W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois was born to a free black family who owned land in Massachusetts, two years before the Emancipation Proclamation. He attended an integrated public school followed by Fisk University, during which time he spent summers working at a black school in rural Tennessee. He then attended Harvard College, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree and received a scholarship to pursue a PhD in sociology. While completing his doctoral work, Du Bois spent time at the University of Berlin. Having graduated as the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard, Du Bois worked as a professor at Wilberforce University, where he met his wife. Du Bois then spent time at the University of Pennsylvania before taking a professorship at Atlanta University. During this time, he published works of sociology about African-American communities that analyzed the subtle class distinctions within the black community and challenged racist ideas and stereotypes. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, while growing increasingly involved in campaigning against lynching and Jim Crow segregation. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and became the editor of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis in 1911. He joined the Socialist party during this time, coming to believe that the origins of racism lay within the system of capitalism. Under McCarthyism, Du Bois was tried for his sympathies to socialism. In 1961, furious that the Supreme Court upheld the McCarran Act requiring Communists to register themselves as such, he joined the Communist party. He died in Ghana at the age of 95, one year before the Civil Rights Act was passed in the US.