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Du Bois, W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)
8 articles on Du Bois, W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)
Du Bois, W. E. B.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 12112 Includes: In the Beginning. | With the NAACP. | The Advent of the New Negro. | Moving Left in the Depression and Out. | Life in Atlanta and Beyond. | Back to New York in War and Peace. | Back to Africa. | A Summing Up. | Darkwater. | Du Bois's Early Novels. | The Black Flame Trilogy. | Bibliography | Bibliography | Bibliography[This article contains three subentries, on Du Bois's life, on his historical writing, and on his literary writing.]William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (b. 23 February 1868; d. 27 August 1963) was the first black public intellectual of the twentieth century and, after Frederick Douglass, the most influential ever. W. E. B. Du Bois was, in the language of the early years of the twentieth century, a “mulatto.” The son of Alfred and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, he was descended from West African, Dutch, Anglo, and probably French stock. A handsome man in his day, throughout his adult life he affected the dress of a Victorian gentleman, generally charming women and annoying men. Trained as a historian, Du Bois transformed sociology by literally inventing the continuous social survey and the subfields of social stratification and race relations, as well as the ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1659 Includes: Bibliography1868–1963
African American writer, social scientist, critic, and public intellectual; cofounder of the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Pan-African Congress; and editor of The Crisis. Along with Frederick Douglass and Booker Taliaferro Washington, historians consider W. E. B. Du Bois one of the most influential African Americans before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Born only six years after emancipation, he was active well into his nineties. Throughout his long life Du Bois remained black America's leading public intellectual, despite near-constant criticism for his often contradictory social and political opinions—he was accused, at various times, of elitism, Communism, and black separatism.Born in the small western Massachusetts town of ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 5046 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(23 Feb. 1868–27 Aug. 1963), scholar, writer, editor, and civil rights pioneer, was born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, a barber and itinerant laborer. In later life Du Bois made a close study of his family origins, weaving them rhetorically and conceptually—if not always accurately—into almost everything he wrote. Born in Haiti and descended from mixed race Bahamian slaves, Alfred Du Bois enlisted during the Civil War as a private in a New York regiment of the Union army but appears to have deserted shortly afterward. He also deserted the family less than two years after his son's birth, leaving him to be reared by his mother and the extended Burghardt kin. Long resident in New England, the Burghardts descended from a freedman of Dutch slave origin who had fought briefly in ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 8284 Includes: The Life | The Souls of Black Folk | John Brown and The Negro | The Later Years | Selected Works | Further ReadingHalf-way between Maine and Florida, in the heart of the Alleghenies,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in John Brown (1909), the year before he helped found the NAACP, “a mighty gateway lifts its head and discloses a scene which, a century and a quarter ago, Thomas Jefferson said was ‘worthy a voyage across the Atlantic.’ ” Whereupon he continues citing Jefferson's words from Notes on the State of Virginia (1785): "You stand on a very high point of land; on your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain a hundred miles to find a vent; on your left approaches the Potomac, in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder, and pass off to the sea." The place is Harpers Ferry, Virginia (later West Virginia), where in ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to American Military History
Word Count: 331(1868–1963), civil rights leader and author. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, W. E. B. Du Bois earned undergraduate degrees at Fisk University (1885) and Harvard (1890), and a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1895. Du Bois taught history and economics at Atlanta University in 1897–1910 and 1934–44. From 1910 to 1934, he served as founding editor of the Crisis, the official organ of the new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).When his most influential book, The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903, Du Bois became the premier architect of the civil rights movement in the United States and among the first thinkers to grasp the international implications of the struggle for racial justice. The problem of the twentieth century, he wrote then, was the problem of the “color-line.” ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1054(1868–1963), African-American scholar, polemicist, activist, and intellectual. Born and reared in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in 1888. Enrolling as a junior at Harvard, he remained to earn a Ph.D. in history in 1895, with two years of study (1892–1894) at the University of Berlin. In 1896, Harvard published his dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade. That same year, during a brief teaching stint at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he married a student, Nina Gomer; they had two children. A fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (1896–1897) resulted in a pathbreaking sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). From 1897 to 1910, he taught sociology at Atlanta University.At this time, most southern blacks could not vote and ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1933(1868–1963), essayist, novelist, journalist, critic, and perhaps the preeminent African American scholar-intellectual. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. He was born into a small community of blacks who had settled in the region since at least the Revolutionary War, in which an ancestor had fought. His mother, Mary Sylvina Burghardt, married a restless young visitor to the region, Alfred Du Bois, who disappeared soon after the birth of his son. Du Bois grew up a thorough New Englander, as he recalled, a member of the Congregational Church and a star student in the local schools, where he was encouraged to excel.In 1885he left Great Barrington for Nashville, Tennessee, to enter Fisk University. The racism of the South appalled him: “No one but a Negro going ...
Read full articleW. E. B. Du Bois: An Interpretation
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 14630 Includes: On Black Strivings | Twilight Civilization in Our TimeW. E. B. Du Bois is the towering black scholar of the twentieth century. The scope of his interests, the depth of his insights, and the sheer majesty of his prolific writings bespeak a level of genius unequaled among modern black intellectuals. Yet, like all of us, Du Bois was a child of his age. He was shaped by the prevailing presuppositions and prejudices of modern Euro-American civilization. And despite his lifelong struggle—marked by great courage and sacrifice—against white supremacy and for the advancement of Africans around the world, he was, in style and substance, a proud black man of letters primarily influenced by 19th-century Euro-American traditions.For those of us interested in the relation of white supremacy to modernity (African slavery in the New World and European imperial domination of most of ...
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