The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America
(
Although the Civil War marked an end to slavery in the ...)
Although the Civil War marked an end to slavery in the United States, it would take another fifty years to establish the countrys civil rights movement. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois was among the first generation of African-American scholars to spearhead this movement towards equality. As cofounder of the NAACP, he sought to initiate equality through social change, and as a talented writer, he created books and essays that provide a revealing glimpse into the black experience of the times.
In
The Gift of Black Folk, Du Bois recounts the history of African Americans and their many unsung contributions to American society. He chronicles their role in the early exploration of America, their part in developing the countrys agricultural industry, their courage on the battlefields, and their creative genius in virtually every aspect of American culture. He also highlights the contributions of black women, proposing that their freedom could lead to freedom for all women.
The Gift of Black Folk provides a powerful picture of the many struggles that paved the way for freedom and equality in our nation.
(A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John B...)
A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century.
In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.
W.E.B. Du Bois : Writings : The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles (Library of America)
(Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor, and political a...)
Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor, and political activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. This Library of America volume presents his essential writings, covering the full span of a restless life dedicated to the struggle for racial justice.
The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States 16381870 (1896), his first book, renders a dispassionate account of how, despite ethical and political opposition, Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until a bloody civil war taught them the disastrous consequences of moral cowardice.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of beautifully written essays, narrates the cruelties of racism and celebrates the strength and pride of black America. By turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical, Du Bois pays tribute to black music and religion, explores the remarkable history of the Reconstruction Freedmans Bureau, assesses the career of Booker T. Washington, and remembers the death of his infant son.
Dusk of Dawn (1940) was described by Du Bois as an attempt to elucidate the race problem in terms of his own experience. It describes his boyhood in western Massachusetts, his years at Fisk and Harvard universities, his study and travel abroad, his role in founding the NAACP and his long association with it, and his emerging Pan-African consciousness. He called this autobiography his response to an environing world that guided, embittered, illuminated and enshrouded my life.
Du Boiss influential essays and speeches span the period from 1890 to 1958. They record his evolving positions on the issues that dominated his long, active life: education in a segregated society; black history, art, literature, and culture; the controversial career of Marcus Garvey; the fate of black soldiers in the First World War; the appeal of communism to frustrated black Americans; his trial and acquittal during the McCarthy era; and the elusive promise of an African homeland.
The editorials and articles from The Crisis (19101934) belong to the period of Du Boiss greatest influence. During his editorship of the NAACP magazine that he founded, Du Bois wrote pieces on virtually every aspect of American political, cultural, and economic life. Witty and sardonic, angry and satiric, proud and mournful, these writings show Du Bois at his freshest and most trenchant.
The World and Africa and Color and Democracy (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois)
(W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, ...)
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history.
Collected in one volume for the first time, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy are two of W E. B. Du Bois's most powerful essays on race. He explores how to tell the story of those left out of recorded history, the evils of colonialism worldwide, and Africa's and African's contributions to, and neglect from, world history. More than six decades after W. E. B. Du Bois wrote The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, they remain worthy guides for the twenty-first century. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and two introductions by top African scholars, this edition is essential for anyone interested in world history.
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Dover Thrift Editions)
(
The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B...)
The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. This volume has long inspired readers with its militant cry for social, political, and economic reforms for black Americans.
(
In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward ...)
In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct in-depth studies of the Negro community in Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society.
More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarshipâthe kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it.
In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.
(
The Talented Tenth, by WEB DuBois, is a term that design...)
The Talented Tenth, by WEB DuBois, is a term that designated a leadership class of African Americans in the early 20th century. The term was created by Northern philanthropists, then publicized by W. E. B. Du Bois in an influential essay of the same name, which he published in September 1903.
WEB DuBois. was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor.
(A distinguished scholar introduces the pioneering work in...)
A distinguished scholar introduces the pioneering work in the study of the role of black Americans during the Reconstruction by the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. Reprint.
W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, the most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934.
Background
Ethnicity:
His mother was descended from Dutch, African and English ancestors. William Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave (born in West Africa around 1730) who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt.
W. E. B. Du Bois, in full William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His mother, Mary Burghardt Du Bois, belonged to a tiny community of African Americans who had been settled in the area since before the American Revolution. His father, Alfred Du Bois, was a visitor to the region who deserted the family in his son's infancy.
Education
From 1885 to 1888 Du Bois attended all-black Fisk University in Nashville, where he first encountered the harsher forms of racism. After earning a B. A. (1888) at Fisk, he attended Harvard University, where he took another B. A. in 1890 and a doctorate in history in 1895. Among his teachers were psychologist William James, philosophers Josiah Royce and George Santayana, and historian A. B. Hart. After being awarded his master’s degree in 1891, he received a Slater Fund grant, which allowed him to study and travel overseas from 1892 to 1894. Du Bois studied history, economics, politics, and political economy at the University of Berlin and completed a thesis on agricultural economics in the American South.
From 1892 to 1894 he studied history and sociology at the University of Berlin. His dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States," was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies.
From 1894 to 1896 Du Bois taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1896 he accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania to gather data for a commissioned study of blacks in Philadelphia. This work resulted in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), an acclaimed early example of empirical sociology.
In 1897 he joined the faculty at Atlanta University and took over the annual Atlanta University Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems. From 1897 to 1914 he edited an annual study of one aspect or another of black life, such as education or the church.
Du Bois's growing radicalism also led him to organize the Niagara Movement, a group of blacks who met in 1905 and 1906 to agitate for "manhood rights" for African Americans. He founded two journals, Moon (1905–1906) and Horizon (1907–1910). In 1909 he published John Brown, a sympathetic biography of the white abolitionist martyr. Then in 1910 he resigned his professorship to join the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York, which had been formed in response to growing concern about the treatment of blacks. As its director of research, Du Bois founded a monthly magazine, The Crisis. In 1911 he published his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, a study of the cotton industry seen through the fate of a young black couple struggling for a life of dignity and meaning.
The Crisis became a powerful forum for Du Bois's views on race and politics. Meanwhile, his developing interest in Africa led him to write The Negro (1915), a study offering historical and demographic information on peoples of African descent around the world. Hoping to affect colonialism in Africa after World War I, he also organized Pan-African Congresses in Europe in 1919, 1921, and 1923, and in New York in 1927. However, he clashed with the most popular black leader of the era, Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Du Bois's second prose collection, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), did not repeat the success of The Souls of Black Folk but captured his increased militancy. In the 1920s The Crisis played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance by publishing early work by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other writers. The Great Depression cut the circulation of The Crisis and weakened his position with the leadership of the NAACP, with which he had fought from the beginning. In 1934 he resigned as editor and returned to teach at Atlanta University. His interest in Marxism, which had started with his student days in Berlin, dominated his next book, Black Reconstruction in America (1934), a massive and controversial revaluation of the role of the freedmen in the South after the Civil War. In 1936 Du Bois commenced a weekly column of opinion in various black newspapers, starting with the Pittsburgh Courier. He emphasized his continuing concern for Africa with Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), an expanded and updated revision of The Negro.
In 1940 Du Bois published his first full-length autobiography, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, in which he examined modern racial theory against the major events and intellectual currents in his lifetime. In 1944 his life took another dramatic turn when he was suddenly retired by Atlanta University after tension grew between him and certain administrators. When the NAACP rehired him that year, he returned to New York as director of special research. In 1945 he published a bristling polemic, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. A year later, he produced a controversial pamphlet, "An Appeal to the World, " submitted by the NAACP on behalf of black Americans to the United Nations Commission on Civil Rights. In 1947 came his The World and Africa, an examination of Africa's future following World War II.
In 1950 Du Bois ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate from New York on the American Labor Party ticket. Also that year, in another move applauded by communists, he accepted the chairmanship of the Peace Information Center, which circulated the Stockholm Peace Appeal against nuclear weapons. Early in 1951 Du Bois and four colleagues from the Peace Information Center were indicted on the charge of violating the law that required agents of a foreign power to register. At the trial in November 1951, the judge heard testimony, then unexpectedly granted a motion by the defense for a directed acquittal. Du Bois was undeterred by his ordeal. In 1953, he recited the Twenty-third Psalm at the grave of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as spies for the Soviet Union. For such involvements, he found himself ostracized by some black leaders and organizations.
Returning to fiction, he composed a trilogy, The Black Flame, about the life and times of a black educator seen against the backdrop of generations of black and white lives and national and international events (the trilogy comprised The Ordeal of Mansart, 1957; Mansart Builds a School, 1959; and Worlds of Color, 1961). After the government lifted its ban on his foreign travel in 1958, Du Bois visited various countries, including the Soviet Union and China.
In 1960 Du Bois visited Ghana for the inauguration of Kwame Nkrumah as its first president. He then accepted an invitation from Nkrumah to return to Ghana and start work on an Encyclopedia Africana, a project in which he had long been interested. In October 1961 he left the United States. He began work on the project in Ghana, but illness the following year caused him to go for treatment to Romania. Afterward, he visited Peking and Moscow. In February 1963 he renounced his American citizenship and officially became a citizen of Ghana. He died in Accra, Ghana, and was buried there.
(W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, ...)
Religion
Although Du Bois attended a New England Congregational church as a child, he abandoned organized religion while at Fisk College. As an adult, Du Bois described himself as agnostic or a freethinker, but at least one biographer concluded that Du Bois was virtually an atheist
Politics
Attracted to the labor movement and to socialism, Du Bois was briefly a member of the Socialist Party in 1912 and was influenced by Marxism for the rest of his career. In 1948, when he endorsed the Progressive Party and its presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, he was fired. He then joined Paul Robeson, who was by this time firmly identified with radical socialism, at the Council on African Affairs, which had been officially declared a "subversive" organization. In 1961 Du Bois joined the U. S. Communist Party.
Pan-Africanism was another major focus of Du Bois’s political career. Beginning in 1905, he organized a series of Pan-African conferences, the first in Paris, with subsequent conferences in Lisbon, Brussels, and Paris (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York City (1927). In these conferences, Du Bois put forth his ideas of self-government for oppressed black people under colonial powers. Ideological and personal differences led to acrimonious debate between Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist leader who strove to construct—through economic enterprise and mass education—a unified empire of people of African descent. Du Bois rejected many of Garvey’s policies and mounted a campaign to expose corruption and mismanagement of Garvey’s famous Black Star Shipping Line (a black cross-continental trade venture).
Views
Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest.
In 1900, in London, Du Bois boldly asserted that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." He repeated this statement in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), mainly a collection of essays on African-American history, sociology, religion, and music, in which Du Bois wrote of an essential black double consciousness: the existence of twin souls ("an American, a Negro") warring in each black body. The book also attacked Booker T. Washington, the most powerful black American of the age, for advising blacks to surrender the right to vote and to a liberal education in return for white friendship and support. Du Bois was established as probably the premier intellectual in black America, and Washington's main rival.
Quotations:
"…One even feels his two-ness – 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. "
In his autobiography, Du Bois wrote:
"When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer [...] I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. [...] I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools."
"And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor – all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked – who is good? Not that men are ignorant – what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men."
"Once we were told: Be worthy and fit and the ways are open. Today the avenues of advancement in the army, navy, and civil service, and even in business and professional life, are continually closed to black applicants of proven fitness, simply on the bald excuse of race and color."
"Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: ... How does it feel to be a problem? ... One ever feels his two-ness,–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 ... He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face."
Membership
He became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He was also a member of the Society of American Historians and of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Personality
Du Bois was organized and disciplined: his lifelong regimen was to rise at 7:15, work until 5, eat dinner and read a newspaper until 7, then read or socialize until he was in bed, invariably before 10. He was a meticulous planner, and frequently mapped out his schedules and goals on large pieces of graph paper. Du Bois was something of a dandy – he dressed formally, carried a walking stick, and walked with an air of confidence and dignity.
Physical Characteristics:
He was relatively short, standing at 5 feet 5. 5 inches (166 cm), and always maintained a well-groomed mustache and goatee.
Quotes from others about the person
Upon his death, the NAACP journal Crisis proclaimed the former leader “the prime inspirer, philosopher and father of the Negro protest movement.”
Interests
He enjoyed singing and playing tennis.
Connections
In 1896 Du Bois met and married Nina Gomer. The couple had two children, Burghardt and Yolande. Burghardt died from dysentery in 1899. Nina had died in 1950 and in 1951 he married Lola Shirley Graham, a fellow socialist and writer. They became citizens of Ghana in 1961 after they emigrated to that country.