ABOUT W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was one of America’s most distinguished educators. Born in a small village in Massachusetts in 1868, W.E.B. Du Bois first came face-to-face with the realities of racism in 19th century America while attending Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. It was while completing his graduate studies at Harvard that Du Bois wrote an exhaustive study of the history of the slave trade - one that remains one of the most comprehensive and important works on that subject today.

In 1895 Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Two years later, Du Bois accepted a professorship at Atlanta University. During his tenure there he conducted extensive studies of the social conditions of blacks in America. At the 1900 Paris World's Fair, Du Bois created a full-scale exhibit of African-American achievement since the Emancipation Proclamation in industrial work, literature, and journalism. It included photo documentation on educational institutions such as Tuskegee, Fisk, and Howard Universities.

In 1903, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk, which serves as the underpinning of access to many of his ideas and remains one of the most influential books ever published in America. The original text was published by A.C. McClurg and Company of Chicago just two months after the author’s 35th birthday. No less than six printings were necessary to answer the demand.

In 1905 W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope, Monroe Trotter and 27 others met secretly in the home of Mary B. Talbert, a prominent member of Buffalo's Michigan Street Baptist Church, to adopt the resolutions that lead to the founding of the Niagara Movement. The Niagara Movement renounced Booker T. Washington's accommodation policies set forth in his famed "Atlanta Compromise" speech ten years earlier. The Niagara Movement's manifesto is, in the words of Du Bois, "We want full manhood suffrage and we want it now.... We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win." The movement became the forerunner of the NAACP.

Despite the establishment of 30 branches and the achievement of a few scattered civil-rights victories at the local level, the group suffered from organizational weakness and lack of funds as well as a permanent headquarters or staff, and it never was able to attract mass support. After the Springfield (Ill.) Race Riot of 1908, however, white liberals joined with the nucleus of Niagara "militants" and founded the NAACP the following year, 1909. The Niagara Movement disbanded in 1910, with the leadership of Du Bois forming the main continuity between the two organizations.

Du Bois did not take his leadership role lightly and ultimately he saw himself as fundamentally a man of letters, according to Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates. He viewed himself as a person who had enjoyed a truly liberal education, but one who was thrust into political activism on behalf of the Negro because of his "privileged education".

Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, W.E.B. Du Bois continued to work as an author, lecturer and educator. His teachings were an important influence on the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Ironically, Du Bois died in Ghana on the eve of the historic March on Washington in 1963, at the age of 95