W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (23 February 1868 – 27 August 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, novelist, editor, and civil rights activist who was the most important African American intellectual of the twentieth century and one of the most influential thinkers in American history. His The Souls of Black Folk (1903) introduced the concept of “double consciousness” — “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” — that became the defining framework for understanding the African American experience. He was the first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard, a co-founder of the NAACP, the editor of The Crisis for twenty-four years, and a scholar whose range encompassed sociology, history, political theory, fiction, and autobiography.

Early Life and Education

Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small town where the Black population was tiny and where he experienced relatively little overt racism as a child. He was a brilliant student, encouraged by his white teachers, and attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee — his first sustained encounter with the South, with segregation, and with the mass of Black Americans whose lives were shaped by the legacy of slavery. Fisk transformed him.

He then attended Harvard, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree and a PhD in history. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896), was the first volume published in the Harvard Historical Studies series. He studied in Berlin for two years, absorbing the methods of German social science, and returned to America determined to apply rigorous empirical scholarship to the “Negro problem.”

The Philadelphia Negro (1899)

Du Bois’s sociological study of the Black community in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward was one of the first works of empirical urban sociology in America. He conducted door-to-door surveys of over 5,000 people, compiled statistical data on employment, housing, crime, and family structure, and produced a work of social science that was decades ahead of its time. The study was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, but Du Bois was never offered a faculty position there.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Du Bois’s masterpiece is a collection of fourteen essays that combine history, sociology, autobiography, music criticism, and fiction into a form that was entirely new. The book opens with its most famous assertion: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” It introduces double consciousness, critiques the accommodationist strategy of Booker T. Washington, mourns the death of Du Bois’s infant son, analyses the Black church, and uses the “sorrow songs” (spirituals) as a framework for understanding African American culture.

The book is written in a prose style that is simultaneously scholarly and lyrical — influenced by the King James Bible, by the German Romantics, and by the cadences of Black preaching. It is one of the rare works of social criticism that is also a literary masterpiece.

The Debate with Booker T. Washington

The central political argument of Du Bois’s early career was his opposition to Booker T. Washington, the most powerful Black leader in America, whose “Atlanta Compromise” (1895) accepted segregation in exchange for economic opportunity and vocational education. Du Bois argued that Washington’s strategy surrendered Black political rights, encouraged white paternalism, and consigned Black Americans to permanent second-class citizenship. He advocated instead for the “Talented Tenth” — the education of a Black intellectual elite who would lead the race toward full equality.

This debate — accommodation versus agitation, vocational training versus liberal education, economic pragmatism versus political rights — has never been fully resolved and continues to resonate in American racial politics.

The NAACP and The Crisis

In 1909, Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and became the editor of its magazine, The Crisis, which he ran from 1910 to 1934. Under his editorship, The Crisis became the most important African American publication in the country — a vehicle for news, political commentary, literature, and art that reached a circulation of over 100,000 and served as a platform for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Du Bois’s revisionist history of the Reconstruction era challenged the dominant (and racist) historical narrative that portrayed Reconstruction as a period of corruption and Black incompetence. Du Bois argued that Reconstruction was a revolutionary experiment in interracial democracy that was destroyed by white supremacist violence and Northern indifference, and that the freedpeople’s achievements — in building schools, establishing families, and exercising political power — were extraordinary. The book was largely ignored by white historians for decades but is now recognised as one of the most important works of American historical scholarship.

Later Life and Radicalisation

Du Bois moved steadily leftward throughout his long life. He became increasingly sympathetic to socialism and communism, visited the Soviet Union and China, and was indicted in 1951 under the McCarran Act as an “unregistered agent of a foreign power” (the charges were dismissed). In 1961, at age ninety-three, he joined the Communist Party of the United States. He accepted an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah to move to Ghana, where he began work on an Encyclopaedia Africana. He died in Accra on 27 August 1963 — the eve of the March on Washington at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream.”

Critical Standing

Du Bois is now universally recognised as the most important African American intellectual of the twentieth century. The Souls of Black Folk is in the permanent canon of American literature. Black Reconstruction transformed American historiography. His concept of double consciousness has influenced thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Cornel West to Ta-Nehisi Coates. His ninety-five years of continuous intellectual production — spanning sociology, history, fiction, journalism, autobiography, and political activism — constitute one of the most remarkable careers in American letters.

Collecting Du Bois

The Souls of Black Folk (1903, A.C. McClurg) in first edition is one of the most important and desirable African American first editions, with copies bringing $5,000–$20,000 depending on condition. Black Reconstruction (1935, Harcourt) is scarce in dust jacket. The Crisis magazines from Du Bois’s editorship are collectible, particularly early issues and those featuring Harlem Renaissance writers. Du Bois’s papers are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.