Du Bois, W. E. B.

Addressing national and international challenges of race, class, and power, Black intellectual, sociologist, and educational leader William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) engaged highly contested, groundbreaking debates throughout his adult life. Du Bois observed in 1900 that race was, in essence, the problem of the coming century—a belief that was fundamental to his vision for a democratic U.S. society. This view put him in opposition to the leading educator of the era, Booker T. Washington, [Page 308]who downgraded equality and civil and political rights in the list of Black priorities. Washington's leadership supported an agenda of industrial education, racial solidarity, institution building, and small business development. In one of his most noted speeches given at the Atlanta Exposition, 1895, Washington argued that agitating for social equality was an extremist folly, and that Black people must continue to struggle rather than artificially force a socially just society.

Opposition to this accommodationist view was expressed by many, including Du Bois, William Trotter, founder of the Boston Guardian, and members of the Niagara Movement, an activist group of professionals and college-educated African Americans that demanded an end to racial discrimination not only in education but all aspects of public life. Washington's voice dominated the national discourses about Black education and social place, especially in the South. Du Bois attacked Washington's beliefs directly in his text The Souls of Black Folks, published in 1903, and continued to mount the fight against Washington's views from 1903 to 1915. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois expressed the characteristic dualism of Black Americans.

Born in Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868, Du Bois studied at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, teaching in rural school districts during the summers. He was editor of the Fisk Herald and earned a BA in 1888. He attended Harvard from 1888 to 1892, receiving a BA cum laude. After studying at the University of Berlin from 1992 to 1994, he taught Latin and Greek at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Du Bois received his PhD from Harvard in 1896; his dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, was published by Harvard University Press. He was an instructor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1899 published The Philadelphia Negro, a study of Black urban life, the first case study of a Black community in the United States.

From 1897 to 1910 Du Bois taught history and economics at Atlanta University and initiated the Atlanta University Studies. For more than a decade, he devoted himself to sociological investigations of Blacks in U.S. society, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914. Other texts authored by Du Bois included The Negro published in 1915, Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, and Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race published in 1939. In 1940 he wrote Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom.

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