BIOGRAPHY
This gives an overview of W.E.B. Du Bois' life and contributions to American history and scholarship, and to the struggle for Black Liberation. In the near future, I hope to offer brief working papers on specific aspects of Du Bois' life and work.

Born on February 23, 1868 to Mary Silvina and Alfred Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was raised in a small but long established Black community in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. An avid student, Du Bois was published in the community's newspaper by the age of fourteen. He graduated from high school early and enrolled at Fisk University. Upon receiving his bacccalaureate degree, Du Bois accepted a scholarship at the University of Berlin, where he studied for two years. Following this, he went to Harvard, where he received his doctoral degree, being the first African American to do so. His dissertation, approved in 1895, was published as The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Regarded as a masterpiece of historiography, this work remains an outstanding example of Du Bois' scholarship.

By the turn of the century, Dr. Du Bois was on his way to becoming a career academician. From 1894 to 1896, Du Bois served as professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio. After his term was completed, he accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania, as an assistant instructor teaching sociology. It is of course during this time that he conducted the research for his landmark work, Philadelphia Negro (1899). It was characteristic of the times that Du Bois was not allowed to stay on the segregated campus. In 1896, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, who would later bear him two children, Burghardt (who died at the age of three) and Yolande. From 1897 to 1910, he served as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University. He served as chairman of the sociology department there from 1934 to 1944.

Du Bois did not invest all of his energy in the rigors of academia. He began to carve out a role for himself as a scholar activist. In 1900, he attended and helped organize the First Annual Pan-African Congress; he was involved in subsequent sessions as well, in 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1945. in 1911 he attended and helped organize the First Universal Races Congress, held in London, England. In 1905, Du Bois and a group of pioneering African American scholars and leaders met to discuss the issue of civil rights. This group, known as the Niagara Movement, eventually led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. As a founding father of the NAACP, Du Bois also edited the organization's journal, The Crisis, from its inception in 1910 to his initial resignation from the organization in 1934. During that time, he also served as Director of Publicity and Research for the NAACP.

Following his departure, Du Bois remained a vital intellectual force, continually committed to solving "the twentieth century's problem of the color line." Increasingly, he became involved with progressive socialist thinkers and activists who related the problems of African in terms of capitalist oppression. In his work, Black Folk, Then and Now, Du Bois proposed that the masses of the world proletariat were African and their uprising would elevate the peoples of the world.

Du Bois returned to the NAACP in 1944 as Director of Special Research, but controversy was not far off. Disagreements with the organization's leaders and their political manipulations were followed by antagonistic measures perpetrated by the American government. In 1951, Du Bois was indicted under the McCarran Act, one in a long series of legislation instituted as a means to curtail personal and intellectual freedoms, in retaliation for calling upon the United Nations to hear the crimes of the U.S. government against its own people. With the help of his dedicated followers and various human rights organizations, Du Bois was cleared of the charges levied against him.

Du Bois continued to believe that the crimes of racism and exploitation necessitated the unity of Africans throughout the world. In 1961, he joined the Communist Party USA. That same year, he left the United States with his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, herself a noted writer, and emigrated to Ghana, where he became a full citizen. In 1963, he died peacefully, after ninety-five years of faithfully serving humanity. He was accorded a funeral befitting a head of state by his close friend, the great Ghanian president, Kwame Nkrumah. Dignitaries the world over attended the ceremonies, but in typical fashion, the U.S. government sent no one to pay tribute.

W.E.B. Du Bois remains one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. He produced over 4,000 works and his life and legacy continue to inspire a new generation of men and women to assume the task he so mightily undertook. In his own words: "Peace will be my applause."

By Jennifer Wager, 1994