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Du Bois was persecuted, hand-cuffed at his arraignment, vilified, put on trial, but acquitted. Nevertheless, he chose to leave the US behind him and emigrated to Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, where he spent the rest of his life. It resonates in the countless scholarly and popular works he produced, in the archives of institutions like UMass Amherst and Fisk University, and in the enduring activism of the NAACP.

Close Menu Welcome. About Du Bois. Du Bois Quotes. The Poetry of W. Du Bois. In , Du Bois taught summer school at Booker T. That group failed, partly due to opposition from Washington , but during its existence Du Bois published The Moon Illustrated Weekly , the first weekly magazine for African Americans, producing a total of 34 issues before folding in He followed this up briefly with the journal Horizon.

Du Bois also became more interested in communism and international issues, and became an open supporter of progressive and left-wing groups, which created problems with NAACP leadership.

He left the organization again in Following the death of his wife in , Du Bois married Shirley Graham the following year. In Du Bois officially joined the American Communist Party before leaving the country to live in Ghana at the invitation of its president and becoming a citizen there.

Du Bois first conceived of the Encyclopedia Africana in as a compendium of history and achievement of people of African descent designed to bring a sense of unity to the African diaspora. After Du Bois was invited to move to Ghana, he pledged to finally publish the work, but it was never realized before his death. Du Bois died on August 27, in Ghana and was given a state funeral.

University of Massachusetts. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Du Bois: Biography of a Race — David Levering Lewis. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Among prominent figures are Madam C. Walker, who was the first U. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v.

Board of Education, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement, which sought to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide. Although it enjoyed some success in articulating an alternative vision of how black Americans should respond to the growing segregation and racial violence of the early twentieth century, the Niagara Movement was fatally hampered by lack of funds and the overt and covert opposition of Washington and his allies.

Indeed, the vision and program of the movement were fully realized only with the founding of a new biracial organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP.

The NAACP grew out of the agitation and a conference called to protest the deteriorating status of and escalating violence against black Americans. Racial rioting in August in Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, sparked widespread protest among blacks and liberal whites appalled at the apparent spread of southern violence and lynch law into northern cities.

Washington, the NAACP represented a clear opposition to his policy of accommodation and political quietism. It launched legal suits, legislative lobbying, and propaganda campaigns that embodied uncompromising, militant attacks on lynching, Jim Crow, and disfranchisement. As editor of The Crisis Du Bois finally established the journal of opinion that had so long eluded him, one that could serve as a platform from which to reach a larger audience among African Americans and one that united the multiple strands of his life's work.

In its monthly issues he rallied black support for NAACP policies and programs and excoriated white opposition to equal rights. But he also opened the journal to discussions of diverse subjects related to race relations and black cultural and social life, from black religion to new poetic works. The journal's cover displayed a rich visual imagery embodying the sheer diversity and breadth of the black presence in America.

Thus the journal constituted, simultaneously, a forum for multiple expressions of and the coherent representation and enactment of black intellectual and cultural life. A mirror for and to black America, it inspired a black intelligentsia and its public.

He had attended the first conference on the global condition of peoples of African descent in London in Each conference focused in some fashion on the fate of African colonies in the postwar world, but the political agendas of the earliest meetings were often compromised by the ideological and political entanglements of the elite delegates chosen to represent the African colonies.

The Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey enjoyed greater success in mobilizing a mass base for his version of Pan-Africanism and posed a substantial ideological and political challenge to Du Bois. Although he played no role in the efforts to have Garvey jailed and eventually deported for mail fraud, Du Bois was not sorry to see him go.

Du Bois cochaired the opening session of the conference with Garvey's first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey. The rupture in world history that was World War I and the vast social and political transformations of the decade that followed were reflected in Du Bois's thought and program in other ways as well. In fact, Du Bois and the NAACP fought for officer training and equal treatment for black troops throughout the war, led a silent protest march down Fifth Avenue in against racism, and in launched an investigation into charges of discrimination against black troops in Europe.

Meanwhile, the unprecedented scope and brutality of the war itself stimulated changes in Du Bois's evolving analyses of racial issues and phenomena. Darkwater: Voices within the Veil reflects many of these themes, including the role of African colonization and the fundamental role of the international recruitment and subjugation of labor in causing the war and in shaping its aftermath.

His visit to Liberia in and the Soviet Union in , his subsequent study of Marxism, his growing awareness of Freud, and the challenges posed by the Great Depression all brought him to question the NAACP's largely legalistic and propagandistic approach to fighting racism. In the early s Du Bois opened the pages of The Crisis to wide-ranging discussions of the utility of Marxian thought and of racially based economic cooperatives and other institutions in the fight against race prejudice.

This led to increasing antagonism between him and his colleagues at the NAACP, especially the executive director Walter White, and to his resignation in June Du Bois accepted an appointment as chair of the sociology department at Atlanta University, where he had already been teaching as a visiting professor during the winter of There he founded and edited a new scholarly journal, Phylon , from to During this period Du Bois continued to be an active lecturer and an interlocutor with young scholars and activists; he also deepened his studies of Marxism and traveled abroad.

He sought unsuccessfully to enlist the aid of the Phelps-Stokes Fund in launching his long-dreamed-of project to prepare an encyclopedia of black peoples in Africa and the diaspora.

By , however, Du Bois had lost an invaluable supporter and friend with the death of John Hope, the president of Atlanta University, leaving him vulnerable to dismissal following sharp disagreements with Hope's successor.

Far from acceding to a peaceful retirement, however, in Du Bois now seventy-six years old accepted an invitation to return to the NAACP to serve in the newly created post of director of special research.

Although the organization was still under the staff direction of Du Bois's former antagonist, Walter White, the s Depression and World War II had induced some modifications in the programs and tactics of the NAACP, perhaps in response to challenges raised by Du Bois and other younger critics. It had begun to address the problems of labor as well as legal discrimination, and even the court strategy was becoming much more aggressive and economically targeted.

In hiring Du Bois, the board appears to have anticipated that other shifts in its approach would be necessary in the coming postwar era. Clearly it was Du Bois's understanding that his return portended continued study of and agitation around the implications of the coming postwar settlement as it might affect black peoples in Africa and the diaspora, and that claims for the representation of African and African American interests in that settlement were to be pressed.

In he prepared and presented to that organization An Appeal to the World , a ninety-four-page, militant protest against American racism as an international violation of human rights. During this period and in support of these activities he wrote two more books, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace and The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History , each of which addressed some aspect of European and American responsibilities for justice in the colonial world.

As ever, Du Bois learned from and was responsive to the events and developments of his time. Conflicts with the U. He became a supporter of the leftist Southern Negro Youth Congress at a time of rising hysteria about Communism and the onset of the cold war. In he was an active supporter of the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace's presidential bid. Truman administration and into fierce opposition to any leftist associations. In , after an inconclusive argument over assigning responsibility for a leak to the New York Times of a Du Bois memorandum critical of the organization and its policies, he was forced out of the NAACP for a second time.

The council had been organized in London in the late s by Max Yergan and Paul Robeson to push decolonization and to educate the general public about that issue. In the postwar period it, too, became tainted by charges of Communist domination and lost many former supporters including Yergan and Ralph Bunche ; it dissolved altogether in