Du Bois, W. E. B.

Education, Academic Career, and Research Goals

Born in 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois was educated at Fisk University, the University of Berlin, and Harvard University. In 1895 he became the first African American to receive a PhD in the social sciences at Harvard University. Du Bois's academic career began at Wilburforce University (the older African American University), moved to Philadel phia in the mid-1890s (where he conducted research for his classic study The Philadelphia Negro), and then moved to Atlanta University from 1897 until 1910 (where he sought to establish a program for the study of African Americans, including their transition from rural to urban living). Over the course of this time, which circumscribed his formal academic career, Du Bois aimed to design and implement a series of systematic studies on African American social organization and culture. A significant part of his agenda concerned the status and fate of African Americans in urban America. The emergence of the industrial order in the United States, coupled with the end of slavery and the beginning of the migration of African Americans to urban areas, allowed Du Bois to consider the city to be the central geographic terrain for assessing the status of, and future prospects for African Americans.

Ultimately, Du Bois's early scholarly mission was to transcend the still-developing formal academic disciplines in order to create a supradisciplinary understanding of the social character, cultural status, and policy needs of African Americans, especially as they began the process of cementing themselves into the urban sphere of early twentieth-century American life. A major point of emphasis in these analyses was framing an orientation to interpreting, defining, and measuring social problems for this constituency. A core part of his objective was to document the barriers and obstacles inhibiting the social advancement of African Americans, to define some strategies and ideas for resolving them, and to illustrate how historical analysis, demographic data, fieldwork, and survey research can be employed to help achieve those ends.