WEB DuBois: Sociologist, Early 20th Century Philosopher of the Black Experience, Civil Rights Leader

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois 1868 - 1963) was socialist historian, civil right activist, :Pan Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Massachusetts. After completing graduate work at the University of Berlin, he was accepted in Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate. He became a professor at Atlanta University, a historic black school of higher education.  

 

Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells, was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of People (NAACP) in 1909. He founded NAACP's official journal, The Crisis, in 1910. The NAACP primary mission was to seek laws that protected blacks from being lynched. A 1915 article in the journal gave a year-by-year list of more than 2,700 lynchings over the previous three decades. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites.

Du Bois published his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. In this collection of essays, he described the predicament of Black Americans as one of "double consciousness.” He writes: 

"One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Dubois he attended the founding convention for the United Nations, channeling his energies toward lobbying the global body to acknowledge the suffering of Black Americans. Du Bois also turned a spotlight onto the injustices of colonialism, urging the United Nations to use its influence to take a stand against such exploitative regimes.

At the end of his life, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia on the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana. A citizen of the world until the end, the 93-year-old Du Bois moved to Ghana to manage the project. Du Bois died in Ghana in1963, the day before the historic March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.”