt radicalism and public support for the Soviet Union during the Cold War forced him out of the NAACP a second time. In 1951, he was indicted as an “unregistered agent of a foreign power.”4 At trial, he was acquitted but denied a passport to travel abroad. When the State Department finally lifted the travel ban in 1958, he left for an extensive trip to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, receiving the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959. In 1961, DuBois accepted an invitation to move to Ghana and become a citizen of the first newly independent African postcolonial state. Renouncing his American citizenship, he moved to Ghana and died there on August 27, 1963, just as American civil rights leaders were assembling for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. DuBois was the author of 17 books, including 5 novels, the founder and editor of 4 journals, and he had reshaped forever how the experience of African Americans in America could be thought about and understood.