W.E.B. Du Bois

His mother's family had held land in western Massachusetts for generations. Her great-grandfather Tom Burghardt was born in West Africa around 1730, was enslaved by a Dutch colonist, served briefly in the Continental Army, and came out of it free. Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, went to the integrated public school there, and graduated with honors in 1884. His father had walked out in 1870. His mother had a stroke in the early 1880s and died in 1885. The congregation of his childhood church raised the money for his tuition and sent him to Fisk, in Nashville, which was the first time he saw the South. Harvard admitted him in 1888 as the sixth Black student in its history.

He was a sociologist before he was anything else. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, was the first door-to-door study of a Black community in America, and annual social studies at Atlanta University followed for over a decade. In December 1909 he became the first African American the American Historical Association invited to read a paper. He argued that Reconstruction had produced democracy and free public schools. It did not invite another Black speaker until 1940. BriefHistory carries the NAACP, The Crisis and the argument with Booker T. Washington. This page keeps to the parts that do not fit.

He spent 60 years demanding America apply its stated principles, then spent a decade excusing states that had none. In 1934 he reversed himself in print and called separate but equal an acceptable goal for Black Americans, refused to retract it, and resigned from the NAACP he had helped found. In 1951 the Justice Department indicted him for failing to register the Peace Information Center as a foreign agent. The case collapsed when his lawyer told the judge that Albert Einstein had offered to appear as a character witness. The NAACP issued no statement of support. He had written of the tyrant Stalin in 1940. When Stalin died in 1953 he eulogized him as simple, calm and courageous. Of the 1959 Tibetan uprising he wrote that the landholders and religious fanatics had revolted and failed as they deserved to.

He died in Accra on August 27, 1963. The next afternoon, at the March on Washington, Roy Wilkins asked a quarter of a million people to stand in silence for him. Nkrumah gave him a state funeral and buried him by the western wall of Christiansborg Castle. The Encyclopedia Africana he moved to Ghana to edit was never finished. One thing repeated about him is not true: he took Ghanaian citizenship in 1963 after the State Department refused to renew his passport and said he meant to renounce his American citizenship, but he never actually did. The Great Barrington homesite became a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and the main library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst carries his name.

W.E.B. Du Bois's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States book
  His Harvard dissertation, and the first volume in the Harvard Historical Studies 1896
• The Philadelphia Negro book
  The first door-to-door sociological study of a Black community in America 1899
• The Souls of Black Folk book
  Fourteen essays, and the origin of double consciousness 1903
• The Crisis other
  The NAACP magazine he founded and edited for 24 years 1910
• Black Reconstruction in America book
  The book that broke the Dunning School's account of Reconstruction 1935
• Dusk of Dawn book
  An autobiography written as a study of the concept of race 1940

• 1885 aged ~17 His mother dies and the church congregation sends him to Fisk Nashville was his first experience of the segregated South.
• 1892 aged ~24 Studies at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin on a Slater Fund fellowship His teachers included Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner. He also met Max Weber.
• 1895 aged ~27 Becomes the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate
• May 12, 1896 aged 28 Marries Nina Gomer, one of his students at Wilberforce
• 1903 aged ~35 Publishes The Souls of Black Folk
• December 1909 aged 41 Reads a paper on Reconstruction to a startled American Historical Association He was the first African American the association had invited. It did not invite another until 1940.
• 1934 aged ~66 Calls separate but equal an acceptable goal and resigns from the NAACP
• 1951 aged ~83 Tried as an unregistered foreign agent and acquitted The government took his passport anyway and held it for eight years.
• October 1961 aged 93 Joins the Communist Party at 93 and moves to Ghana

• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. opposed
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. co-founded the NAACP with
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. offered to be his character witness
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. supported him at his trial
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. inherited the argument
• Malcolm X 1925–1965
  Civil-rights leader whose critique of racism and advocacy of Black dignity reshaped American political thought. sharpened the case against gradualism