W.E.B. Du Bois,
1868-1963
W.E.B (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois
was born on February 23, 1863 in Great
Barrington, Massachusetts.
Du Bois knew little of his
father. Alfred Du Bois
married Mary Burghardt in
1867. Soon after Du Bois
was born, his father left,
never to return. Du Bois
described him as "a
dreamer-- romantic,
indolent, kind, unreliable, he
had in him the making of a
poet, an adventurer, or a
beloved vagabond,
according to the life that
closed round him; and that
life gave him all too little."
Du Bois at the age of
four, dressed to conform
to the Victorian era's
idea of how well-behaved
little boys should appear.
Du Bois at
age nineteen.
Jubilee Hall at Fisk University is the oldest permanent building for
the higher education of African Americans in the United States
Du Bois with Fisk University
faculty and students in front of
Jubilee Hall, c. 1887.
Fisk University Class of 1888.
Du Bois at
Harvard, 1890,
or University
of Berlin,
1892.
Du Bois was the first African American to receive
a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1896.
Du Bois at the
Paris International
Exposition in 1900
where he won a
gold medal for his
exhibit on the
achievement of
black Americans.
Du Bois met Nina Gomer while at
Wilberforce and they were married in 1896.
Their first child, Burghardt, died as an infant
in Atlanta from a typhoid epidemic.
Du Bois at Atlanta University, 1909.
Scene of Lynching at
Clanton, Alabama,
Aug. 1891
The lynching of
Lige Daniels.
August 3, 1920,
Center, Texas.
Du Bois and other
black leaders of
similar opinions
organized what
became known as
the Niagara
Movement. It was
the first organization
to seek full political
and economic rights
for Afro-Americans
at a national level.
By 1910, the
organization led to
the founding of the
NAACP.
Du Bois (2nd row, 2nd from right) in a NAACP
sponsored demonstration against lynching
and mob violence against blacks.
Du Bois receiving the
NAACP's Spingarn Medal,
Atlanta University, 1920.
Du Bois and members of The Crisis
staff in their New York office.
Resolutions established by 15 countries at the first Pan-African
Congress, Paris, February 1919.
Speakers at the Pan-African Congress held in
Brussels, Belgium, in 1921. Du Bois is 2nd from right.
Du Bois carried his
message to the political
arena when he ran for the
U.S. Senate in 1951 on the
American Labor Party's
ticket.
Du Bois, with Shirley Graham Du Bois (right) and
other indicted members of the Peace Information
Center, in Washington prior to their court hearing.
Throughout the 1950s, Du Bois' concerns became
increasingly international, and he traveled and
lectured on a number of issues including
disarmament and the future of Africa.
Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah offers a toast
on Du Bois' 95th birthday, c. February, 1963.
One thing alone I charge you. As
you live, believe in Life! Always
human beings will live and progress
to greater, broader and fuller life.
The only possible death is to lose
belief in this truth simply because the
great end comes slowly, because time
is long.
-- W.E.B. Du Bois in his last
statement to the world, 1963
“How does it feel to be a
problem?”
W.E.B. Du Bois,
1868-1963
W.E.B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro People (1897)
Main Points:
1. Being a problem [i.e. being an black person in 19th
c. America] is a disturbing experience, compelling
one to always take other people’s estimation of them
in consideration and creating a doubleconsciousness.
[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,
and gifted with second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but
only lets him see himself through the revelation of
the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
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. (p. 123)
2. The African American feels his duality of being both African
and American.
One ever feels his two-ness, — 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. The history of the American Negro is the history of
this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to
merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging
he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish
to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the
world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a
flood of white Americanism, for he believes — foolishly, perhaps,
but fervently — that Negro blood has yet a message for the
world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both
a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by
his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.
(p. 123)
3. The end of the Negro’s striving is “to be a co-worker in the
kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to
husband and use his best powers. (p. 123)
3. Prejudice and discrimination keep the freedman oppressed.
The freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
Whatever of lesser good may have come in these years of
change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the
Negro people…. (p. 88)
4. Americans, including white Americans, should appreciate
the Negro race.
Work, culture, and liberty,--all these we need, not singly, but
together; for to-day these ideals among the Negro people are
gradually coalescing, and finding a higher meaning in the
unifying ideal of race,--the ideal of fostering the traits and
talents of the Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity
with, the greater ideals of the American republic, in order
that some day, on American soil, two world races may give
each to each those characteristics which both so sadly lack.
(p. 88)
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Niagara Movement, (1905)
1. We should meet, despite the existence of other
organizations for Negroes.
2. We must complain about common wrongs toward
blacks.
We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint,
ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of
dishonesty and wrong—this is the ancient,
unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it.
(p. 100)
3. In not a single instance has the justice of our
demands been denied, but then come the
excuses.
They still press on, they still nurse the
dogged hope, — not a hope of
nauseating patronage, not a hope of
reception into charmed social circles of
stock-jobbers, pork-packers, and earlhunters, but the hope of a higher
synthesis of civilization and humanity, a
true progress, with which the chorus
"Peace, good will to men,“
"May make one music as before,
But vaster."
Pages 126-127.
One ever feels his two-ness, — 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. The
history of the American Negro is the history of this
strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood,
to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In
this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be
lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for
America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he
does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of
white Americanism, for he believes — foolishly, perhaps,
but fervently — that Negro blood has yet a message for
the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a
man to be both a Negro and an American without being
cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the
opportunity of self-development. p. 125.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain
suddenness that I was different from the others;
or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but
shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to
creep through; I held all beyond it in common
contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue
sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was
bluest when I could beat my mates at
examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or
even beat their stringy heads. p. 124.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a
land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He
felt the weight of his ignorance, — not simply of
letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities;
the accumulated sloth and shirking and
awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled
his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty
and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which
two centuries of systematic legal defilement of
Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant
not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but
also the hereditary weight of a mass of filth from
white whoremongers and adulterers, threatening
almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
A people thus handicapped ought not to be
asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to
give all its time and thought to its own social
problems. p. 126.