W.E.B. DuBois: A Great African-American Scholar and Activist
W.E.B. DuBois was a great scholar activist who was probably the creator of Black History and a founder of the social sciences. He was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which had a population of 5,000 out of which 25 to 50 were African American. Dubois experienced little overt racism but did have to endure innuendo and a climate of subtle racism. He was a brilliant student and wanted to attend Harvard. However, he couldn’t afford it and instead went to Fisk University in Nashville with a scholarship and help from friends and family. In Nashville he first encountered overt racism and the Jim Crow laws and was horrified.
After graduating from Fisk, DuBois entered Harvard on a scholarship and received a Master’s Degree in 1891. He then studied abroad at the University of Berlin, returning to Harvard where he got his doctorate. His dissertation was The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America and it became the first volume in Harvard’s Historical Series.
DuBois’ achievements at even this stage of his life cannot be overstated. He was the first African American to receive a doctorate at Harvard and one of the few African American doctorates in the entire country. His scholarship was sound, original and brave. He put his scholarship to the service of his own people and this was to be true for him the rest of his life.
After getting his doctorate, DuBois taught at Wilberforce University for a couple of years and the got a special fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a research project in Philadelphia’s 7th ward slums.
He published The Philadelphia Negro. This was the first time statistics and a scientific, sociological approach had been used to study social phenomena and for this Dubois is considered to be one of the founders of social science.
DuBois then went to Altanta University where he stayed for 13 years. A steady stream of work was done on black morality, urbanization, blacks in business, college bred blacks, the black church, and black crime. He also wrote historical versions of complex cultural development in Africa, showing that Africa was not a land of ignorant savages.
Initially DuBois thought social science could solve the race problem but gradually came to the conclusion that only agitation and protest would work.
He came into direct conflict with Booker T Washington who believed that African Americans should temporarily forgo “political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education. They should concentrate all their energies on industrial education.” DuBois did not believe in waiting patiently to get civil rights and he thought a “talented tenth” should get a higher education to help create justice for African Americans. In 1903 he wrote a book called Souls of Black Folk which devoted a chapter to a critique of Washington. The book also contained a very prescient sentence. “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.”
Dubois was one of the founders of the NAACP in 1909 and left Atlanta University to be the director of research and the editor of Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. At the turn of the century, DuBois had been a supporter of black capitalism but by 1905 he was drawn to socialism and Marxism. His life was a gradual drift to the left. Sometimes his thinking held a degree of black separatist and nationalism. He had free reign over the content of Crisis but became more and more dissatisfied over the politics of the NAACP. Its board of directors had, from its founding, been mostly white and DuBois felt this was a mistake and that African Americans should direct an African American organization. He also objected to the gradualism of the NAACP. Finally, in 1934, DuBois left the NAACP and returned to Atlanta University.
Gradually DuBois became more and more disillusioned with America and, when he was 90 years old, he moved to Ghana, became a citizen and joined the Communist Party. He also renounced his citizenship in the United States.
He died in Ghana at age 92 on Aug. 27, 1963 on the eve of the March on Washington.
It is hard to overestimate the influence of DuBois on the Civil Rights Movement, on African American Studies, on Pan Africanism, and on the social sciences. He was a towering scholar and thinker and left behind a huge volume of work.
