William Edward Burghardt Du Bois 18681963

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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963)

• History 106
• April 3, 2009

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A Reminder

• If you havent already done so, you should
  bookmark the syllabus for this course in your
  browser. It will update regularly before each
  class session. Its at http//www.uoregon.edu/dap
  ope/106syllabus--sp09.htm
• The instructions for the short paper on Chinua
  Achebe, Things Fall Apart are at
  http//www.uoregon.edu/dapope/106paper--achebe.ht
  m

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Some Websites of Interest

• Du Boiss photos of African Americans displayed
  at the Paris 1900 Fair.
• Du Boiss article on The American Negro at
  Paris, about the fair exhibit.
• At the Paris 1900 Fair, 500 books written by
  African Americans were also exhibited
• Resources about Du Bois at the University of
  Massachusetts
• A comprehensive website about Du Bois
• E-texts of his most famous book, The Souls of
  Black Folk (1903) and his early study of The
  Philadelphia Negro (1899)
• Du Bois was a leader in several Pan African
  Congress meetings. Some information on the
  Congresses here.

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• At the beginning of W.E.B. Du Boiss most famous
  book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he made
  this bold statement
• The problem of the twentieth century is the
  problem of the color line.

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The American Negro at Paris

• Among the exhibits at the Paris Universal
  Exposition of 1900 was one on The American
  Negro.
• At its heart, a collection of five hundred
  photographs arranged and displayed by W.E.B. Du
  Bois, a professor at Atlanta University, an
  African-American college in Georgia.

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Pictures at the Exposition
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Paris Fair Owners of the only Black-owned Cotton
Mill
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Paris Fair Calculus Class
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Paris Fair Black-Owned Pharmacy
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Paris Fair African American Band
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Paris Fair Unpaved Street
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Paris Fair African American workers at various
machines
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An Exceptional Youth

• Up from Poverty in Massachusetts

• Respect and racism in a small town

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Education Fisk, Harvard, and Germany

• Du Bois discovers a Southern African American
  world
• Consider how miraculous it all was to a boy of
  seventeen, just escaped from a narrow valley. I
  willed and lo! My people came dancing about
  me,--riotous in color, gay in laughter, full of
  sympathy, need and pleading.
• We were going to have these enslaved Israelites
  out of the still enduring bondage in short
  order.

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Education Fisk, Harvard, and Germany

• Only the 6th African American admitted to
  Harvard. (Graduates cum laude in 1890, goes on to
  be the first African American to earn a Ph.D from
  Harvard.)

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An Academic Career

• History and the new Social Sciences
• The promise of salvation would lie in the social
  sciences, not the Bible
• Studying the the Negro Problem
• The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
• Atlanta University Studies
• Honoring achievement under adversity

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Booker T. Washington

• Atlanta Compromise Speech, 1895
• In all things that are purely social we can be
  as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand
  in all things essential to mutual progress.

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Du Bois Comments on Washington and the Atlanta
Compromise

• Mr. Washington's cult has gained unquestioning
  followersyet the time is come when one may speak
  in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the
  mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's
  career.

• Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people
  give up, at least for the present, three things,
  -- First, political power,
• Second, insistence on civil rights,
• Third, higher education of Negro youth, --
• and concentrate all their energies on industrial
  education, and accumulation of wealth, and the
  conciliation of the South.

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Political Power and Civil Rights Race and The
American South

• Losing the Right to Vote
• Segregation and Exclusion
• Culture of Racial Violence
• In 1900, the year of Du Boiss exhibit in Paris,
  there were 115 lynchings in the United States.
  The victims in all but nine of the lynchings were
  African American.

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Atlanta Riot 1906
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Du Bois and the Talented Tenth

• We shall hardly induce black men to believe that
  if their stomachs be full, it matters little
  about their brains. They already dimly perceive
  that the paths of peace winding between honest
  toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance
  of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent
  comradeship between the black lowly and the black
  men emancipated by training and culture.

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Du Bois on Double Consciousness

• The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a
  veil, and gifted with second-sight in this
  American world, -- a world which yields him no
  true self-consciousness, but only lets him see
  himself through the revelation of the other
  world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
  double-consciousness, this sense of always
  looking at one's self through the eyes of others,
  of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world
  that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One
  ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro
  two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
  strivings two warring ideals .

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Academia and Activism

• Dealing with Booker T. Washingtons Machine
• The Niagara Movement, 1905
• National Association for the Advancement of
  Colored People (NAACP), founded 1909
• Editor of The Crisis, 1910-1934

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The Global Context

• Racism and the Misuse of Evolution
• Racism in a World of Empires
• Du Bois looks to Africa

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Du Bois and Africa

• Growing awareness of African American connections
  to Africa
• Criticism of imperialism
• 1915, from African Roots of WarThere are
  those who would write world-history and leave out
  this most marvelous of continents. Particularly
  to-day most men assume that Africa lies far
  afield from the center of our burning social
  problems, and especially from our present problem
  of World War.
• Diplomatic mission to Liberia, 1924

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Pan-Africanism

• Delegates at a Pan African Congress, Belgium 1921
• Du Bois was a leader at this and other
  international gatherings to build solidarity with
  and among the peoples of Africa.

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The Rest of the Story

• Du Bois as editor of The Crisis, 1910-1934
• Prolific author Poetry, fiction, history,
  autobiography
• 1935 Publishes Black Reconstruction, pioneering
  study of the post-Civil War American South
• Turns toward Marxism, breaks with the NAACP
• Indicted but not convicted during the McCarthy
  era
• 1961 Moves to newly-independent Ghana
• Dies at age 95 in 1963, the day before the giant
  civil rights March on Washington

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