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A Day
in Black History |
W.E.B.
Dubois
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W.E.B. Dubois, the most
influential African American intellectual of his day, shaped modern
African American cultural values. William Edward Burghardt Dubois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the only child of Alfred and Mary Dubois. There were few African Americans in Great Barrington, and William Edward was the only African American in his high school graduating class. Throughout his academic
career, Dubois distinguished himself as a top student; he also displayed
an early interest in the condition of the African American people by
becoming a local correspondent for the New York Globe, an African
American newspaper, at the age of fifteen.
A prolific writer throughout his life, he wrote, as a teenager,
about the need for African Americans to advance in the American
political arena. Upon
graduation he wished to attend Harvard, the top university in the nation;
although his academic achievements were sufficient, he lacked financial
resources, so in 1885 he accepted a scholarship to Fisk College instead,
and spent the next few years at Fisk in Nashville, Tennessee.
While at Fisk, he spent two summers teaching at a local school;
it was the first time he had been exposed to the harsh realities of
African American life in the South. This experience helped him to develop his ideas regarding the
need for African American educational opportunities and cultural
advancement. After graduating from Fisk in 1888, Dubois applied again to Harvard, he was accepted, and graduated from Harvard with a second bachelor’s degree in 1890. His primary fields of study included history, philosophy, economics, and political science. By 1891 he had also earned a master’s degree from that university and began working to obtain his doctorate. He won a grant to study for two years in Berlin, Germany, and returned to take his doctorate, becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. Dubois wished to apply his education and
experience to examine and improve the conditions of African Americans in
this country, and he believed that using scientific methods to analyze
social problems (social science) was the way to do it, an idea that has
been almost universally accepted in recent times.
He accepted a teaching position (professor of French, English and
literature) at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he taught for two
years. In 1897 he moved to
Atlanta University where he taught history and economics for thirteen
years. As Dubois became increasingly aware of the
obstacles with which Black Americans were forced to contend, his outlook
on race relations evolved to advocate protests and political agitation
with the purpose of effecting rapid change.
This view put him at odds with Booker T. Washington, whose
philosophy was that African Americans should concentrate on developing
technical and industrial skills that would elevate their economic
circumstances, allowing social advancement (elimination of
discriminatory laws, etc.) to follow gradually.
Through his stronger stance regarding the fight against racism,
Dubois earned the reputation of being a “radical.” In 1905 Dubois founded an organization called the Niagara Movement, to develop political strategies for African Americans. This group later merged with pre-existing White activist groups, to form the N.A.A.C.P. W.E.B. Dubois was one of the original, founding members of the new organization. Originally, most of the leaders of the N.A.A.C.P. were White, but as the organization evolved and grew in political power, Dubois pushed for Black leadership, with Whites in more of a supporting role. He became the editor of The
Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., continuing in
this capacity for twenty-five years.
As editor, he wrote numerous scathing editorials against
injustice, and his was the voice that called for actions and changes in
laws to end lynching and discriminatory practices in the military.
Between 1909 and 1919 the number of subscribers to The
Crisis grew from about 1,000 to 10,000. Dubois became involved in the Pan-African movement and organized several conferences involving African and African-American leadership. The concept behind this movement was that no people of African descent could be free until all were free—many African countries at that time were still colonies of European nations, and the Pan-African movement examined methods for these countries to obtain independence and self-rule. Dubois became a critic of Marcus Garvey, a high-profile leader of a movement for people of African descent to unite and form a single, strong state in Africa. Dubois did not agree with Garvey’s philosophies and methods and their ideological differences were the subject of much press. In 1923 Dubois visited Africa for the first time,
writing that “The spell of Africa is upon me.”
His visit to Africa caused him to reflect upon his successes and
failures through all his years of working to obtain civil rights for
Black Americans, and he began to think of integration of American
society as a long-range goal, perhaps not as immediately attainable as
he had first hoped. His
political ideology began to shift to the left. In 1927, ten years after the Russian Revolution, he visited Russia to obtain firsthand knowledge about their communist system of government. When he returned, he began to come in conflict more frequently with rest of the leadership of the N.A.A.C.P. In 1933 he resigned as editor of The Crisis and returned to his teaching post at Atlanta University. He continued to write prolifically, and in 1945 served as a consultant to the American delegation at the conference in San Francisco that founded the United Nations. He continued to be a major player at Pan-African conferences, and to speak vociferously against “imperialism.” In the 1950s, Dubois,
who was then the chairman of an organization called the Peace
Information Center, called for a ban on nuclear weapons.
This, among other things, caused him to become a target of
McCarthyism, and he was indicted by the Department of Justice for
failing to register as a foreign agent (they tried to show that he was
an agent of the Russian government).
Dubois was acquitted of this charge, but the experience only
heightened his disgust with the American government. W.E.B. Dubois, in his
early nineties, became an expatriate and moved to Ghana.
At the age of 95 he renounced his American citizenship and became
a citizen of Ghana, as well as an official member of the Communist
Party. He died a few months
later. |
