THE YEAR OF W.E.B DU BOIS
A CELEBRATION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH
W.E.B Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, a small town in western Massachusetts. At the time of his birth no more than fifty Black folk lived in the area. His mother and her family were descended from African slaves captured and brought to New York by Dutch slavers. His great great grandfather won his family’s freedom by fighting on the side of the American revolutionaries against the British. After the war the family moved from New York State to western Massachusetts. His father was of Haitian origins. His father left Great Barrington soon after his birth. A single mother raised him among the Black poor and working class. He was educated in the schools of Great Barrington, where he first experienced racism. His mother died soon after his graduation from high school.
He began his college education at historically Black Fisk University in Nashville Tennessee, where he said he touched the very shadow of slavery. He spent his summers teaching Black sharecroppers in rural Tennessee. Upon graduating from Fisk he was admitted to Harvard University on condition that he must redo his college courses, because Harvard refused to accept his degree from Fisk. He said of his Harvard years, he was at Harvard not of Harvard. While doing graduate studies leading to a PhD he received a fellowship that led to two years of study at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. In 1895 he became the first Black person to receive a Harvard PhD, his dissertation was entitled “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638—1870”. It was published as the first volume in the Harvard historical series and remains in publication. Thus began his career as an historian as well as a student of Black culture, slavery and resistance. His first teaching position was at Wilberforce University in Ohio; a Black university attached to the African Methodist Episcopal denomination.
In 1896 he was contacted by a group of liberal minded social workers connected to the University of Pennsylvania to do a study of the Black community in Philadelphia. Their motives were to discover the reasons for the corruption of the political system in the city, believing that Blacks were the cause. Du Bois saw things differently; he wished to do a scientific study of the Black population in the city, including racial discrimination, poverty, crime and Black institutions like the Black Church. His study was published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro, a landmark in urban sociology.
He at that time believed that knowledge was the key to racial reform, and called upon major universities to take up the scientific study of race in America. They refused. A refusal equaled by the University of Pennsylvania denying him the right to teach in its classrooms or to live on the campus during the time that he did the study.
In 1897 he cofounded along with Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper and others the first African American scholarly association, The American Negro Academy. In 1900 he was the secretary at the first Pan African Conference held in London. In his speech to the conference he observed “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”.
In 1897, Du Bois took a job at Atlanta University in Georgia, a fledgling Black institution. There he advanced his sociological project, setting up the department of sociology, a sociological laboratory and the annual Atlanta University Conferences. From these conferences came the annual reports known as The Atlanta University Studies. While in Atlanta he personally experienced the realities of Southern Black life. In 1899 a Black man, Sam Hose, was brutally tortured, lynched and his body mutilated by a mob of several thousands whites. He saw the results of this crime when going to deliver an article to the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, he saw the severed hands and feet and ankles of Hose displayed in a butcher shop and labeled as such. He returned home and wept. The death of his first born child Burghardt of a respiratory illness further compounded his sadness. He died because a white doctor refused to come to treat him in the middle of the night. He movingly wrote that it was perhaps better that a Black male not live to experience the violence and viciousness of American racism.
These events convinced him that knowledge alone would not solve the race problem. Science and scholarship must be joined to organized resistance to the white supremacist system. The struggle would be protracted, however. Du Bois the activist emerged from these tragedies. We witness this change in his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. In it he proclaims he is “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of those within the Veil”; an assertion that his scholarship and scientific studies are tied to the suffering of Black folk and to struggle. The Souls of Black Folk shows him combining scholarship, scientific inquiry, fiction, poetry and music, producing a complete work of science and art.
In 1905 Du Bois led a small group of Black men meeting in Niagara Falls, Canada in creating the first civil rights organization of the modern period, named the Niagara Movement. It lasted until 1910 when it merged with the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He founded the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. It became the most widely read Black magazine for several decades.
During the years 1900 until 1919 Du Bois along with a robust scholarly and scientific career campaigned for Black civil rights, Pan Africanism, women’s rights and socialism. He continued to publish The Atlanta University Studies and wrote an interpretative biography of the white abolitionist John Brown as well as a novel about the post slavery south entitled The Quest of the Silver Fleece. A decade long political and ideological debate with Booker T Washington and his followers over Black education and the necessity of civil rights and the vote, ends with Washington’s death in 1915. Du Bois wrote his first history of Africa, The Negro, and his landmark essay on international relations and World War I, “The African Roots of the War”. Each saw Africa as at center of world history and politics in the modern epoch, theorizing that the slave trade and slavery were foundations of modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. World War I, he concluded, was a war between European powers for the redivision of Africa. His sequel to The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1920 as Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. In it he wrote what is considered the originary work of Black feminism entitled “The Damnation of Women”. An essay “The Souls of White Folk” is an early critique of whiteness as a cultural construction and mode of white false consciousness.
From 1919 to 1929 he organizes four Pan African Congresses. In 1928 his maturing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thinking was crystallized in a novel entitled The Dark Princesses. In it he advocates for the unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia against European imperialism. He sees the African American struggle as not essentially an American affair, but a struggle that has global meaning and is part of the global anti-imperialist struggles of Asians and Africans. In it he called for what can be called intercivilizational unity of the oppressed.
The world financial system collapsed in 1929 leading to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Du Bois argued in the pages of The Crisis for greater Black unity and asserted that Black folk were a “Nation within a Nation” and a cultural “world within a world” reasserting an earlier observation, that Black folk are a “civilization in potentiality”. He called for Black self-reliance and self-determination. These positions led to a great struggle within the NAACP and Du Bois’ eventual leaving its Board of Directors. He returns to Atlanta University where he teaches and completes the landmark historical study Black Reconstruction in America. He challenges the standard white interpretation of Reconstruction (1865—1877) and of American history. His theory was that Black workers are the central force in American history; that the Civil War, once the Black workers fully joined the struggle, became a war of emancipation and that Reconstruction was the most democratic period in American history. He went so far as to speculate that in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana there existed the possibilities for what he called “the dictatorship of the Black proletariat”, an expression of democracy and Black power. The defeat of Reconstruction was for him a defeat for democracy, throwing Black folk and the South back towards slavery. In 1939 he published his second history of Africa, Black Folk Then and Now. In 1940 his autobiography Dusk of Dawn was published. Perhaps the most striking chapter is “Science and Empire”, where he asserts that Race and Empire distort and undermine science. He further suggests that the science of racists and colonialists and the science of the oppressed are distinct enterprises and in irreversible and permanent conflict. He insists that the oppressed if they are to be free must produce their own knowledge based upon their scientific methods and research. Again, he believed that science in order to be revolutionary must be connected to struggle.
In 1947 his fully formed view of world history crystallized in The World And Africa. Coming on the heels of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the ruin of Europe by two World Wars, Du Bois sees new possibilities for the anti-colonial and freedom movements. These possibilities were made greater because Europe was collapsing. In fact the first chapter of this history of Africa is ironically tilted “The Collapse of Europe”.
After World War Two the United States emerges as the most powerful nation, the largest empire in world history and the most violent imperialist nation. The US was a nuclear-armed nation, whose principle ideology was white supremacy. It had just used these weapons of mass genocide against the Japanese people. Du Bois in the face of this joined Pan Africanism and civil rights to the struggle for world peace and for nuclear disarmament. He opposed the US war in Korea and joined the international movement The Peace Information Center. For this he was indicted by the US government as an agent of a foreign government, arrested, finger printed and put on trial in 1951. To the charge of being an agent of a foreign government he replied he was not an agent of any government; he was an agent of peace. In the book Color and Democracy, Colonies and Peace he answered the racism, anticommunism and war mongering of his accusers and the US government in these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called communists. Is that condemnation for the peace makers or praise for the communists.” A mass campaign on behalf of his freedom and right to speech and to dissent developed. He finally won his case, and forced the government to return his passport, allowing him to travel aboard. He began, along with his second wife Shirley Graham, a world tour, where he was celebrated in Europe and Asia. This tour ended with a ten-week visit at the invitation of the government of the People’s Republic of China.
In 1961 he was invited by the head of state of the new government in Ghana to live there and take up work on his long envisioned project The Encyclopedia of Africa. He met with leading Pan Africanists like George Padmore, Alphaeus Hunton, and leaders of Africa’s independence movements from Algeria, Guinea, South Africa and Egypt.
On August 27, 1963 Du Bois died peacefully in Accra, the capital of independent Ghana. The Ghanaian government organized a state funeral for him. President Kwame Nkrumah eulogized him as “the father of Pan Africanism”. Many foreign embassies, especially from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America honored his life by flying their flags at half mast. The US government dishonored itself by conducting business as usual on the day of his funeral.
In the end we salute Du Bois for his many achievements and contributions to humanity, but more than anything we salute his moral courage. We agree with the words spoken on W.E.B Du Bois’ one-hundredth birth anniversary by Martin Luther King Jr.:
Dr. Du Bois’ greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice. Today we are still challenged to be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind, freedom and until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a dark past and every family will have a decent, sanitary house in which to live. Let us be dissatisfied until the empty stomachs of Mississippi are filled and the idle industries of Appalachia are revitalized. Let us be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda. Let us be dissatisfied until our brother of the Third World- Asia, Africa, and Latin America will no longer be the victims of imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Let us be dissatisfied until this pending cosmic elegy will be transformed into a creative psalm of peace and “justice will roll down like waters from a mighty stream.”
May he live forever!
He began his college education at historically Black Fisk University in Nashville Tennessee, where he said he touched the very shadow of slavery. He spent his summers teaching Black sharecroppers in rural Tennessee. Upon graduating from Fisk he was admitted to Harvard University on condition that he must redo his college courses, because Harvard refused to accept his degree from Fisk. He said of his Harvard years, he was at Harvard not of Harvard. While doing graduate studies leading to a PhD he received a fellowship that led to two years of study at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. In 1895 he became the first Black person to receive a Harvard PhD, his dissertation was entitled “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638—1870”. It was published as the first volume in the Harvard historical series and remains in publication. Thus began his career as an historian as well as a student of Black culture, slavery and resistance. His first teaching position was at Wilberforce University in Ohio; a Black university attached to the African Methodist Episcopal denomination.
In 1896 he was contacted by a group of liberal minded social workers connected to the University of Pennsylvania to do a study of the Black community in Philadelphia. Their motives were to discover the reasons for the corruption of the political system in the city, believing that Blacks were the cause. Du Bois saw things differently; he wished to do a scientific study of the Black population in the city, including racial discrimination, poverty, crime and Black institutions like the Black Church. His study was published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro, a landmark in urban sociology.
He at that time believed that knowledge was the key to racial reform, and called upon major universities to take up the scientific study of race in America. They refused. A refusal equaled by the University of Pennsylvania denying him the right to teach in its classrooms or to live on the campus during the time that he did the study.
In 1897 he cofounded along with Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper and others the first African American scholarly association, The American Negro Academy. In 1900 he was the secretary at the first Pan African Conference held in London. In his speech to the conference he observed “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”.
In 1897, Du Bois took a job at Atlanta University in Georgia, a fledgling Black institution. There he advanced his sociological project, setting up the department of sociology, a sociological laboratory and the annual Atlanta University Conferences. From these conferences came the annual reports known as The Atlanta University Studies. While in Atlanta he personally experienced the realities of Southern Black life. In 1899 a Black man, Sam Hose, was brutally tortured, lynched and his body mutilated by a mob of several thousands whites. He saw the results of this crime when going to deliver an article to the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, he saw the severed hands and feet and ankles of Hose displayed in a butcher shop and labeled as such. He returned home and wept. The death of his first born child Burghardt of a respiratory illness further compounded his sadness. He died because a white doctor refused to come to treat him in the middle of the night. He movingly wrote that it was perhaps better that a Black male not live to experience the violence and viciousness of American racism.
These events convinced him that knowledge alone would not solve the race problem. Science and scholarship must be joined to organized resistance to the white supremacist system. The struggle would be protracted, however. Du Bois the activist emerged from these tragedies. We witness this change in his 1903 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. In it he proclaims he is “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of those within the Veil”; an assertion that his scholarship and scientific studies are tied to the suffering of Black folk and to struggle. The Souls of Black Folk shows him combining scholarship, scientific inquiry, fiction, poetry and music, producing a complete work of science and art.
In 1905 Du Bois led a small group of Black men meeting in Niagara Falls, Canada in creating the first civil rights organization of the modern period, named the Niagara Movement. It lasted until 1910 when it merged with the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He founded the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. It became the most widely read Black magazine for several decades.
During the years 1900 until 1919 Du Bois along with a robust scholarly and scientific career campaigned for Black civil rights, Pan Africanism, women’s rights and socialism. He continued to publish The Atlanta University Studies and wrote an interpretative biography of the white abolitionist John Brown as well as a novel about the post slavery south entitled The Quest of the Silver Fleece. A decade long political and ideological debate with Booker T Washington and his followers over Black education and the necessity of civil rights and the vote, ends with Washington’s death in 1915. Du Bois wrote his first history of Africa, The Negro, and his landmark essay on international relations and World War I, “The African Roots of the War”. Each saw Africa as at center of world history and politics in the modern epoch, theorizing that the slave trade and slavery were foundations of modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. World War I, he concluded, was a war between European powers for the redivision of Africa. His sequel to The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1920 as Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. In it he wrote what is considered the originary work of Black feminism entitled “The Damnation of Women”. An essay “The Souls of White Folk” is an early critique of whiteness as a cultural construction and mode of white false consciousness.
From 1919 to 1929 he organizes four Pan African Congresses. In 1928 his maturing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thinking was crystallized in a novel entitled The Dark Princesses. In it he advocates for the unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia against European imperialism. He sees the African American struggle as not essentially an American affair, but a struggle that has global meaning and is part of the global anti-imperialist struggles of Asians and Africans. In it he called for what can be called intercivilizational unity of the oppressed.
The world financial system collapsed in 1929 leading to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Du Bois argued in the pages of The Crisis for greater Black unity and asserted that Black folk were a “Nation within a Nation” and a cultural “world within a world” reasserting an earlier observation, that Black folk are a “civilization in potentiality”. He called for Black self-reliance and self-determination. These positions led to a great struggle within the NAACP and Du Bois’ eventual leaving its Board of Directors. He returns to Atlanta University where he teaches and completes the landmark historical study Black Reconstruction in America. He challenges the standard white interpretation of Reconstruction (1865—1877) and of American history. His theory was that Black workers are the central force in American history; that the Civil War, once the Black workers fully joined the struggle, became a war of emancipation and that Reconstruction was the most democratic period in American history. He went so far as to speculate that in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana there existed the possibilities for what he called “the dictatorship of the Black proletariat”, an expression of democracy and Black power. The defeat of Reconstruction was for him a defeat for democracy, throwing Black folk and the South back towards slavery. In 1939 he published his second history of Africa, Black Folk Then and Now. In 1940 his autobiography Dusk of Dawn was published. Perhaps the most striking chapter is “Science and Empire”, where he asserts that Race and Empire distort and undermine science. He further suggests that the science of racists and colonialists and the science of the oppressed are distinct enterprises and in irreversible and permanent conflict. He insists that the oppressed if they are to be free must produce their own knowledge based upon their scientific methods and research. Again, he believed that science in order to be revolutionary must be connected to struggle.
In 1947 his fully formed view of world history crystallized in The World And Africa. Coming on the heels of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the ruin of Europe by two World Wars, Du Bois sees new possibilities for the anti-colonial and freedom movements. These possibilities were made greater because Europe was collapsing. In fact the first chapter of this history of Africa is ironically tilted “The Collapse of Europe”.
After World War Two the United States emerges as the most powerful nation, the largest empire in world history and the most violent imperialist nation. The US was a nuclear-armed nation, whose principle ideology was white supremacy. It had just used these weapons of mass genocide against the Japanese people. Du Bois in the face of this joined Pan Africanism and civil rights to the struggle for world peace and for nuclear disarmament. He opposed the US war in Korea and joined the international movement The Peace Information Center. For this he was indicted by the US government as an agent of a foreign government, arrested, finger printed and put on trial in 1951. To the charge of being an agent of a foreign government he replied he was not an agent of any government; he was an agent of peace. In the book Color and Democracy, Colonies and Peace he answered the racism, anticommunism and war mongering of his accusers and the US government in these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called communists. Is that condemnation for the peace makers or praise for the communists.” A mass campaign on behalf of his freedom and right to speech and to dissent developed. He finally won his case, and forced the government to return his passport, allowing him to travel aboard. He began, along with his second wife Shirley Graham, a world tour, where he was celebrated in Europe and Asia. This tour ended with a ten-week visit at the invitation of the government of the People’s Republic of China.
In 1961 he was invited by the head of state of the new government in Ghana to live there and take up work on his long envisioned project The Encyclopedia of Africa. He met with leading Pan Africanists like George Padmore, Alphaeus Hunton, and leaders of Africa’s independence movements from Algeria, Guinea, South Africa and Egypt.
On August 27, 1963 Du Bois died peacefully in Accra, the capital of independent Ghana. The Ghanaian government organized a state funeral for him. President Kwame Nkrumah eulogized him as “the father of Pan Africanism”. Many foreign embassies, especially from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America honored his life by flying their flags at half mast. The US government dishonored itself by conducting business as usual on the day of his funeral.
In the end we salute Du Bois for his many achievements and contributions to humanity, but more than anything we salute his moral courage. We agree with the words spoken on W.E.B Du Bois’ one-hundredth birth anniversary by Martin Luther King Jr.:
Dr. Du Bois’ greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice. Today we are still challenged to be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind, freedom and until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a dark past and every family will have a decent, sanitary house in which to live. Let us be dissatisfied until the empty stomachs of Mississippi are filled and the idle industries of Appalachia are revitalized. Let us be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda. Let us be dissatisfied until our brother of the Third World- Asia, Africa, and Latin America will no longer be the victims of imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Let us be dissatisfied until this pending cosmic elegy will be transformed into a creative psalm of peace and “justice will roll down like waters from a mighty stream.”
May he live forever!
