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Editor, Author & Civil Rights Leader

An outstanding critic, editor, scholar, author and civil rights leader, William Edward Burghardt DuBois is certainly among the most influential blacks of the twentieth century.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, DuBois received a bachelors degree from Fisk University and went on to win a second bachelors, as well as a Ph.D., from Harvard. He was for a time professor of Latin and Greek at Wilberforce and the University of Pennsylvania, and also served as a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University.

One of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored (NAACP) in 1909, DuBois served as that organization's director of publications and editor of Crisis magazine until 1934. In 1944 he returned from Atlanta University to become head of the NAACP'S special research department, a post he held until 1948. Dr. DuBois emigrated to Africa in 1961 and became editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Aricana, an enormous publishing venture which had been planned by Kwame Nkrumah, since then deposed as president of Ghana. DeBois died in Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95.

His numerous books include The Suppression of the Slave Trade (1896), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Dark Princess (1928), Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), Dusk of Dawn (1940), Color and Democracy (1945), The World and Africa (1947), In Battle for Peace (1952), and a trilogy, Black Flame (1957-1961).

It is this enormous literary output on such a wide variety of themes which offers the most convincing testimony to DuBois' lifetime position that it was vital for blacks to cultivate their own aesthetic and cultural values even as they made valuable strides toward social emancipation. In this he was opposed by Booker T. Washington, who felt that the black should concentrate on developing technical and mechanical skills before al else.

In 1961 at age 93, DuBois' affiliation with the Communist Party that prompted a spirited protest against the plan to erect a memorial in his hometown 1969. Though DuBois was a lifelong radical, he functioned within the pale of society as an American during his most productive years.