W. E. B. Du Bois
American Sociologist
| Date of Birth | : | 23 Feb, 1868 |
| Date of Death | : | 27 Aug, 1963 |
| Place of Birth | : | Great Barrington, Massachusetts, United States |
| Profession | : | Sociologist |
| Nationality | : | American |
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community.
The Souls of Black Folk, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP
Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of Blacks. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of Blacks in America, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914 at Atlanta University in Georgia, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), the first case study of a Black community in the United States.
Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington’s opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association’s director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class Blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the Black protest from 1910 until 1934.
Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of Black Americans:
Black nationalism and later works
Du Bois’s Black nationalism took several forms—the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism, the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism. As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of Black literature and art and urged his readers to see “Beauty in Black.” Third, Du Bois’s Black nationalism is seen in his belief that Blacks should develop a separate “group economy” of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and Black poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.
He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the Black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois’s interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of Black capitalism and Black support of Black business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.
Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University’s “Review of Race and Culture.” In 1945 he published the “Preparatory Volume” of a projected Encyclopedia Africana, for which he had been appointed editor in chief and toward which he had been working for decades. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of Reconstruction (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of Blacks in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this brilliant book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the Black-white conflict.
Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944–48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he applied to, and was accepted as a member of, the Communist Party. That same year he left the United States for Ghana, where he began work on the Encyclopedia Africana in earnest, though it would never be completed, and where he later became a citizen.
Du Bois also wrote several novels, including the trilogy The Black Flame (1957–61). The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in the United States in 1968.
Quotes
Total 50 Quotes
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.
Ignorance is a cure for nothing.
I am especially glad of the divine gift of laughter: it has made the world human and lovable, despite all its pain and wrong.
In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
Men must not only know, they must act.
I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.
The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin--the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world.
