As we wrap up our celebration of National Library Week, our salute to African American writers will continue through next week.
W.E.B.DuBois was an American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited its magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934. This, all in addition to “The Souls of Black Folk.”
Young Mr. Dubois graduated from Nashville HBCU, Fisk University, in 1888. He was the first Black student to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895.
His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of Black Americans. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of Black people in America, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914 at Atlanta University in Georgia, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study(1899), the first case study of a Black community in the United States.
Although Du Bois 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, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential Black leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged Black Americans to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of white citizens. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing the Black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many Black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the Black community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.