Before the Maya Angelo's and the Alice Walkers there was a man who played a major role in all of African American Literature. This mans name was W.E.B DuBois. W.E.B DuBois was born Febuary 23,1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1868 the population of Great Barrington was 5,000 but there were only about 50 black people that lived there.
Young DuBois developed a "knack" for writting in his early days and at the age of 15 he became a local corespondant for the New York Globe. DuBois showed a drive for the advancement of his race even in his teens. Although DuBois was extremely smart and advanced for his age, he could not attend the college he wanted to attend, that college is what we know now as Harvard University. But Dubois was still given a shot at college when he won a scholarship to attend Fisk University in Nashville.
In 1890 DuBois still held on to his dream of attending Harvard but it still did not happen, but he did recieve his bachelors degree, and immediately started working toward his masters and docters degree.
After going to school in Germany and later finnaly achieving his goal of going to Harvard, at the age of twenty six, Dubois felt it was time to start his career.
So he accepted a teaching job in Ohio making about 800.00 dollars a year.DuBois soon began to plunge himself into research. DuBois believed that the race problem was one of ignorance. So he was determined to find out as much knowledge as he could. With this he believed he could give knowledge providing the "cure" for color prejudice. His relentless studies led into historical investigation, statistical and anthropological measurement, and sociological interpretation. The outcome of these studies were published as The Philadelphia Negro. "It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence." This was the first time such a scientific approach to studying social phenomena was undertaken, and as a consequence DuBois is acknowledged as the father of Social Science.
From that point on, DuBois engaged in the study of human rights, all the way from the black churches to the black voting systems. Mr. DuBois also had several meetings with Black civil rights leader Marcus Garvey. His meetings with Garvey were exremely important because unlike DuBois, Garvey had tremendous feedback and hordes of people that stood behind him.
Despite all of DuBois influence and affect on civil rights through his writting and speeches, Dubois felt all of his works went to waste. In 1959 he told a large audience in Peking that –"In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a NIGGER." Shortly after DuBois went to finish the rest of his days in Ghana, not long after Dubois succumbed on August 27, 1963.
DuBois Works Include:
The Philadelphia Negro (1896)
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (Harvard Ph.D. thesis, 1896)
Atlanta University's Studies of the Negro Problem (1897–1910)
Souls of Black Folks (1903)
John Brown (1909)
Quest of the Silver Fleece ( 1911)
The Negro (1915)
Darkwater (1920)
The Gift of Black Folk (1924)
Dark Princess (1924)
Black Reconstruction (1935)
Black Folk, Then and Now (1939)
Dusk of Dawn (1940)
Color and Democracy (1945)
The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1931–1946)
The World and Africa (1946)
The Black Flame (a trilogy)
______I. Ordeal of mansart (1957)
_____II. Mansart Builds a School (1959)
____III. Worlds of Color (1961) The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois (1968)
The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960
(Edited by Herbert Aptheker–1973)
By Lamar Bledsaw
Facts About DuBois
W.E.B Dubois Links
W.E.B DuBois Bio
Dubois and Garvey
DuBois Instititue
