About W. E. B. Du Bois
About W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the leading thinkers of his age. As a public intellectual, activist, organizer, historian, poet, sociologist, and philosopher, he devoted his prodigious talent to the struggle for equality and social justice both in the US and internationally. His incredible legacy is embodied at UMass by the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, which are housed in the Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center. This vast collection of correspondence, photographs, manuscripts, speeches, and other treasures has been an invaluable resource for Du Bois scholars since the papers were opened to the public in 1980.
Many of the scholars who have come to UMass to conduct research on Du Bois have done so through the W. E. B. Du Bois Center’s fellowship program. The Du Bois Center was established in 2009 to live up to former chancellor Randolph Bromery’s vision of a community space that would introduce Du Bois to new audiences and support the interdisciplinary study of his work. The Center runs year-round programs, including the weekly Breakfasts with Du Bois, public talks, seminars and symposia. It produces innovative learning resources for all ages and provides a space on campus specifically for those students who want to embody the commitment of W. E. B. Du Bois to racial and social justice.
Du Bois dedicated his 95-year life to the cause of fighting racism, inequality, oppression, imperialism, militarism, greed and corruption. He did so through the creation and dissemination of knowledge, as well as by constantly organizing networks of like-minded activists and thinkers across the globe. Throughout his life, Du Bois displayed a great capacity to develop his thought and made sure that his intellectual approach matched the exigencies of the present moment. This is one of many traits of Du Bois’s work that ensures its continued relevance to our own time.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His early years as a scholar took him first to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, then to Harvard where he became the first Black man to earn a PhD, despite the fact that his qualifications for Fisk were disregarded and his time in Cambridge blighted by race-based exclusion and prejudice. Du Bois sought relief from this environment by studying abroad at the University of Berlin, where he was heavily influenced by the leading thinkers of the new science of sociology.
When Du Bois returned to the US he took a job at Wilberforce University in Ohio. He did not stay long but did meet Nina Gomer, whom he married in 1896. The couple moved to Philadelphia that Fall where Du Bois completed the fieldwork and research on what would become his first major book, The Philadelphia Negro. He took a job teaching economics and history at Atlanta University around the same time that Nina gave birth to the couple’s first child, Burghardt.
Du Bois’s time in Atlanta had a profound influence on his life and career. He and Nina witnessed and suffered the murderous racial apartheid of the South firsthand. Burghardt contracted diphtheria and died in 1899, in large part because he was denied the best treatment on the grounds of race. In the same year, Du Bois almost witnessed the aftermath of a lynching and he resolved to turn away from the cloistered life of a scholar to one of public action and leadership. In the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Du Bois put this resolution into practice and shook the world.
In 1900 he exhibited groundbreaking data visualizations at the Paris Exposition. In 1903 he released his singular document of the Black experience, The Souls of Black Folk. He helped found movements for social change, the Niagara Movement in 1905 and later the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois became the only Black board member of the NAACP at its inception and also the editor of The Crisis magazine. He would serve as editor of the publication for over a quarter of his life, writing countless editorials, supporting other writers lime Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes, and bringing his subscribers crucial information about world events and conditions in the US.
Du Bois was a citizen of the world and concerned himself with international affairs as much as he did with the domestic. He travelled to France at the end of the First World War to document the experiences of Black soldiers in the American army. After the War, he helped organize several Pan-African Congresses and visited Russia, where the aftermath of the Revolution made a deep impression on him. Throughout his life, Du Bois remained a tireless advocate for the rights of peoples around the world to throw off the oppression of their colonizers and govern their own affairs in their own best interests.
After the Second World War, Du Bois became increasingly involved with the campaign for peace and concerned with the ways the US was using the climate of fear around the Cold War to justify the infringement of liberties at home and abroad. Shortly after the death of Nina in 1950, and just before his marriage to Shirley Graham in 1951, Du Bois was indicted and put on trial by the US Justice Department on charges so ludicrous that he was swiftly acquitted. Nevertheless, the experience was upsetting and embittering for the by now 83-year-old Du Bois and it played a large part in his decision to emigrate to Ghana where he would die at the age of 95 on August 27, 1963.
The UMass Amherst Library was named for W. E. B. Du Bois in 1994. This decision and our continued celebration of Du Bois, reflects our pride in our role as custodians of Du Bois’s intellectual legacy as well as our continued commitment to the values of social justice, equality, peace and freedom to which he dedicated his brilliant life.