Scholar, author, civil rights pioneer and activist, and co-founder of the NAACP, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, a small western Massachusetts town that is a long way from west Africa. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community.
Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state. She was descended from Dutch, African, and English ancestors. William Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave (born in West Africa around 1730) who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, which may have been how he gained his freedom during the late 18th century.
William Du Bois claimed Elizabeth Freeman as his relative; he wrote that she had married his great-grandfather Jack Burghardt. But Freeman was 20 years older than Burghardt, and no record of such a marriage has been found. It may have been Freeman's daughter, Betsy Humphrey, who married Burghardt after her first husband, Jonah Humphrey, left the area "around 1811", and after Burghardt's first wife died (c. 1810). If so, Freeman would have been William Du Bois's step-great-great-grandmother. William Du Bois's paternal great-grandfather was James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, an ethnic French-American of Huguenot origin who fathered several children with enslaved women.
One of James's mixed-race sons was Alexander, who was born on Long Cay in the Bahamas in 1803; in 1810, he immigrated to the United States with his father. Alexander Du Bois traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, with a mistress. Sometime before 1860, Alfred Du Bois immigrated to the United States, settling in Massachusetts. He married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic, a village in Great Barrington. Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after their son William was born.
Mary Du Bois moved with her son back to her parents' house in Great Barrington, and they lived there until he was five. She worked to support her family (receiving some assistance from her brother and neighbors) until she suffered a stroke in the early 1880s. Great Barrington had a majority European American community, who generally treated Du Bois well. He attended the local integrated public school and played with white schoolmates. As an adult, he wrote about racism that he felt as a fatherless child and being a minority in the town.
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After receiving his bachelor's degree from Fisk University, Du Bois attended Harvard College (which did not accept course credits from Fisk) from 1888 to 1890, becoming the sixth admitted African American in its history. He was strongly influenced by professor William James, prominent in American philosophy. Du Bois paid his way through three years at Harvard with money from summer jobs, an inheritance, scholarships, and loans from friends. In 1892, Du Bois received a fellowship from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen to attend Friedrich Wilhelm University for graduate work.
While a student in Berlin, he traveled extensively throughout Europe. He intellectually came of age in the German capital while studying with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists, including Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, and Heinrich von Treitschke. He also met Max Weber who was highly impressed with Du Bois and later cited Du Bois as a counter-example to racists alleging the inferiority of Blacks. He wrote about his time in Germany: "I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk - students, acquaintances, teachers - who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet and talk over the world; particularly, the part of the world whence I came."
After returning from Europe, Du Bois completed his graduate studies; in 1895, he was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. After completing graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, Du Bois rose to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of black civil rights activists seeking equal rights. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise.
Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Du Bois used his position in the NAACP to respond to racist incidents. He primarily targeted racism with his writing, which protested strongly against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination in important social institutions.
After the First World War, he attended the Pan-African Congresses, embraced socialism and became a professor at Atlanta University. Once the Second World War had ended, he engaged in peace activism and was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Du Bois was a prolific author. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several meetings of the Pan-African Congress to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia.
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His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. His 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn is regarded in part as one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces.
After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in the summer of 1896. He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, which formed the foundation for his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899 while he was teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a black community in the United States. Among his Philadelphia consultants on the project was William Henry Dorsey, an artist who collected documents, paintings and artifacts pertaining to Black history. Dorsey compiled hundreds of scrapbooks on the lives of Black people during the 19th century and built a collection that he laid out in his home in Philadelphia.
By the 1890s, Philadelphia's black neighborhoods had a negative reputation in terms of crime, poverty, and mortality. Du Bois's book undermined the stereotypes with empirical evidence and shaped his approach to segregation and its negative impact on black lives and reputations. While taking part in the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass's plea for black Americans to integrate into white society.
In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University in Georgia. His first major academic work was his book The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on his fieldwork in 1896-1897. Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass in the study. Later in 1903, he popularized the term, the "talented tenth", applied to society's elite class.
After the conference, delegates unanimously adopted "To the Nations of the World", and sent copies of the speech to heads of state who governed large populations of African descent that suffered oppression. The text appealed for "[acknowledgment] and [protection of] the rights of people of African descent" from the United States and imperial European nations, and the recognition of "the free Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, etc."
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In the first decade of the new century, Du Bois emerged as a spokesperson for his race, second only to Booker T. Washington. Washington was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and wielded tremendous influence within the African-American and white communities. Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal that he had struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction. Despite sending congratulations to Washington for his Atlanta Exposition Speech, Du Bois later came to oppose Washington's plan, along with many other African Americans, including Archibald H.
Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred near Atlanta in 1899. Hose was tortured, burned, and hanged by a mob of two thousand whites. When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display. The episode stunned Du Bois, and he resolved that "one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved". In 1901, Du Bois wrote a review critical of Washington's autobiography Up from Slavery, which he later expanded and published to a wider audience as the essay "Of Mr. Booker T.
In 1905, Du Bois and several other African-American civil rights activists - including Fredrick McGhee, Max Barber and William Monroe Trotter - met in Canada, near Niagara Falls, where they wrote a declaration of principles opposing the Atlanta Compromise, and which were incorporated as the Niagara Movement in 1906. They wanted to publicize their ideals to other African Americans, but most black periodicals were owned by publishers sympathetic to Washington, so Du Bois bought a printing press and started publishing Moon Illustrated Weekly in December 1905. It was the first African-American illustrated weekly, and Du Bois used it to attack Washington's positions, but the magazine lasted only for about eight months.
Du Bois soon founded and edited another vehicle for his polemics, The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, which debuted in 1907. Freeman H. M. Murray and Lafayette M. The Niagarites held a second conference in August 1906, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's birth, at the West Virginia site of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Reverdy C. Ransom spoke, explaining that Washington's primary goal was to prepare blacks for employment in their current society: "Today, two classes of Negroes ...are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations ... The other class believe that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place.
Two calamities in the autumn of 1906 shocked African Americans, and they contributed to strengthening support for Du Bois's struggle for civil rights to prevail over Booker T. Washington's accommodationist Atlanta Compromise. First, President Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 Buffalo Soldiers because they were accused of crimes as a result of the Brownsville affair. Many of the discharged soldiers had served for 20 years and were near retirement. Second, in September, riots broke out in Atlanta, precipitated by unfounded allegations of black men assaulting white women. This was a catalyst for racial tensions based on a job shortage and employers playing black workers against white workers.
Ten thousand whites rampaged through Atlanta, beating every black person they could find, resulting in more than 25 deaths. In the aftermath of the 1906 violence, Du Bois urged blacks to withdraw their support from the Republican Party, because Republicans Roosevelt and William Howard Taft did not sufficiently support blacks. Du Bois wrote the essay, "A Litany at Atlanta", which asserted that the riot demonstrated that the Atlanta Compromise was a failure. Despite upholding their end of the bargain, blacks had failed to receive legal justice in the South. Once we were told: Be worthy and fit and the ways are open.
In addition to writing editorials, Du Bois continued to produce scholarly work at Atlanta University. In 1909, after five years of effort, he published a biography of abolitionist John Brown. It contained many insights, but also contained some factual errors. The work was strongly criticized by The Nation, which was owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, who was writing his own, competing biography of John Brown. Du Bois was the first African American invited by the American Historical Association (AHA) to present a paper at their annual conference. He read his paper, Reconstruction and Its Benefits, to an astounded audience at the AHA's December 1909 conference.
The paper went against the mainstream historical view, promoted by the Dunning School of scholars at Columbia University, that Reconstruction was a disaster, caused by the ineptitude and sloth of blacks. Du Bois asserted that it was the federal government's failure to manage the Freedmen's Bureau, to distribute land, and to establish an educational system, that doomed African-American prospects in the South. When Du Bois submitted the paper for publication a few months later in The American Historical Review, he asked that the word 'Negro' be capitalized. The editor, J.
After graduating from Fisk University in Tennessee, he earned a second bachelor’s degree at Harvard University. In 1895 he became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He went on to write 17 books, including the seminal The Souls of Black Folk, in which he introduced the idea of “twoness.” (A new edition of the book was published last month by Restless Books during Black History Month).
Du Bois was a leader in the pan-African movement that sought solidarity between all people of African descent. He was a major influence on Nkrumah, especially after they met at the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England. In 1947, Nkrumah led Ghana to break free from Britain’s colonial rule, making it the first African country to win independence. Inspired by this, Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana and lived there until his death in 1963-he died on the eve of the civil-rights march in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The current burial place of Dr. Du Bois and the ashes of Shirley Graham Du Bois.
The story of W.E.B. Du Bois
Du Bois’s final home, a sleepy bungalow in a leafy enclave of Accra, Ghana’s capital, still stands. The tombs of Du Bois and his second wife, Shirley, sit next to his former home, which is today a tiny, modest museum at the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Center in Accra. For us in Ghana, we see Du Bois as somebody who blazed the pan-African scene in Africa. Before independence, we had some Ghanaian pan-Africanists but they were not so prominent in activism. When Dr. Nkrumah, our first president, met Du Bois in the 1945 Pan-African Congress, he had the vision to help liberate the people of Africa. They got so much attached to each other. For us, Du Bois being in Ghana became an eye opener. He was able to work with Nkrumah on a number of pan-African initiatives in Africa.
He didn’t stay that long but even in that short time he was very influential for us, not only in Ghana but all of Africa. Those leaders who attended the Pan-African Congress became leaders of their countries, such as Jomo Kenyatta [Kenya’s first president] and Nkrumah. That influenced them to work hard to deliver their people from shackles of colonialism. When Nkrumah came back to Ghana after the Pan-African Congress, he was always in contact with Du Bois. After gaining independence, Nkrumah needed people to help him to push pan-Africanism. He said the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of the African continent. He needed Du Bois to help push this agenda through. He invited Du Bois in 1961. with renewal of his passport. When he came to Ghana, Nkrumah accepted him as a Ghanaian and Du Bois naturalized as a Ghanaian.
Nkrumah didn’t just look at Ghana. He supported most of the African countries to gain independence. The light had been lit by Du Bois and Nkrumah and it was a matter of course that other countries follow. Partially the vision has been achieved. There were major landmarks that had to be reached. First was the independence of African countries. That has been achieved. The second was unification of the African continent as one group. That was started with Organization of African Unity followed up with the African Union [a union that includes all 55 countries on the continent.] There were stumbling blocks here and there because we had different groups having different visions. So it was difficult for the African Union to be well-focused. Nonetheless, at least the AU exists. It’s not so strong as we expected but it’s working.
The other component is the economic emancipation of people. That has not been achieved to a large extent. In the museum, there are photos of African American leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and writer Maya Angelou visiting Ghana and meeting Nkrumah. Du Bois is held so high in terms of pan-Africanism, and the struggle for independence and liberation of the black race. His presence in Ghana alone is something that Africans in the diaspora cherish. So any time they come, they want to come to the Du Bois Center to see his legacy. That is very important for us. The other part is the work that Nkrumah has done. His influence on the independence struggle and independence of African countries is one that gives Ghana that pedigree. The majority of our visitors are African Americans. Ghanaians don’t know so much about the Du Bois Memorial Center. Nkrumah gave Du Bois this house as his residence.
In 1963, Du Bois’s wife was still in Ghana because she was a close friend of the Nkrumah family until the 1966 coup d’état, which toppled Nkrumah’s government. Nkrumah’s wife was Egyptian. After the coup, she took Du Bois’s wife to Egypt. Du Bois’s wife continued to China because [W.E.B.] Du Bois had links to China. Within that period, Du Bois’ house was ransacked. Most things were taken away. Du Bois came with a lot of books and regalia. We were able to salvage some of them. Not all, but some of them. In 1985, some Pan-Africanists in Ghana realized when diasporan Africans come to Ghana they can’t see the tomb of Du Bois. Du Bois was buried along the walls of Osu Castle, which was the seat of government at the time. It was such a security zone that they couldn’t see the tomb.
These Pan-Africanists asked the president for help to relocate the tomb. Du Bois had wished that he be buried in front of his house. This request was made to the government of former president Jerry Rawlings. The body was re-interred in a specially designed tomb in front of his house. Any visitor to the bungalow where Dr. Du Bois lived with his wife, worked, and died would notice the deterioration of the building, both the outside and the inside. Evidence of water leaks and damage is everywhere. Dr. Du Bois brought with him about 1500 books and papers to Ghana. Over the many years since he died in 1963, in the absence of a climate-controlled environment, all the books and papers have been seriously damaged. The museum features hundreds of books Du Bois brought with him to Ghana. Their titles reflect his eclectic background: British Slavery and the Abolition, The Mark of the Oppressor, Into China, Time in New England, History of the Jews in the United States and American Novels and Stories of Henry James.
These items are now in very poor condition.
Thus, the answer to the crossword clue "African capital where W.E.B. Du Bois is buried" is Accra.
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Birth | Great Barrington, Massachusetts, February 23, 1868 |
| Education | Fisk University, Harvard University (Ph.D.) |
| Key Roles | Leader of Niagara Movement, Founder of NAACP |
| Ideologies | Pan-Africanism, Socialism |
| Final Years | Citizen of Ghana, Lived and died in Accra |
| Death | Accra, Ghana, 1963 |
| Burial Site | W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Center, Accra |
W.E.B. Du Bois
