Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.)

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868–1963), historian, sociologist, race man, social theorist, poet, journalist, political, and civil rights leader, was the first social theorist of the earliest generation of American academic sociologists to have deservedly earned a global reputation. Though generally ignored by American sociologists, Du Bois was highly regarded in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa well before the value of his ideas and life's work were seriously considered by the white mainstream in his native land. His voluminous writings made enduring contributions to urban ethnography, race theory, the social history of slavery and Reconstruction, and the literary revolution in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance.

W. E. B. Du Bois (pronounced “du-boyz”) was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, in the early years of the post–Civil War era of Reconstruction of the South. Though he grew up in near poverty, as a child, Du Bois was little exposed to the terrors of white racism that contributed to the nation's civil war. He was accepted in the local Massachusetts schools, where prejudice against the Irish ran deeper than it did against blacks. Du Bois excelled as a pupil. He began his career as a published writer when, still in high school, he served as a correspondent for New York City's Globe, a prominent black newspaper. His intellectual promise led him in 1885 to Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennesssee, where he took an undergraduate degree in 1888, then to Harvard University, where he took a second BA degree in 1891. These early experiences fixed the two contesting themes of Du Bois's intellectual work. At Fisk, a traditionally Negro college, he experienced the pain and pleasure of the African American life in the South. Most notably, he was permanently affected by summer work among the rural poor of Tennessee. At Harvard, the most European of American cultural institutions, he learned the high values of Western culture, which were applied to his postgraduate scholarly training in economic history at [Page 214]Harvard and in Germany (1892–1894). Thereafter, he finished doctoral studies at Harvard in 1895. His thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, became the first of his published scholarly books (Du Bois 1896).

Du Bois's first teaching position was at Wilberforce University (1894–1896), then a small and religiously enthusiastic college in rural Ohio, though he couldn't stand the place. Still, this was when he married Nina Gomer, his wife of 53 years. In 1896, he accepted the offer of a research position at the University of Pennsylvania. Though the University paid him scant attention, the post allowed him to conduct fieldwork in Philadelphia's predominantly Negro Seventh Ward. This work led to The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which may justifiably be considered the classic work of urban ethnography in America. His first two books solidified his reputation as a scholar. But there was more soon to come.

Du Bois's international recognition as a new and insistent voice in American racial politics owed to a small collection of large essays that appeared in 1903 as Souls of Black Folk. Notwithstanding the prevailing racism of the day, Souls was widely acclaimed by writers as different as Max Weber in Germany and Henry James, the American expatriate living in England. The lead essay in Souls, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” contains Du Bois's elegant description of the double-consciousness (or, “twoness”) concept that now pervades social and race theories as well as sociological social psychology: “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 1903:3). The words are as much poetry as social theory. The concept itself may well have been derived as much from literature as from social science. Yet among the influences on Du Bois's double-consciousness idea was, surely, his teacher at Harvard, William James, the acknowledged founder of self-theory in the social sciences. Du Bois put his theory of the Negro self to an important sociological purpose, one that conveyed the unique social place of the Negro in American life as an heir equally to African and European diasporas. This is where the two contesting themes of Du Bois's life and thought came into their creative tension. At Fisk, he learned the woes of the Negro in the South, and at Harvard, the hopes of European civilization. This, of course, is why the title's key word, Souls, is plural; hence, also, the book's striking literary qualities. Each essay is prefaced with several lines of poetry from European high culture, juxtaposed, without gloss, to a bar of unmarked music from the sorrow songs of Negro slavery. These, in turn, foretell the powerful effect of Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois tells the story of the suffering of the American Negro under slavery and after, while writing with the literary grace of the Victorian gentleman he was. In many ways, these competing cultural commitments apply as much to his way of living as to his literary style and social theory. Few of Du Bois's qualities of genius have been more controversial or as poorly understood.

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