Monday Open Thread: Prominent Black Educators

William Edward Burghardt “W.E.B” Du Bois was born and raised in Massachusetts, and graduated in 1888 from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. During the summer, he taught in a rural school and later wrote about his experiences in his book THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK.

In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. He then studied in Germany but ran out of funds before he could earn a post-doctoral degree. With the publication of THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO: A SOCIAL STUDY in 1899, the first case study of a black community in the United States, as well as papers on black farmers, businessmen, and black life in Southern communities, Du Bois established himself as the first great scholar of black life in America.

Du Bois taught sociology at Atlanta University between 1898 and 1910. He had hoped that social science could help eliminate segregation, but he eventually came to the conclusion that the only effective strategy against racism was agitation. He challenged the dominant ideology of black accommodation as preached and practiced by Booker T. Washington, then the most influential black man in America. Washington urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain to win the respect of whites.

In 1901, Du Bois wrote a review critical of Washington’s book 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. One of the major contrasts between the two leaders was their approach to education: Washington felt that African American schools should limit themselves to industrial education topics such as agricultural and mechanical skills. However, Du Bois felt that black schools should also offer a liberal arts curriculum (including the classics, arts, and humanities), because liberal arts were required to develop a leadership elite.

In 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the short-lived Niagara Movement, intended to be an organization advocating civil rights for blacks. Although the Niagara Movement faltered, it was the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent role in the organization’s creation and became its director of research and the editor of its magazine, THE CRISIS.

For many young African Americans in the period from 1910 through the 1930s, Du Bois was the voice of the black community. He attacked Woodrow Wilson when the president allowed his cabinet members to segregate the federal government. The Crisis continued to wage a campaign against lynching.

In 1935, he published his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois documented how black people were central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and also showed how they made alliances with white politicians. The book also demonstrated the ways in which black emancipation promoted a radical restructuring of United States society, as well as how and why the country failed to support for civil rights for blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction.

While visiting Ghana in 1960, Du Bois spoke with its president about the creation of a new encyclopedia of the African diaspora, the Encyclopedia Africana. In October 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to take up residence and commence work on the encyclopedia. In early 1963, the United States refused to renew his passport, so he made the symbolic gesture of becoming a citizen of Ghana. His health declined during the two years he was in Ghana, and he died on August 27, 1963. 

A day after his death, at the March on Washington, speaker Roy Wilkins asked the hundreds of thousands of marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, embodying many of the reforms Du Bois had campaigned for his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.