The Negro de W. E. B. DuBois

The Negro

W. E. B. DuBois

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 17 mai 2008

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a black civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He became a naturalized citizen of Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95. "The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro peoples. Archaeological research in Africa has just begun, and many sources of information in Arabian, Portuguese, and other tongues are not fully at our command; and, too, it must frankly be confessed, racial prejudice against darker peoples is still too strong in so-called civilized centers for judicial appraisement of the peoples of Africa. Much intensive monographic work in history and science is needed to clear mooted points and quiet the controversialist who mistakes present personal desire for scientific proof. Nevertheless, I have not been able to withstand the temptation to essay such short general statement of the main known facts and their fair interpretation as shall enable the general reader to know as men a sixth or more of the human race. Manifestly so short a story must be mainly conclusions and generalizations with but meager indication of authorities and underlying arguments." - W. E. B. Du Bois

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W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois (1868-1963) was a world historian, sociologist, journalist, novelist, civil rights leader, and Pan-Africanist. He was the first Black American to earn a doctorate at Harvard and was one of the founders of the Niagara Movement, which became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also founded the NAACP journal The Crisis and edited it for nearly a quarter of a century. Du Bois was a critic of Booker T. Washington, whom he felt was too willing to compromise about Black rights. A published writer as a teenager, Du Bois wrote prolifically until his death at ninety-five. His 1903 Souls of Black Folk is a founding text of the civil rights movement. In it, as well as in other books including the Dusk of Dawn, he used personal experience as a persuasive tool. Controversial, articulate, and impassioned, he had wide-ranging influence in the United States and around the world. Du Bois's communist beliefs led to conflicts with the US government in the 1950s, and he eventually settled in Ghana, where he died. Nonetheless, his attachment to his birthplace, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was a constant in his life, and his thinking on a broad range of issues has gained new attention in the twenty-first century. Each volume of David Levering Lewis's biography of Du Bois won a Pulitzer Prize.