W.E.B. Du Bois, American sociologist, author, activist and co-founder of the NAACP, died on this day in history on Aug. 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana at age 95.
“He was an activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century,” noted Britannica.com.
The civil rights pioneer, born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was the son of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, a barber and laborer, according to the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
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Du Bois descended from mixed-race Bahamian slaves. His father enlisted during the Civil War as a private in a New York regiment of the Union army.
He appears to have deserted shortly afterward, the same source indicated.
“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,” according to the same source.
Under the care of his mother and family, young Du Bois was raised in Massachusetts. He received a college preparatory education in Great Barrington’s racially integrated high school.
In June 1884, he became the first African American graduate, according to the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
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In 1888, Du Bois enrolled at Harvard University as a junior (he had first attended all-black Fisk University in Tennessee).
He received a BA cum laude in 1890, an MA in 1891 and a PhD in 1895, the same source chronicled.
He was the first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, according to the NAACP. “The honor, I assure you, was Harvard’s,” Du Bois reportedly once said, as Harvard itself reported.
In 1896, DuBois married Nina Gomer and the couple had two children.
After the death of his first wife in 1950, DuBois married Shirley Graham, who remained his wife until his death.
Du Bois took a position at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1896 conducting a study of the city’s Seventh Ward, published in 1899 as “The Philadelphia Negro,” according to History.com.
The study is considered one of the earliest examples of statistical work being used for sociological purposes, with extensive fieldwork resulting in hundreds of interviews that Du Bois conducted door-to-door, the same source recounted.
Du Bois’ activism was also outspoken at times.
While working as a professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois rose to national prominence when he very publicly opposed Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,” an agreement that asserted that vocational education for Black people was more valuable to them than social advantages such as higher education or political office, noted Biography.com.
Du Bois criticized Washington for not demanding full equality for African Americans, as granted by the 14th Amendment, the same source said.
Du Bois shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934.
His collection of essays, “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903), is a landmark of African American literature, according to Britannica.com.
The NAACP aimed to secure for all people the rights guaranteed in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which promised an end to slavery, equal protection of the law, and the right for all men to vote, respectively, according to the NAACP.
Today, the NAACP continues to work to remove all barriers of racial discrimination through democratic processes, according to the same source.
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In his later years, Du Bois embarked on an ambitious project to create a new encyclopedia of the African diaspora, funded by the government of Ghana, according to the NAACP.
“A citizen of the world until the end, the 93-year-old Du Bois moved to Ghana to manage the project, acquiring citizenship of the African country in 1961,” said the same source.
Du Bois died in Ghana on Aug. 27, 1963, the day before the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
He was 95 years old.
