Had Du Bois lived today, he would have probably held a professorship at Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Columbia. Such as it was, despite being the foremost intellectual of his generation, amongst whites as well as blacks, he was confined to teaching and researching at the new established Black colleges, which often had poor facilities, and little or no funding, because of the colour of his skin. Despite this, he produced groundbreaking work consistently, without the benefit of research assistants, or any of the resources that were accessible to his white counterparts.

He was an arrogant and snobbish man; many people could not stand him. He had joked in his autobiography that he would have been sincerely mourned had he died at fifty, but “at seventy five, my death was practically requested”. His first wife, Nina, suffered terribly from his serial affairs, and his daughter Yolande lived her whole life feeling the pressure of his high expectations of her. “Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force”, he wrote of Booker T Washington, and the same can be applied to Du Bois himself, whose personal relationships suffered because of his extraordinary abilities.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois did not live the life of many of the black people he wrote about. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, he was a mulatto; of Huguenot Calvinist and Bantu African slave descent. His father Alfred disappeared when he was very young, and was brought up by his mother, Mary Silvina, and her family, the Burghardts, who were free blacks who had prospered in farming, and had lived in Great Barrington since the 17th century.
As a boy, he encountered little discrimination, but his time at Fisk University gave him his first experience of the black South, and taught in rural Tennessee, where he “touched the very shadow of slavery”. Witnessing the marginalisation of blacks, as a result of poverty, degradation and indifference affected Du Bois profoundly, leading him to develop his concepts of “double consciousness” and “the veil”, which helped him to define the black experience.

Du Bois went on to study at Harvard, one of the first African Americans to do so, and after his graduation, went to study at Heidelberg University in Berlin. He found the relative lack of racism liberating, and returned to Harvard to complete his PhD – the first African American to do so, and then began is extensive research. His works The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) and The Philadelphia Negro (1899), both important scholarly works, served as the foundation for The Souls of Black Folk.
Du Bois founded the Niagra Movement in 1905; the first black led organisation committed to civil and political rights, and in 1909 founded the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), which became the most powerful civil rights organisation until the 1960s. He was the editor of its highly influential journal, The Crisis, writing powerful editorials on every topic of interest to black Americans.
Many have said that Du Bois was an elitist. It was true that his earliest opinions were formed in the north, and that he counted among his peers members of the black social and cultural elite. He believed that appealing to the rational minds of whites could help to achieve reform, as well as experience. For this reason, The Souls of Black Folk is about black experience and intellectual thought.
His beliefs on the elite leading blacks toward their goals were in direct contrast to the Afro-centric and more urban approach of Marcus Garvey, with whom he shared a most volatile war of words.

As time went on, Du Bois became more internationalist, learning more about the plight of colonial people of African descent, and helped to organise several pan African congresses, including the 5th that was held in Manchester after the second world war, which was attended by Amy Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. He thus placed the race issue in a global context.

In his later years, he became more and more disillusioned with America, believing that the chances of equality were diminishing. He became a communist, stating that the black struggle was opposed by the US and supported by the Soviet Union. As a result of this, his passport was confiscated, and when he was eventually reissued one he met Khrushchev, Mao Tse-Tung and attended the independence celebrations of Nigeria and Ghana. In 1961, he moved to Ghana, where he lived in self imposed exile, until his death aged 95 in 1963, interestingly during the historic march on Washington, before Dr. King was to take the podium. As NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins asked for a moment of silence, an elderly black woman is said to have wept,
“It’s like Moses. God had written that he should never enter the Promised Land”.
If Du Bois were writing today, he would probably begin with, “The problem of the 21st century…”

By Angelina Osborne

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Useful Links

Tuskegee University site: www.tusk.edu

Sites for W.E.B. DuBois: www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/dubois.html
www.fas.harvard.edu/~du_bois/
www.duboislc.com

Booker T. Washington site: www.who2.com/bookertwashington.html

Fisk University site: www.fisk.edu

Marcus Garvey site: www.marcusgarveylibrary.org.uk

100 Black Men (mentoring and education): www.100blackmen.org.uk

Pan African Congress: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/13chapter5.shtml

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