W. E. B. Du Bois: “Agitation”

About the Author

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and raised by his mother. In spite of the poverty of his childhood, Du Bois excelled in school and achieved one of the most impressive educations of his generation. He received bachelor degrees from Fisk University and Harvard University, pursued graduate work at Harvard and Germany's University of Berlin, and earned his PhD in history from Harvard in 1895. He received a faculty appointment at Wilberforce University in 1894, worked for the University of Pennsylvania on a study of blacks in Philadelphia in 1896, and joined the faculty of Atlanta University in 1897. In 1910 he left Atlanta and took a paid position as the director of publishing and research for the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He served in that position and also as the founding editor of the NAACP journal, the Crisis, subtitled A Record of the Darker Races, until 1934, when he resigned over a policy dispute.

Following his departure from the NAACP, Du Bois returned to Atlanta University and to academic scholarship for ten years. In 1943, at the age of seventy-six, he was forced to retire from the university, and he accepted a position back at the NAACP. By this time, Du Bois was clearly out of step with the civil rights organization; his increasingly leftist, pro-Soviet politics and his criticism both of U.S. foreign policy and of the NAACP director Walter White cost him his job in 1948. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Du Bois became involved in leftist organizations, continued condemning the United States and its foreign policy while praising the Soviet Union, and ran for public office as a nominee of the American Labor Party. These activities made him a target of the post–World War II “Red Scare” inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Although he was acquitted of charges related to his involvement with radical antiwar organizations, his passport was suspended from 1951 to 1958. When he regained the right to travel abroad, he made a series of trips, including highly publicized visits to East Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. Du Bois's continued pro-Communist political radicalism isolated him from the emerging civil rights movement. In 1961, disillusioned with the United States, Du Bois formally joined the U.S. Communist Party before relocating to the newly independent nation of Ghana. In 1963 he became a citizen of his adopted country; on August 27, 1963, he died at the age of ninety-five.

Du Bois was the leading African American intellectual of his day. He first established his credentials with his scholarly publications on the Atlanta slave trade and on Philadelphia's black community. In 1897 he began to define his political and racial views, moving from academic work to political and social activism; his publication of “Strivings of the Negro People” in the Atlantic Monthly brought him national attention. Six years later, his classic work The Souls of Black Folk cemented his intellectual credentials. His involvement with the Niagara Movement beginning in 1905 and with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made him the most significant of Booker T. Washington's critics and the most prominent and most respected head of the early-twentieth-century campaign for civil rights. In his books and articles, especially those published in the Crisis, Du Bois developed ideas that were fundamental to his vision of race in America and to the long struggle against discrimination and for equality. While he found himself increasingly out of the mainstream civil rights movement following his departure from the NAACP in 1934, Du Bois remained one of the giants among twentieth-century American intellectuals.