W. E. B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois married Nina Gomer on May 12, 1896. The couple was blessed with two children. Nina died in 1950.

He married Shirley Graham, an author, playwright, composer and activist, in 1951. Shirley had a son from a previous relationship, David. Some historians allege that Du Bois also had several extramarital relationships.

W.E.B. Du Bois moved to Ghana in his later years, and died on August 27, 1963, at the age of 95, and still active in his work.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to Alfred and Mary Silvina Du Bois. He was of mixed race, and identified himself as a “mulatto”. His father left the family when William was just two years old, and his mother moved in with her parents.

The community he grew up in was a relatively tolerant one. He attended a local integrated public school where he became friends with white students. He was a bright young boy and his talents were duly recognized by his white teachers. Still, as a person of mixed race, he was subjected to some racism.

He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1885 to attend Fisk University from where he earned his bachelor’s degree. It was here that he became aware of the rampant racism that blacks faced and was deeply disturbed by the incidents of bigotry, lynching and suppression of black rights.

He attended Harvard College from 1888 to 1890 and earned a second bachelor's degree, cum laude, in history. As he hailed from a modest background, he had to pay for his education by working in summer jobs and borrowing funds from friends.

He excelled in studies and received a fellowship from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen to attend the University of Berlin for graduate work in 1892. He travelled extensively while studying at Berlin, and studied with some of the country’s most prominent social scientists, including Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitschke.

W.E.B. Du Bois accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio where he became acquainted with Alexander Crummell, who believed that ideas and morals are necessary tools to effect social change.

From Wilberforce he moved to the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in 1896 and performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods.

He became a professor of history and economics at the Atlanta University in Georgia in 1897. There he published the first case study of an African-American community, ‘The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study’ (1899), which was based on the field work he did in 1896–1897.

He proved to be a prolific writer and published several papers over the ensuing years. He also emerged as a prominent voice of the African-American community in early 20th century, next only to Booker T. Washington who was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The two men, however, had different ideologies regarding civil rights activism, and when Washington proposed the Atlanta Compromise, Du Bois and several others like Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar vehemently opposed him.

Du Bois was a prolific author and one of his best known works is the ‘The Souls of Black Folk’, considered to be a seminal work in the history of sociology. One of the early works in the field of sociology, it contains several essays on the basic rights of the blacks, including right to vote, the right to a good education, and to be treated with equality and justice.

He was the editor of ‘The Crisis’, the highly successful official magazine of the NAACP. Primarily a current-affairs journal, ‘The Crisis’ also included poems, reviews, and essays on culture and history. For as long as he was the editor, the journal published the work of many young African-American writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance.