He Was The Voice: The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois
... Fisk University in 1888 and earned a scholarship to attend Harvard. Harvard University said that his preparation from high school and Fisk University were inadequate, so he had to enroll as an undergraduate. In 1890 Du Bois earned his second bachelor’s degree and then enrolled in Harvard graduate school. There he earned his master’s degree and his doctoral degree in 1895, which made him the first African American to receive a doctoral from Harvard. By 1895 Du Bois had done considerable research into the historical and sociological conditions that African Americans had faced. This intensive research would make him the most influential black intellectual of his time. In 1896 Du Bois published The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, as the initial volume in the Harvard Historical Studies Series. Du Bois continued his efforts by studying the social and economic conditions of urban African Americans in Philadelphia. His results were published in The Philadelphia Negro and it was the first sociological writing on a black community published in the U.S. In 1897 he became professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, where he started many studies at the head of the school’s “Negro Problem” program. Du Bois wrote a famous statement about his thoughts on the black identity. “One feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.” He continued his thoughts in The Soul of Black Folk, which was a collection of essays he had written. With the writing of The Soul of Black Folk, Du Bois began to challenge Booker T. Washington as the most influential and admired African American in the U.S. Du Bois objected to Washington’s strategy of accommodation and compromise with whites in politics and education. To Du Bois this strategy was accepting the denial of citizenship rights to African Americans. Du Bois also did not like Washington’s theory on the industrial education of African Americans and he believed that this theory was limiting African Americans from higher education in art and humanities. Du Bois continued to challenge Washington and in 1905 he did so with the Niagara Movement, which was a meeting of 29 African American leaders who met to discuss segregation and political rights for African Americans. At the meeting they drafted a list of demands, which included equality in economic and educational opportunity, an end to segregation, and prohibition of public discrimination. The Niagara Movement had little impact immediately, but it influenced the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is known as the NAACP. The NAACP was a group of black and white intellectuals who opposed the nonconfrontational tac...