William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His mother, Mary Burghardt, was descended from a West Africa slave. His father, Alfred Du Bois, came from a long line of French Huguenots (Protestants). As W.E.B. Du Bois himself later put it, he was born "with a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but thank God! no Anglo-Saxon."
The town of Great Barrington had a small African American population and a rather informal color line. The only people explicitly oppressed on the basis of race were Irish immigrants. But, as Du Bois explains in our reading, there was also a deeper, more implicit, kind of racism. Du Bois came to see himself as part of a "problem": the "problem of the Negro." He understood that he was different from others in school and that he was "shut out from their world by a vast veil."
Du Bois's initial response was to excel at whatever he did, to make himself exhibit A in putting the lie to racial inferiority. While still in high school, Du Bois became a correspondent for the New York Globe, a black newspaper. He excelled academically and, following graduation, several local churches collected money to send him to college. In 1885, Du Bois enrolled at Fisk University, an all-black school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Following graduation from Fisk, Du Bois received a Harvard scholarship for a second bachelor's degree in philosophy. Studying with William James and George Santayana, Du Bois developed a Hegelian philosophy that made sense of the black experience. Du Bois went on to receive an M.A. at Harvard in 1892.
Following travel in Europe, Du Bois taught Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University, a black institution in Xenia, Ohio. At the same time, he completed his doctorate in sociology, becoming the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896), was published as the first in the Harvard Historical Studies Series.
In 1896, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, and together they had two children. That same year, Du Bois accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania. He was commissioned to produce the first systematic study of blacks, The Philadelphia Negro, which was published in 1899. Interviewing over five thousand people for this study, Du Bois came to the conclusion that hard work, persistence, and patience in seeking reforms were the keys to improving the lot of African Americans in Philadelphia.
Following the study's completion, Du Bois was called to Atlanta University, where he taught for the next thirteen years. In Atlanta, Du Bois's social and political philosophies changed radically. The political climate in the late 1800s grew increasingly antagonistic toward blacks as the remnants of Reconstruction disappeared and Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) legalized "separate but equal" segregation. Du Bois himself suffered numerous indignities as he traveled in the South. He was especially repelled by the lynching of a black farm laborer in 1899 and by the antiblack Atlanta riots of 1906.
It was in this period that Du Bois challenged Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute and African American leader. Washington advocated that his people accept a posture of submissiveness and modest aspiration, claiming, "It is at the bottom of life we must begin and not at the top." In his earlier days Du Bois might have agreed, but he was no longer willing to wait patiently at the bottom. Instead, Du Bois argued that blacks must assert themselves, particularly the "Talented Tenth" in the African American community, who would "be leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people."
At Atlanta University, Du Bois began to put his ideas into political action. He was the secretary of the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 and helped organize the First Universal Races Congress in 1911 (both in London). In 1905, he was a founder of the Niagara Movement, which led in 1910 to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During this period Du Bois made a number of sociological studies of blacks in the South. He also published his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folks: Essays and Sketches (1903).
With the founding of the NAACP in 1910, Du Bois left teaching to become editor of the organization's monthly organ, The Crisis. Du Bois's move from social scientist to political activist was now complete. For the next twenty-four years, Du Bois wrote, edited, organized, and labored tirelessly for racial equality.
In 1926, Du Bois accepted an invitation to the Soviet Union and returned full of praise for the new "Socialist Republic." He was now convinced that African Americans could find liberation in socialism. As his views moved further and further left, his relations with the NAACP were strained. Du Bois now regarded the NAACP's ideal of integration as not only unattainable but as even undesirable. When he publicly supported "nondiscriminatory segregation," he was forced to resign his position with the NAACP. He returned to teaching at Atlanta University, where he remained until retiring in 1943.
Du Bois spent a busy "retirement" in political activism. For four years, he returned to the NAACP as director of the department of special research. Among his many other activities in retirement, he was a consultant to the founding of the United Nations, co-chair of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, vice-chair of the Council of African Affairs, and chair of the Peace Information Center. At the age of eighty-seven, he even ran for senator of New York on the Progressive Party ticket.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Du Bois became even more enthusiastic about the USSR and The People's Republic of China. In 1951, as the Cold War warmed up, Du Bois was indicted as an "unregistered agent" of the Soviet Union. Though acquitted of all charges, Du Bois was embittered with life in the United States, and for the rest of the 1950s he traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and China. In 1959, Du Bois received the Lenin Peace Prize, and in 1961 he officially joined the Communist Party of the United States. Du Bois left the United States for good in 1961, becoming a citizen of the African state of Ghana. There he died at the age of ninety-five. Following a state funeral led by Ghana's president Kwame Nkrumah, Du Bois was buried in Accra, Ghana.
To understand Du Bois's philosophy, one must begin with the Hegelianism that runs through his work. Hegel had argued that the "the study of world history ... represents the rationally necessary course of the World Spirit."(1) All human history is a dialectical process whereby the World Spirit becomes conscious of itself as free. Whenever a thesis of freedom is asserted, it is opposed by an antithesis. These are then both overcome by a synthesis that incorporates the best of both. In particular, Hegel held that the World Spirit that is coming to a consciousness of freedom is always the spirit of specific world-historical peoples, not individuals. Hegel traced the development of this World Spirit through six historical peoples: Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Germans.
Du Bois accepted Hegelian history and applied it to the experience of African Americans. In The Souls of Black Folds, Du Bois refers to Hegel's six historical peoples and adds,
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.
According to Du Bois, "Black folk's" consciousness of freedom is newer and richer than that of any previous world-historical people because of slavery. As one writer explains,
Out of slavery and out of the later striving of black folk for whiteness in an oppressive white world came a rising sense of black soul. Thus it was that white thesis bred black antithesis, which took the best of white culture and moved it upward toward a new synthesis.(2)
While using Hegelian notions, Du Bois noticed something unique about the self-consciousness of black folk. As a "problem," as an "other," black folk develop a kind of "double-consciousness." Black folk have the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." This "twoness," this consciousness of "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body," means that black folk must uniquely struggle to find true self-consciousness and self-identity.
(Click here for our selection from The Souls of Black Folks)
Although in some ways Du Bois is more activist than philosopher, his thought has been enormously influential. His identification of a "black soul" provided a theoretical base for African American studies. His identification of a unique black culture gave blacks both dignity and an alternative to the assimilationist tendencies of integrationists. His discovery of double-consciousness and his notion of the "other" anticipated some recent debates in Continental philosophy.
Footnotes:
1 Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, see Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann, Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997), p. 63
2 Joel Williamson, Crucible of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 405.
By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume V