W.E.B. Dubois

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Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
—WEB Dubois, 1897


W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Dubois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was one of the most influential black leaders of the first half of the 20th Century. Dubois shared in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, in 1909. He served as its director of research and editor of its magazine, "Crisis," until 1934.
Born in 1868 during the painful period of Reconstruction, Du Bois was graduated from Fisk University in 1888 and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895 before entering the worlds of academe and activism. Using Atlanta University as his base from 1897-1910, he opposed Booker T. Washington's educational views as too limiting, preferring to organize young black intellectuals in the Niagara Movement. In 1909 he founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and in 1910 launched its historic magazine, THE CRISIS. During this period he also published his classic treatise, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903), the best known of many passionate and well-argued philosophical and sociological studies of his race, which also included THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO, JOHN BROWN, THE GIFT OF BLACK FOLK, BLACK RECONSTRUCTION, COLOR AND DEMOCRACY: COLONIES AND PEACE.
Dubois was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1896. Between 1897 and 1914 Dubois conducted numerous studies of black society in America, publishing 16 research papers. He began his investigations believing that social science could provide answers to race problems. Gradually he concluded that in a climate of virulent racism, social change could only be accomplished by agitation and protest.
Author, journalist, social reformer, activist, poet, philosopher, and educator W.E.B. Du Bois wield...