Educator, essayist, journalist, scholar, social critic, and activist W.E.B. DuBois, was born to Mary Sylvina Burghardt and Alfred Dubois on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He excelled in the public schools, graduating valedictorian from his high school in 1884. Four years later he received a B.A. from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1890 DuBois earned a second bachelor's degree from Harvard University. DuBois began two years of graduate studies in History and Economics at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1892 and then returned to the United States to begin a two year stint teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1895, DuBois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His doctoral thesis, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America," became the first book published by Harvard University Press in 1896. Later that year 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.
Before the close of the 19th century, DuBois also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Atlanta University. During this time, he became the first scholar to systematically study African American urban life.
DuBois lacked the black public appeal of his contemporaries but he remained scathingly critical of white racism. He was unwilling to seek compromise in the quest for civil rights and racial justice. In 1903, DuBois published a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, which challenged the civil rights strategies of black leaders while inspiring a cadre of young black activist scholars to use their work to combat racial oppression.
In 1905 DuBois and other black leaders created the Niagara Movement to provide an organizational challenge to segregation and discrimination. DuBois edited the organization’s magazines. In 1909 as the Niagara Movement begin to decline, DuBois moved on and became the co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the editor of its magazine, The Crisis, until 1934 when he was fired. DuBois's departure from the NAACP reflected his disillusionment over the continuing power of white racism and what he felt was the compromising approach of black leaders, including his NAACP colleagues.
DuBois, however, continued to believe education could promote racial equality. He wrote numerous books and articles including Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. Largely discounted by scholars at the time, the book eventually became the basis for a dramatic reappraisal of the Reconstruction era by scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. His conclusions regarding the progress made by African Americans during the decade of Reconstruction have now been accepted by almost all mainstream historians.
By the early 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, he embraced this controversial position in the civil rights struggle at great personal and professional peril. His Socialist activities drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was stripped of his passport by the State Department. And in 1961 DuBois gave up his citizenship altogether and left the United States permanently for Accra, Ghana.
W.E.B DuBois died at the age of 95 in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963.
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