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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was a scholar, a political activist, and the leading African American thinker of his generation. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois spent most of his long career in the United States, but he moved to newly independent Ghana in 1961, invited by President Kwame Nkrumah to become editor of the Encyclopedia Africana, a project Du Bois had first proposed in 1909. After the U.S. Department of State refused to renew his passport, Du Bois became a Ghanaian citizen in the last year of his life. He died on August 27, 1963, on the eve of the march on Washington.

Du Bois graduated from Fisk College in 1888 and earned a second BA from Harvard University in 1890. He spent the years 1892 to 1894 in doctoral studies at the University of Berlin, returning to the United States to receive his PhD from Harvard in 1895. He taught briefly at Wilberforce College and then at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910.

Du Bois’s achievements include a share in founding the Niagara movement in 1906, its successor the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, and the Pan-African Congress in 1919. He edited the NAACP magazine The Crisis until 1934, building its circulation up to 100,000. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896), and his sociological study The Philadelphia Negro (1899) are still considered landmarks of scholarship.

Du Bois’s best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is a collection of essays, ranging from personal memoir to sociological study. It combines a rich evocation of the life and culture of the African American South with a masterfully orchestrated polemic against the political ideas and leadership of Booker T.Washington. Du Bois argued, contra Washington, for three key strategic points: that African Americans should demand the right to vote, resist the imposition of social segregation, and insist on access to a high-quality liberal arts education for the community’s future leaders (those to whom he referred elsewhere as the “Talented Tenth”). His declaration that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” and his description of himself as “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” did much to define African American political consciousness.

Other notable books—among many—include Black Reconstruction in America (1934), which portrayed the Reconstruction era as a struggle by the freed slaves, rather than an imposition by the North on the South; Dusk of Dawn: An Autobiography of a Concept of Race (1940), which describes the development of his thinking about African American liberation; and Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), which articulated his Pan-Africanist vision.

After World War II (1939–1945), Du Bois grew increasingly disillusioned with the chance for change in America and saw the Soviet Union as the bulwark of anticolonial struggle. He was indicted as a foreign agent but acquitted in 1951, denied a passport from 1952 through 1958, awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, and joined the Communist Party in 1961, when he was 93 and living in Ghana.

Bibliography:

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: H. Holt, 1993–2000.
Marable, Manning. W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Schocken, 1990.