W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was considered the most influential African American thinker of the first half of the 20th century. Born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he was largely educated in Cambridge, where, because Blacks were not welcome in Harvard dormitories at that time, he found a room on Flagg Street in a house owned by Mary Taylor, a widow of Jamaican Maroon descent. He matriculated at Harvard as a junior after receiving a B.A. degree in 1888 from Fisk University in Nashville, graduated with honors in 1890, spent that summer lecturing with his classmate Clement Morgan, and had studied with him at Maria Baldwin's house on Prospect Street. He received a master's degree the next year, and in 1895, after two years at the University of Berlin, became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. Du Bois gained national attention for his role in the Black Protest movement. In 1903, while teaching at Atlanta University, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk, a treatise on race relations that criticized the conservative policies of Booker T. Washington, the leading spokesperson for African Americans. Opposition to Washington coalesced in the Niagara Movement, which Du Bois organized in 1905 with a group that included Clement Morgan and Cantabrigian Emery T. Morris, and he served as the organization's general secretary until its demise in 1909. In 1909, Du Bois cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an interracial organization dedicated to the same aims as the Niagara Movement. The only African American on its executive board, he served as editor of its magazine, The Crisis. He wrote countless books and articles on the African American condition and frequently lectured around the world. In 1961, he moved to Accra, Ghana, at the invitation of its president, Kwame Nkruma, and he died there on August 27, 1963, at the age of ninety-five, receiving a state funeral.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States