W.E.B. Du Bois: The Man Within

W. E. B. Du Bois was born on Church Street on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington at the south-western edge of Massachusetts, to Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, whose February 5, 1867 wedding had been announced in the Berkshire Courier. A man that would be greatly admired in his later years by many of his peers for his big steps he took for the African American civil rights. After graduating from Great Barrington High School he went to the University of Berlin finding out that he had a great passion in African American history he went to the University of Harvard to broaden he knowledge on the history of African Americans.

In 1895 William Dubois became the first African American to be given a PhD from the University of Harvard. After his PhD he started teaching economics and history at the University Of Atlanta and in the early 1900’s he published his first ground breaking book The Souls of Black Folks. Which the book contained attacks on Booker T Washington. In the book, Booker T Washington was an Uncle Tom selling his race short by trying to tell them that they aren’t going to be important figures in life, so he told people that they should learn a trade to make themselves some what successful in life. To Dubois he thought this was wrong and instead Washington should be telling them that they should be trying to make something better with there race. Later Dubois started to work for The Crisis, a newspaper that he became the editor of in October, 1911. He wrote articles about the Jim Crow laws during that time and in one article he stated “every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women suffrage.” Dubois remained the editor of the crisis until 1934 when he became the chairman of the Sociology Department of the University of Atlanta.

Dubois was active in the NAACP and also was their representative at the San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations. Throughout his life wrote many books such as The Philadelphia Negro, John Brown, Dusk of Dawn, and Colour and Democracy. Dubois later joined the communist party in 1961 and at the age of 91 moved to Ghana where he became a naturalized citizen where in later years dying in August 27 in 1967. When he died he was honored by a state funeral and buried