W. E. B. Du Bois Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, into a small, relatively integrated New England town whose schools and libraries he used avidly. Raised primarily by his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt, and supported by a tight-knit community, he showed exceptional academic promise. Scholarships and local patronage helped him attend Fisk University in Nashville, where the racial realities of the post-Reconstruction South deepened his resolve to study the condition of Black Americans. After graduating from Fisk, he completed an A.B. at Harvard College in 1890 and an A.M. in 1891. Fellowships enabled further study at the University of Berlin from 1892 to 1894, where exposure to German social science and economics impressed upon him the power of empirical inquiry. He returned to Harvard to finish the first Ph.D. earned by an African American, in 1895, with a dissertation on the transatlantic slave trade.

Early Career and The Philadelphia Negro
Du Bois's first academic positions included Wilberforce University and a research appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, he conducted one of the earliest modern urban sociological studies, moving block by block through the Seventh Ward. The resulting book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), combined maps, surveys, and statistics to show that poverty and crime were produced largely by structural discrimination rather than inherent racial deficiencies. The meticulous method he developed there became a hallmark of his scholarship and established him as a leading sociologist. In 1897 he joined the faculty of Atlanta University, where he organized annual conferences and published studies on education, health, labor, and crime among Black Americans.

The Souls of Black Folk and the Talented Tenth
With The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois blended history, social analysis, and lyrical prose to articulate the idea of "double consciousness" and to declare that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line". He argued that a "Talented Tenth" of well-educated Black leaders should guide broader uplift, a stance that set him at odds with Booker T. Washington's accommodationist "Atlanta Compromise". Du Bois debated Washington in speeches and essays, insisting that political rights, higher education, and civic equality were prerequisites for economic progress. Allies and interlocutors in these years included William Monroe Trotter, who worked with him on militant campaigns, and Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching crusade he championed even as they sometimes differed over tactics.

Niagara Movement and the Founding of the NAACP
In 1905 Du Bois helped convene the Niagara Movement, a coalition of Black activists demanding full civil rights and opposition to segregation. Though the movement faced internal strains and external pressure, its platform foreshadowed the agenda of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1909 Du Bois joined white and Black reformers such as Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard to found the NAACP. He became the organization's director of publications and research in 1910 and launched its magazine, The Crisis, which quickly grew into a national forum for politics, culture, and letters.

Editor of The Crisis and Cultural Leadership
As editor of The Crisis from 1910 to 1934, Du Bois combined journalism with advocacy, reporting on lynching, disfranchisement, labor struggles, and international affairs. He featured the work of emerging writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and he publicized NAACP campaigns spearheaded by colleagues such as James Weldon Johnson and Walter White. Du Bois cultivated a broad readership, balancing investigative reporting with poetry, fiction, and photography to demonstrate Black achievement and to confront the nation with the realities of racial terror. His editorial voice sometimes clashed with other leaders over strategy, but he remained a central architect of modern civil rights discourse.

Pan-Africanism and International Vision
From early in his career, Du Bois linked the fate of African Americans to global struggles against colonialism. He attended the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and helped organize the Pan-African Congresses of 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927, gathering activists and intellectuals from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas. He argued that World War I and its aftermath revealed the centrality of empire and race to world politics, and he lobbied at Versailles for African and African-descended peoples' rights. Although he disagreed with Marcus Garvey over separatism and methods, Du Bois's Pan-African advocacy inspired later anticolonial leaders. He corresponded with and encouraged figures whose work fed independence movements, and his internationalism later resonated with activists such as Paul Robeson and, in Africa, Kwame Nkrumah.

Scholarship and Return to Atlanta University
Leaving the NAACP in 1934 after disputes over priorities, Du Bois returned to Atlanta University to teach and write. He produced Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a sweeping reinterpretation of the post-Civil War era that highlighted the role of Black workers and the interracial possibilities of democracy thwarted by white supremacy. He followed with Dusk of Dawn (1940), an intellectual autobiography, and studies in sociology, history, and philosophy that continued his empirical and theoretical work. His advocacy for cooperative economics, public planning, and labor rights reflected an evolving critique of capitalism amid the Great Depression.

Ideological Shifts and Cold War Years
Du Bois's politics moved leftward in the 1940s as he stressed peace and decolonization. He rejoined the NAACP briefly during World War II but resigned again in 1948, frustrated by strategy and pace. In 1951, as chair of the Peace Information Center, he was indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act; he was acquitted, yet the case marked him for Cold War suspicion. His passport was revoked for years, restricting travel to international peace and Pan-African gatherings. He wrote and spoke in defense of civil liberties and against nuclear weapons, often alongside figures like Robeson who faced similar pressures. In 1951 he married writer and activist Shirley Graham, whose partnership sustained his work and broadened his connections in global anticolonial circles.

Final Years in Ghana
After his passport was restored, Du Bois traveled widely and, in the early 1960s, accepted an invitation from Ghana's president, Kwame Nkrumah, to develop the Encyclopedia Africana, a project he had envisioned for decades. He moved to Accra, where he continued to research African and diaspora histories and to mentor younger scholars and organizers. In Ghana he was honored as an elder of Pan-Africanism, his presence symbolizing a bridge between the first generation of diaspora intellectuals and newly independent African states. He became a resident and later a citizen of Ghana, committing his final energies to the encyclopedia and to articulating a global future beyond colonialism and racism.

Family, Mentors, and Colleagues
Throughout his life, Du Bois's personal relationships nourished his public work. His first marriage, to Nina Gomer in 1896, coincided with his early academic career; their family life, including the tragic loss of their young son Burghardt, informed passages of The Souls of Black Folk. In the NAACP he collaborated with Mary White Ovington, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White; in academia he engaged scholars and students at Fisk and Atlanta who built Black social science; in activism he argued with, and learned from, contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington, William Monroe Trotter, Ida B. Wells, and Marcus Garvey. Later, his partnership with Shirley Graham Du Bois expanded his reach into international cultural and political networks.

Death and Legacy
W. E. B. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana, on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. His passing, and the tributes that followed, underscored the extent to which his life had encompassed scholarship, organizing, and global advocacy. As a pioneering sociologist, he established methods and questions that shaped the study of race and modernity. As a public intellectual, he created a language, double consciousness, color line, that remains foundational. As an organizer, he helped build institutions, from the Niagara Movement to the NAACP, that advanced civil rights. His later Pan-African work anticipated postcolonial transformations, and his collaborations with colleagues from Ida B. Wells and James Weldon Johnson to Paul Robeson and Kwame Nkrumah linked local struggles to world-historical shifts. Du Bois's intellectual rigor and principled dissent continue to influence historians, sociologists, activists, and writers, making him one of the most consequential American thinkers of the twentieth century.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by E. B. Du Bois, under the main topics: Learning - Freedom - Book - Equality - Work Ethic.

Other people realated to E. B. Du Bois: B. R. Ambedkar (Politician), Langston Hughes (Poet), Margaret Sanger (Activist), Cornel West (Educator), John Henrik Clarke (Author), Anna Julia Cooper (Educator), Carter G. Woodson (Historian), Albert Bushnell Hart (Historian), Henry Ossawa Tanner (Artist), E. Franklin Frazier (Sociologist)