Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868–1963)

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was one of the most prolific and profound social scientists of [Page 243]the 20th century. Du Bois' writings on race have influenced scholars from across the social sciences, including political science, psychology, and economics. In recent years, prominent sociologists have recognized Du Bois' contributions as a founding father of American sociology. Over the past decade, scholars of race, crime, and justice have also acknowledged his significant contribution to American criminology.

Du Bois was raised by his mother in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Like many of the few Black Americans who lived in the small and mostly immigrant mill town, Du Bois' mother worked as a domestic. Despite his mother's modest social position, Du Bois was regularly exposed to the ways of life of the town's well-to-do White citizens, some of whom took a special interest in the academic and social development of the young, intellectually advanced Du Bois. This somewhat bifurcated childhood experience marked by exposure to the elite, despite his skin color, and social proximity and distance from the immigrant mill worker, along with later racial encounters in university settings, informed Du Bois' early writing on the “double consciousness” that characterizes the social experience of Black Americans.

After graduating from high school in Great Barrington, and with the help of the elite White citizens of his hometown, Du Bois received a college scholarship to Fisk University, now a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee. Three years later, Du Bois received his B.A. from Fisk. He applied to Harvard University, which he had longed to attend as a boy, and was accepted to Harvard as a junior. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard before continuing on to earn a Ph.D. During his period of graduate study, Du Bois spent 2 years in Germany, where he studied with a founding father of sociology, Max Weber (author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as well as many other works). After completing his dissertation, which was a well-respected and still-cited study of the suppression of the African slave trade, Du Bois directly encountered race prejudice from White colleges that refused to hire him for faculty positions. Du Bois was eventually offered an academic position at Wilberforce University, an all-Black school near Dayton, Ohio. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to conduct a social study of the Black community in Philadelphia, commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania.