W.E.B Dubois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University and noted Black Leader
Author: Arthur Edgar E. Smith
Category: News and Society
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A noted scholar, lecturer, editor, public intellectual, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, poet, and African American civil rights activist, William Edward Burghardt Dubois (W.E.B.Du Bois) was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
He was one of the most influential black leaders of the first half of the 20th Century. A founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP -- the largest and oldest civil rights organization in America), founded in 1909, he served as its director of research and editor of its magazine,Crisis, until 1934.
Dubois won also the distinction of being the first African American to have received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1896, with his doctoral thesis there on the suppression of the African slave trade with the U.S.A. still remaining a landmark, being the first volume in the Harvard Historical Series.
Between 1897 and 1914 Dubois conducted numerous studies of black society in America, publishing 16 research papers. He began his investigations in the belief that social science could provide answers to race problems. Gradually he concluded that in a climate of virulent racism, social change could only be accomplished through agitation and protest.
Throughout his life Du Bois fought discrimination and racism making significant contributions to debates about race, politics, and history in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, primarily through his writing and impassioned speaking on race relations. Du Bois published several scholarly works on race and African American history. He was the most multifaceted, prolific, and influential writer that black America has ever produced, possessing one of the widest ranging intellects of any of his American contemporaries. Through his extensive publications in the sociology and history of African Americans and in tribute to his pioneering editing of numerous journals of opinion devoted and committed to racial issues, Du Bois has become justifiably credited with being the founder of black studies in American academic spheres. His work along with his example inspired a twentieth century African American intelligentsia proud of its heritage and committed to a social as well as an intellectual mission.
At the turn of the century Dubois who had been a supporter of black capitalism, moved steadily to the political left. By 1905 he had become fully drawn to socialist ideas. He remained sympathetic to Marxism throughout his life. Dubois acted in support of integration and equal rights for everyone regardless of race, but his thinking often exhibited a degree of black separatist-nationalist tendencies.
In 1961 Dubois becoming completely disillusioned with the United States, moved to Ghana, joined the Communist Party, and a year later renounced his American Citizenship, and became a naturalized citizen of Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95. By the time he died, August 27, 1963, on the eve of the March On Washington, he had written 17 books, edited four journals and played a key role in reshaping black-white relations in America.
Dubois died in Accra, Ghana, shortly after becoming a Ghanaian citizen. David Levering Lewis, a biographer, wrote, "In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism -- scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity."
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Keywords: DuBois, hARVARD, SCHOLAR, sociologist, racism, theses, slavery, historical, writer, orator, intellectual prowess
View Count: 98
Date Submitted: 8/21/2008
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