W.E.B. DuBois: A Great African-American Scholar and Activist

When I was in college, I joined a civil rights organization called the DuBois Club. The DuBois clubs were widely known to be communist fronts but the plan by my friends and me was to infiltrate it and use it for non-communist civil rights activities. Not much came of any of this but I did wonder who the heck this DuBois person was.

W.E.B. DuBois was a great scholar activist who was probably the creator of Black History and a founder of the social sciences. He was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which had a population of 5,000 out of which 25 to 50 were African American. Dubois experienced little overt racism but did have to endure innuendo and a climate of subtle racism. He was a brilliant student and wanted to attend Harvard. However, he couldn’t afford it and instead went to Fisk University in Nashville with a scholarship and help from friends and family. In Nashville he first encountered overt racism and the Jim Crow laws and was horrified.

After graduating from Fisk, DuBois entered Harvard on a scholarship and received a Master’s Degree in 1891. He then studied abroad at the University of Berlin, returning to Harvard where he got his doctorate. His dissertation was The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America and it became the first volume in Harvard’s Historical Series.

DuBois’ achievements at even this stage of his life cannot be overstated. He was the first African American to receive a doctorate at Harvard and one of the few African American doctorates in the entire country. His scholarship was sound, original and brave. He put his scholarship to the service of his own people and this was to be true for him the rest of his life.