biography
| name: |
Du Bois, W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)
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pronunciation:
[doo boyz]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1868–1963)
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| biography:
| Historian, sociologist, political activist, and writer, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA. Supported by the local school headmaster and the Congregational Church in Great Barrington, he was educated at Fisk University (1885–8), where he was shocked by the racial segregation he experienced in the South. He went on to take a PhD at Harvard (1895), with two years at the University of Berlin (1892–4). Under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, he studied black life in the Philadelphia ghetto, writing The Philadelphia Negro (1899). A professor of economics, history, and sociology at Atlanta University (1898–1910), he sponsored an annual conference for the Study of the Negro Problem and wrote essays compiled in The Soul of Black Folk (1903), calling for an activist African-American middle class to change racial politics. Founding the Niagara Movement (1905) to fight segregation, he also organized its official magazine, Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (1907–10). He resigned from teaching (1910) to serve as director of publications and research for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York, editing Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (1910–34), a magazine that was credited with encouraging many early civil-rights activists. However, when he argued that African-Americans should voluntarily segregate themselves to organize economically during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he alienated the NAACP leadership, so he resigned in 1934. He returned to Atlanta University to chair the sociology department (1934–44), where he founded a scholarly journal, Phylon: A Review of Race and Culture (1940–4), and completed his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn (1940). Forced to retire at age 76, he returned to the NAACP, serving as director of special research (1944–8), leaving when his Marxist politics became a liability. Chairman of the Peace Information Centre, an antinuclear weapons group, he was indicted as a foreign agent (1951), and although acquitted his passport was revoked (1952–8). He later toured Europe, China, and the Soviet Union, where he received the Lenin Peace Prize (1959). After joining the Communist Party (1961), he moved to Accra, Ghana, becoming a naturalized citizen just before he died. |
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