Black History Month 2022: W.E.B. Du Bois

“Strive for that greatness of spirit that measures life not by its disappointments but by its possibilities.”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

“A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

“Herein lies the tragedy of the age: Not that men are poor, - all men know something of poverty. Not that men are wicked, - who is good? Not that men are ignorant, - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

“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.”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

"Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.”
-- W. E. B. Du Bois

 

 

 

1. W.E.B. DuBois is an educator, essayist, journalist, scholar, social critic, and activist.

2. DuBois was the valedictorian from his high school in 1884. 

3. DuBois Four years later he received a B.A. from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1890 DuBois earned a second bachelor degree from Harvard University.  DuBois began two years of graduate studies in History and Economics at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1892 and then returned to the United States to begin a two year stint teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio. 

4. In 1895, DuBois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University.  His doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America,” became the first book published by Harvard University Press in 1896. 

5. DuBois also joined Alpha Phi Alpha and Sigma Pi Phi Fraternities.

6. DuBois’s first post-dissertation book, The Philadelphia Negro, released in 1899, determined that housing and employment discrimination were the principal barriers to racial equality and black prosperity in the urban North.  His work and conclusions initiated the field of African American urban history.

7. DuBois lacked black public appeal of his contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson.  He remained scathingly critical of white racism his entire life and unlike Washington.

8. In 1903, DuBois published a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, which challenged the civil rights strategies of black leaders like Washington while inspiring a cadre of young black activist scholars to use their work to combat racial oppression.

9. In 1905 DuBois and other black leaders created the Niagara Movement to provide an organizational challenge to segregation and discrimination. DuBois edited the organization’s magazines, the Moon and the Horizon.  As the Niagara Movement declined,

10. DuBois became the co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and served as the editor of its magazine, The Crisis, until 1934 when he was fired by the organization.

11. DuBois’s speeches and editorials made him unpopular with many whites and some blacks who, fearing white backlash, refused to support his positions on race.
12. DuBois wrote numerous books and articles including Black Reconstruction in America in 1935.

13. DuBois was stripped by the State Department of his passport in 1950 and criticized by many former allies and associates in the civil rights struggle.

14. DuBois became a Communist, believing it offered the only hope for working class people around the world and the only major challenge to racism.

15. In 1961 DuBois gave up his citizenship and left the United States permanently for Accra, Ghana. 

16. With the support of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, DuBois became the editor of the proposed Africana Encyclopedia. 

17. Before the Africana Encyclopedia was completed, DuBois died in Accra on August 27, 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington, the largest civil rights demonstration in the US to that date, at which Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.