William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (he pronounced his last name as “Doo-boys”) was one of the greatest intellectuals of his time. He is known as an educator, pan-Africanist, editor, and early civil rights leader. He helped found the NAACP and edited its newspaper, the Crisis.
He was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in an integrated community. He first graduated from Fisk University. and then Harvard, where he was the first Black to earn a PHD. He did graduate work in Berlin. After graduation, he worked at Wilberforce
During his time at Fisk, he determined that the Negro problems was one of knowledge. He later decided the real problem, in the face of lynchings and racial terrorism, was civil rights. Education was not enough.
Web Du Bois was recruited by the University of Pennsylvania to study blacks in Philadelphia.
In 1897, he moved to Atlanta University in 1987, and for 13 years to researched the “Negro Problem” in the United States. In 1899, he published the Philadelphia Negro, the first detailed study of a Black neighborhood. The work is a landmark study in sociology.
In his book, WEB Du Bois documented daily life in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward an area just south of Market Street, between Spruce and South Street, river to river.
Note: growing up in Philly, I had always wondered why there were so many black people in the South Street area. Now I know, it was a Black neighborhood before gentrification.
In 1900, Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University published a set of informational graphs for the Paris Exposition. The illusations called “The Exhibit of American Negroes” featured hand-drawn graphics that captured African-American life in 1900.
In 1903, he published The Souls of Black Folk. A book of stories, poetry and auto-biographical information in which he described the double consciousness of the Negro in the United States. What is it like to be American and Black? The book was a response to Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery.
In the book, he discusses what life is like for Black Americans who interact with whites. He uses the idea of a “veil” which hides true Black life from a white imposed view.
In 1905, he founded the Niagara Movement as a response to the racial accommodationist philosophy of Booker T Washington. The Niagara movement was opposed to lynchings, racism and promoted black up-lift. The Niagara Movement believed protest was the best way to achieve civil rights and political rights.
In 1910, he helped found the NAACP. And then founded the Crisis magazine, the official newspaper of the NAACP in 1910. He served as editor from 1910 to 1933.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Political Philosophy
Du Bois was an outspoken activist against segregation, Jim Crow laws, and lynchings. He was also anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. He supported the Russian revolution. He opposed the capitalism of his time.
He was an anti-colonialist. Many of his ideas led to the Black independence movement of the 1960s when many African and Caribbean nations achieved self-government.
He later turned to communism and peace activism.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Economic Philosophy
Du Bios was an integrationist and a supporter of classical education. His philosophy, like Washington’s, was built on his life experiences. He believed in Black uplift with the leadership of the talented tenth: a group of , classically educated Blacks.
He also believed that Black would achieve economic uplift through challenging white political power.
The talented tenth
He is best known idea of black improvement was called the “Talented Tenth.”
In his book, The Talented Tenth, Du Bois argues that these college-educated African American men should sacrifice their personal interests and use their education to lead and better the Black community.
“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”
“The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.”
“How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land.”
“All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in the beginning, were the favored sons of the freedmen trained.”
Du Bois emphasized that the training of high-quality teachers was a major goal. He took a jab a Booker T Washington, saying many of his teachers were classically trained, implying that Washington would not be where he is without the help of Talented Tenth.
He helped organize the silent march against racial violence in 1917. The march protested the recent St. Louis massacre and lynching’s around the country. Lynching was finally outlawed when the US Congress passed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynchings Act in 2022. There is a video of the Silent March.
In 1935, he published Black Reconstruction, a comprehensive review of the Reconstruction period from 1860 to 1880 in the United States.
In 1955 he was accused of being a communist
He long held socialist beliefs and supported the communist revolution in Russia. In 1961, he moved to Ghana, where he died in 1963 at the age of 95.
We are lucky enough to have a recording of WEB Du Bois speaking and reading his autobiography. You have to hear him speak. He comes across as an educated and reasoned man.
W.E.B. DuBois: A Recorded Autobiography (1961)
Other Notable Quotes
“And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money–getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.”
Sources
The Chris Hedges Report: Dr. Gerald Horne on the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois. An interview with Dr. Gerald Horne, history professor at the University of Houston and Biographer of Du Bois. The interview explores the depth of WEB Du Bois’s life, ideas, and work.
In support of Du Bois, Horne argues that having a “trade’ is not enough when discrimination limits you from practicing your trade.
The Silent March (Wikipedia) – 1917