W.e. dubois biography

American sociologist and activist (–)

For other people with similar names, see William DuBois.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (doo-BOYSS; February 23, – August 27, ) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and Harvard University, where he was its first African American to earn a doctorate, Du Bois rose to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of black civil rights activists seeking equal rights. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the talented tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.

Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Du Bois used his position in the NAACP to respond to racist incidents. After the First World War, he attended the Pan-African Congresses, embraced socialism and became a professor at Atlanta University. Once the Second World War had ended, he engaged in peace activism and was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27,

Du Bois was a prolific author. Du Bois primarily targeted racism with his writing, which protested strongly against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination in important social institutions. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanis

Holt, Thomas C.. "Du Bois, W. E. B.." African American National Biography. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. New York: Oxford UP,  Oxford African American Studies Center.

W. E. B. Du Bois,

(23 Feb. –27 Aug. ),

scholar, writer, editor, and civil rights pioneer, was born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, a barber and itinerant laborer. In later life Du Bois made a close study of his family origins, weaving them rhetorically and conceptually—if not always accurately—into almost everything he wrote. Born in Haiti and descended from mixed race Bahamian slaves, Alfred Du Bois enlisted during the Civil War as a private in a New York regiment of the Union army but appears to have deserted shortly afterward. He also deserted the family less than two years after his son's birth, leaving him to be reared by his mother and the extended Burghardt kin. Long resident in New England, the Burghardts descended from a freedman of Dutch slave origin who had fought briefly in the American Revolution. Under the care of his mother and her relatives, young Will Du Bois spent his entire childhood in that small western Massachusetts town, where probably fewer than two-score of the four thousand inhabitants were African American. He received a classical, college preparatory education in Great Barrington's racially integrated high school, from whence, in June , he became the first African American graduate. A precocious youth, Du Bois not only excelled in his high school studies but also contributed numerous articles to two regional newspapers, the Springfield Republican and the black-owned New York Globe, then edited by T. Thomas Fortune.

In Du Bois enrolled at Harvard as a junior. He received a BA cum laude, in , an MA in , and a PhD in Du Bois was strongly influenced by the new historical work of the German-traine

An advocate for the black community and women’s suffrage, Du Bois spent much his life and career focused on Pan-Africanism and became an organizer of several Pan-African congresses leading the charge to free many African colonies from European control.  

While in Ghana, a country where he was a champion for independence, Du Bois, planned his final project, the Encyclopedia Africana. Styled similarly to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the proposed Encyclopedia Africana was an ambitious undertaking that Du Bois hoped would connect the entire African diaspora.

Although Du Bois died in without completing Encyclopedia Africana, his contributions to the African American experience as a historian, civil rights activist, writer, sociologist and intellectual are vast. The Museum celebrates the influential life he lived, his activism and the scholarly works that continue to serve as essential references regarding racism in America.

The post-screening conversation between director Louis Massiah and Howard University Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies Dr. Greg Carr will be streamed live and archived on the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s UStream page.

Louis Massiah is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center (SVC) in Philadelphia. This media arts center provides educational workshops and equipment access to community groups and emerging independent media makers. SVC develops community media production methodologies that assist first-time filmmakers using time-based visual media as a creative tool for authoring their own stories. Currently, he is leading the Precious Places Community History Project, a documentary video project composed of 79 short documentaries produced collaboratively with neighborhood organizations in Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey. He also is project director of the Muslim V

PERHAPS THE MOST brilliant and influential African American intellectual of the 20th century, William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) DuBois was born on February 23, , in Great Barrington, Mass. He was the son of Alfred DuBois, a Haitian-born barber and itinerant laborer, and of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a descendant of a freed Dutch slave who had fought briefly in the American Revolution. DuBois attended a racially integrated public high school and graduated with a classical college preparatory education. With scholarship funds provided by Great Barrington citizens, he then enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn, a southern college founded after the Civil War to educate freed slaves. While at Fisk, DuBois had his first extended encounters with African American culture and southern American racism.1

After graduating from Fisk in , DuBois enrolled as a junior at Harvard, received a BA cum laude in , an MA in , and a PhD in He was deeply influenced by historian Albert Bushnell Hart and the philosopher-psychologist William James. His PhD dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, –, was published in as the inaugural volume of the Harvard Historical Studies series. From to , DuBois traveled in Germany and completed a monograph on the history of southern US agriculture. In , the University of Pennsylvania invited him to conduct a detailed sociological study of African Americans in Philadelphia, which was published in as The Philadelphia Negro.2 This study combined advocacy and careful empirical scholarship, emphasizing historical and circumstantial rather than hereditary explanations for the conditions of the African American community.

In , DuBois moved to Atlanta University in Georgia, where he taught history, sociology, and economics and became corresponding secretary and editor of the annual Atlanta University conferences for the “Study of the Negro Problems.” The proceedings of the 11th such conference, held