35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero W.E.B. DU BOIS

W.E.B. Du Bois 

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born poor in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, but rose from his meager roots to become the brightest Black mind of the 20th century. 

Showing remarkable brilliance even as a youth, W.E.B. Du Bois won scholarships that took him through Fisk and Harvard universities. He earned his master's and doctorate degrees from Harvard, and he later studied at the University of Berlin. 

His first works of importance included The Suppression of the Slave-Trade of the United States of America, 1638-1870, published in 1896, and The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, published in 1899. The latter is a classic about the social conditions of turn-of-the-century Blacks in that city. He wrote several reports about Atlanta a few years later, from 1899 to 1913, with Atlanta University. These social studies were published for the university's Conferences for the Study of Negro Problems. During this same stormy period, when whites' hostility against Blacks reached a fever pitch, Du Bois also wrote the oft-quoted classic The Souls of Black Folk, which identified the color line as the principal problem of the 20th century. 

His uncompromising opposition to injustice and Jim Crow impelled him to write scathing reports about the Atlanta Riots of 1906 and found the Niagara Movement. He later cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which demanded full citizenship for Blacks. Du Bois became the NAACP's chief spokesperson through his editorship of The Crisis magazine. During his stint as editor, Du Bois greatly advanced African-American literature by editing many of the important voices of the Black arts revival, known as the Harlem Renaissance. 

Through his moving editorials, he was to stir the emotions, and awaken the sense of outrage in both Blacks and whites—an act that would draw the ire of Booker T. Washington, the more accommodationist Black leader at the time. 

Washington said Du Bois was an agitator who was always stirring up trouble. Du Bois said Washington's strategy would perpetuate oppression of Blacks. Their debate was legendary and to this day represents the fight between accommodationist and integrationist schools of thought within the African-American community. 

Du Bois was also critical of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Their conflict symbolized the differences between integrationist and Black nationalist schools of thought. 

Throughout Du Bois's life, including periods when he embraced Pan-Africanism, socialism, and communism, he believed in three basic goals for Blacks: the right to vote, civic equality, and education of the youth. One of Du Bois's most often quoted philosophies was the "talented tenth." It said that Blacks' salvation would come through the accomplishments of the Black elite. 

Hardly modest about his own achievement in defining and transcending caste and class in this country, Du Bois boasted in his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn: "I was the main factor in revolutionizing the attitude of the American Negro toward caste." 

Du Bois had a universal outlook. He was concerned, as was Garvey, with the treatment of the darker people of other lands. In 1909, he began thinking of creating an Encyclopedia Africana. He finally did work on it in his later years, while in self-imposed exile in Ghana. He was also an organizer of the Pan-African Congress, which brought together, for the very first time, influential Blacks from Europe, Africa, and America. Its first conference was held in Paris in 1919.

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.