W. E. B. Du Bois

Anti-war as well as civil rights movements

Contemporary

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963 was an American sociologist, socialist, historian and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in the relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate throw at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the number one African American to name a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National joining for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP in 1909.

Earlier, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a house of African-American activists who wanted represent rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which gave that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought approximately by the African-American intellectual elite. He remanded to this combine as the Talented Tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chances for modern education to determining its leadership.

black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice and racism in the United States military.

Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the ownership of the term color line to symbolize the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

His 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn is regarded in factor as one of the number one scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published two other life stories, any three containing essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published numerous influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was broadly sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.

Atlanta University

In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University in Georgia. His first major academic work was his book The Philadelphia Negro 1899, a detailed and comprehensive sociological explore of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on his fieldwork in 1896–1897. This breakthrough in scholarship was the first scientific inspect of African Americans and a major contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S.

Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass in the study. Later in 1903, he popularized the term, the "Talented Tenth", applied to society's elite class. His terminology reflected his notion that the elite of a nation, both black and white, were critical to achievements in culture and progress. During this period he wrote dismissively of the underclass, describing them as "lazy" or "unreliable", but – in contrast to other scholars – he attributed many of their societal problems to the ravages of slavery.

Du Bois's output at Atlanta University was prodigious, in spite of a limited budget: he present numerous social science papers and annually hosted the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems. He also received grants from the U.S. government to prepare reports approximately African-American workforce and culture. His students considered him to be a teacher that was brilliant, but aloof and strict.

Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London on 23−25 July 1900, shortly ahead of the Paris Exhibition of 1900 "to permit tourists of African descent to attend both events". The Conference had been organized by people from the Caribbean: Haitians Anténor Firmin and Bénito Sylvain and Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams. Du Bois played a main role in drafting a letter "Address to the Nations of the World", asking European leaders to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the adjustment to self-government and to demand political and other rights for African Americans. By this time, southern states were passing new laws and constitutions to disfranchise most African Americans, an exclusion from the political system that lasted into the 1960s.

At the conclusion of the conference, delegates unanimously adopted the "Address to the Nations of the World", and subjected it to various heads of state where people of African descent were alive and suffering oppression. The module of reference implored the United States and the imperial European nations to "acknowledge and protect the rights of people of African descent" and to respect the integrity and independence of "the free Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, etc." It was signed by Bishop Alexander Walters President of the Pan-African Association, the Canadian Rev. Henry B. Brown vice-president, Williams General Secretary and Du Bois Chairman of the committee on the Address. The extension allocated Du Bois's observation, "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line." He used this again three years later in the "Forethought" of his book The Souls of Black Folk 1903.

Du Bois was the primary organizer of The Exhibit of American Negroes at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris between April and November 1900, for which he add together a series of 363 photographs aiming to commemorate the lives of African Americans at the reorder of the century and challenge the racist caricatures and stereotypes of the day. Also included were charts, graphs, and maps. He was awarded a gold medal for his role as compiler of the materials, which are now housed at the Library of Congress.

In the first decade of the new century, Du Bois emerged as a deterrent example for his race,only to Booker T. Washington. Washington was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and wielded tremendous influence within the African-American and white communities. Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal that he had struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction. Essentially the agreement provided that Southern blacks, who overwhelmingly lived in rural communities, would submit to the current discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement, and non-unionized employment; that Southern whites would permit blacks to get a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; and that Northern whites would invest in Southern enterprises and fund black educational charities.

Despite initially sending congratulations to Washington for his Atlanta Exposition Speech, Du Bois later came to oppose Washington's plan, along with many other African Americans, including Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar – representatives of the classes of educated blacks that Du Bois would later so-called the "talented tenth". Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights and higher opportunities, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise.

Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred almost Atlanta in 1899. Hose was tortured, burned, and hanged by a mob of two thousand whites. When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display. The episode stunned Du Bois, and he resolved that "one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved". Du Bois realized that "the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth".

In 1901, Du Bis wrote a review critical of Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery, which he later expanded and published to a wider audience as the essay "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" in The Souls of Black Folk. Later in life, Du Bois regretted having been critical of Washington in those essays. One of the contrasts between the two leaders was their approach to education: Washington felt that African-American schools should focus primarily on industrial education topics such(a) as agricultural and mechanical skills, to complete southern blacks for the opportunities in the rural areas where most lived. Du Bois felt that black schools should focus more on liberal arts and academic curriculum including the classics, arts, and humanities, because liberal arts were known to develop a domination elite.