W. E. B. Du Bois

• 1. Introduction

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  W. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting for civil rights did not live to see that march. He had left the United States entirely, renouncing his citizenship and settling in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. How does a man born into the cautious optimism of Reconstruction-era Massachusetts end up an exile in West Africa, his name a subject of FBI surveillance files stretching back decades? How does someone who helped found the NAACP come to be indicted as an agent of a foreign power? And what does it mean that the phrase "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line" was written more than a hundred years before the century ended? Du Bois's life tracks the full arc of Black American struggle from the end of slavery to the dawn of independence movements across Africa. His story keeps arriving at the same crossroads: what kind of progress is possible, and at what price?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Tom Burghardt, Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather, was born in West Africa around 1730 and held as a slave by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom served briefly in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, which may have been how he gained his freedom. That thread of a man earning liberty through military service ran forward through generations until it reached William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born on the 23rd of February 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

  Great Barrington was an unusual place for a Black child to grow up in the late 19th century. The community was majority European American and, by Du Bois's own account, generally treated him well. He attended the integrated public school, played with white schoolmates, and had teachers who recognized his intellectual ability and encouraged it. When he graduated from Great Barrington High School with honors in 1884, the congregation of his childhood church, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, raised the money for his college tuition.

  That money sent him not to an elite northern school but to Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, where he studied from 1885 to 1888. The move south was a collision with a world wholly unlike Great Barrington. Jim Crow laws, suppression of Black voting, and lynching were facts of daily life. Du Bois taught school during the summer of 1886, traveling into rural Tennessee communities where poverty and racial terror were ambient conditions.

  After Fisk, Du Bois attended Harvard College, which declined to accept his Fisk credits, requiring him to start again. He paid his way through three years with summer jobs, an inheritance, scholarships, and loans from friends. Harvard awarded him his second bachelor's degree, cum laude, in 1890. He was strongly influenced there by the philosopher William James. A fellowship from the John F. Slater Fund then sent him to Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he studied with prominent social scientists including Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitschke, and where he met Max Weber. Weber was highly impressed and later cited Du Bois as a counter-example to racists alleging the inferiority of Black people. In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

• 3. The Philadelphia Study

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  In the summer of 1896, the University of Pennsylvania hired Du Bois as an "assistant in sociology" for a one-year research post. Philadelphia's Black neighborhoods had a negative reputation by the 1890s, defined in the public mind by crime, poverty, and high mortality rates. Du Bois went into those neighborhoods and conducted sociological field research that would upend those assumptions.

  The result was The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899 while Du Bois was already teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a Black community in the United States, and it used empirical evidence to dismantle the stereotypes that had framed the neighborhood's reputation. Du Bois showed that the conditions he documented were products of segregation and its compounding effects on Black lives, not expressions of inherent character. The methodology, mapping social characteristics onto neighborhood areas, anticipated the later work of the Chicago School of Sociology.

  While conducting that research, Du Bois was also sharpening his thinking about identity. In the August 1897 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, he published "Strivings of the Negro People", his first work aimed at a general audience, arguing that African Americans should embrace their African heritage while contributing to American society. He had presented a related paper at the American Negro Academy that same year, rejecting Frederick Douglass's call for Black Americans to integrate fully into white society. These two strands, rigorous sociology and a proud assertion of Black identity, would run through everything he wrote afterward.

• 4. The Souls of a Movement

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  The lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, near Atlanta, forced a turn in Du Bois. Hose was tortured, burned, and hanged by a mob of two thousand whites. When Du Bois walked through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, he encountered Hose's burned knuckles displayed in a storefront window. The episode broke something open in him. He resolved that "one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved". He understood then that "the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth".

  The book that carried this new urgency to a mass audience was The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. It collected 14 essays, and its introduction contained the line that would define his career: "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line". James Weldon Johnson said the book's effect on African Americans was comparable to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Each chapter opened with two epigraphs, one from a white poet and one from a Black spiritual, a deliberate argument for cultural and intellectual parity between the races. The book introduced the concept of double consciousness, the experience of being simultaneously American and Black, which Du Bois described not merely as a burden but as something that could become a source of strength.

  The book also contained a pointed critique of Booker T. Washington, specifically the essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others". Washington, as director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had in 1895 struck an unwritten agreement with Southern white leaders that Du Bois called the Atlanta Compromise. Under it, Southern Blacks would submit to discrimination, segregation, and disenfranchisement in exchange for basic education, limited economic opportunity, and some legal protections. Du Bois rejected the bargain entirely. He insisted on full civil rights and political representation, to be led by what he called the "talented tenth", the educated Black elite who would develop the community's leadership capacity.

• 5. Building the NAACP

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  In 1905, Du Bois and several other civil rights activists, including Fredrick McGhee, Max Barber, and William Monroe Trotter, met in Canada near Niagara Falls and wrote a declaration of principles opposing the Atlanta Compromise. The Niagara Movement, formally incorporated in 1906, wanted to publicize these principles, but most Black periodicals were owned by publishers sympathetic to Washington. Du Bois bought a printing press and in December 1905 launched Moon Illustrated Weekly, the first African American illustrated weekly. It lasted about eight months. He followed it with The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, which debuted in 1907 with Freeman H. M. Murray and Lafayette M. Hershaw as co-editors.

  Two events in the autumn of 1906 accelerated the political shift away from Washington's accommodationist approach. President Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 Buffalo Soldiers after they were accused of crimes stemming from the Brownsville affair, including many men who had served for 20 years and were nearing retirement. Then in September, riots broke out in Atlanta. Ten thousand whites rampaged through the city, beating every Black person they could find, resulting in more than 25 deaths. Du Bois wrote "A Litany at Atlanta", arguing that the violence proved the Atlanta Compromise had failed: Blacks had upheld their end and received no protection in return.

  In May 1909, Du Bois attended the National Negro Conference in New York, which led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. At Du Bois's suggestion, the word "colored" was used in the name rather than "black", to include dark-skinned people everywhere. Most executive officers were white, including its first president, Moorfield Storey. The NAACP offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research. He accepted in the summer of 1910, resigned from Atlanta University, and moved to New York. His primary duty was editing the NAACP's new monthly magazine. He named it The Crisis.

• 6. The Crisis and Its Years

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  The first issue of The Crisis appeared in November 1910. Du Bois wrote that it aimed to set out "those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested toward colored people". Its circulation reached 100,000 by 1920. The journal became one of the most influential publications of the civil rights movement, and Du Bois used it to wage campaigns against lynching, racial discrimination, and the creeping expansion of white supremacist ideology in government.

  In 1915, The Crisis published a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914. The April 1916 edition covered the group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia. The June 1916 issue ran the "Waco Horror" article on the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old, utilizing undercover reporting to expose how local whites in Waco, Texas had conducted themselves. Du Bois included photographs.

  Du Bois also used The Crisis to engage broader social and political questions. He held party membership in the Socialist Party of America from 1910 to 1912 but departed after supporting Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, a breach of party rules. A 1913 editorial took on the taboo of anti-miscegenation laws, framing them as a women's rights issue: "These laws leave the colored girls absolutely helpless for the lust of white men."

  When the United States entered World War I, Du Bois organized the Silent Parade of around 9,000 African Americans down New York City's Fifth Avenue in 1917, the first such parade in the city's history, responding to the East St. Louis riots in which between 40 and 250 Black people were massacred. That same year, he wrote the "Close Ranks" editorial supporting the war effort, a position he accepted in exchange for an officer's commission that was later withdrawn. After the war ended, Du Bois returned from Europe to document widespread racism within the Army and to report on what he called the "Red Summer" of 1919, a series of race riots across more than 30 cities in which more than 300 African Americans were killed.

• 7. Black Reconstruction and Late Scholarship

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  In December 1909, Du Bois was the first African American invited by the American Historical Association to present a paper at their annual conference. He read "Reconstruction and Its Benefits" to what was described as an astounded audience, arguing directly against the Dunning School at Columbia University, which held that Reconstruction was a disaster caused by Black incompetence and corruption. Du Bois asserted instead that African-American leadership during Reconstruction accomplished three concrete things: democratic governance, free public schools, and new social welfare legislation. When he submitted the paper for publication in The American Historical Review, he asked that the word "Negro" be capitalized. Editor J. Franklin Jameson refused, and published the paper without the capitalization. White historians largely ignored it.

  Twenty-six years later, in 1935, Du Bois published his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, supported in part by two fellowships totaling six thousand dollars from the Rosenwald Fund. The book marshaled extensive evidence that Black people were central figures in the Civil War and Reconstruction, that coalition governments established public education across the South, and that the failure of Reconstruction was not Black inadequacy but the federal government's failure to manage the Freedmen's Bureau, distribute land, and build an educational system. The book was virtually ignored by mainstream white historians when it appeared. In the following decades, it ignited what scholars came to call a "revisionist" trend in Reconstruction historiography, and by the 21st century it was widely regarded as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography".

  In the book's final chapter, Du Bois described his attempt to write an entry on the history of the American Negro for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After the editors cut all references to Reconstruction, he insisted on a note being included: "White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union." The editors refused. Du Bois withdrew the article.

• 8. Exile and Final Years

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  In 1950, Du Bois became chair of the Peace Information Center, which worked to publicize a nuclear disarmament petition in the United States. The following year, the government indicted him as an agent of a foreign power. He was 83 years old. The charges were eventually dismissed, but the experience clarified something for Du Bois about the limits of working within American political structures. Manning Marable, the socialist historian, characterized the government's treatment of Du Bois during the McCarthyism years as "ruthless repression" and "political assassination". The FBI had been compiling a file on him since 1942.

  In late 1948, by mutual agreement, Du Bois had resigned from the NAACP for the second time, after his association with communist sympathizers such as Paul Robeson and Shirley Graham, who later became his second wife, made him a liability. He began writing regularly for the leftist weekly newspaper the National Guardian.

  In late 1945, at the fifth and final Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, Du Bois had met Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first president of Ghana. Nkrumah later invited Du Bois to Africa. In the final years of his life, Du Bois moved to Ghana, where Nkrumah had asked him to direct a projected Encyclopedia Africana. He renounced his American citizenship and died in Accra on the 27th of August 1963. He was 95 years old. The march he did not live to see took place the following day, but the phrase that opened his 1903 collection, that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line, had by then traveled far past the century he named.