W.e.b. Dubois

Alexander returned to New Haven without the boy and his mother.
It is unknown how Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt met, but they married on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic, Massachusetts. The two of them moved frequently, surviving on money from family members and Du Bois's after-school jobs.

Some of the neighborhood whites noticed him, and one rented Du Bois and his mother a house in Great Barrington.
While living there, Du Bois performed chores and worked odd jobs. He did not feel separate because of his skin color while he was in school.

In fact, the only times he felt out of place were times when out-of-towners visited Great Barrington. One such incident occurred when a white girl who was new in school refused to take one of his "calling cards" during a game; the girl told him she would not accept it because he was black.

Du Bois then realized that there would always be a barrier between some whites and non-whites.
Young Du Bois may have been an outsider because of being the poor mixed-race son of a single mother and extremely intellectual for his age; however, he was very comfortable academically. His academic success led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans.
University education
In 1888 Du Bois earned a degree from Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee.

The club was employed at a grand luxury summer resort on Lake Minnetonka in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota. The resort was a favorite spot for vacationing wealthy American Southerners and European royalty.

He taught while undertaking field research for his study The Philadelphia Negro. Among his most significant works are The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), Black Reconstruction (1935), and Black Folk, Then and Now (1939).His book The Negro (1915) influenced the work of several pioneer Africanist scholars, such as Drusilla Dunjee Houston and William Leo Hansberry.
In the New York Times review of The Souls of Black Folk, the anonymous book reviewer wrote, "For it is the Jim Crow car, and the fact that he may not smoke a cigar and drink a cup of tea with the white man in the South, that most galls William E. Burghardt Du Bois of the Atlanta College for Negroes." The review's conclusion reflected some contemporary thinking:
...it is the thought of a negro of Northern education who has lived long among his brethren of the South yet who can not fully feel the meaning of some things which these brethren know by instinct — and which the Southern-bred white knows by a similar instinct: certain things which are by both accepted as facts — not theories — fundamental attitudes of race to race which are the product of conditions extending over centuries, as are the somewhat parallel attitudes of the gentry to the peasantry in other countries.
While prominent white scholars denied African-American cultural, political and social relevance to American history and civic life, in his epic work Black Reconstruction, Du Bois documented how black people were central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and also showed how they made alliances with white politicians.

He provided evidence to disprove the Dunning School theories of Reconstruction, showing the coalition governments established public education in the South, as well as many needed social service programs. He demonstrated the ways in which Black emancipation— the crux of Reconstruction — promoted a radical restructuring of United States society, as well as how and why the country failed to continue support for civil rights for blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction. This theme was taken up later and expanded by Eric Foner and Leon F.

In 1946, he wrote The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part That Africa Has Played in World History. He helped establish four academic journals.
Criminology
Du Bois began writing about the sociology of crime in 1897, shortly after receiving his Ph.D.

The first work that involved in-depth criminological study and theorizing was The Philadelphia Negro, in which a large section of the sociological study was devoted to analysis of the black criminal population in Philadelphia (Du Bois, 1899).
Du Bois (1899) set forth three significant parts to his criminology theory. He distinguished between the strains on southern Negroes and those on northern Negroes because the problems of city life in the North were different from those of the Southern rural sharecroppers.
Secondly, Du Bois (1904a) believed that black crime declined as the African-American population moved toward a more equal status with whites.

This idea, referred to later as "stratification," was developed in a similar manner later in the twentieth century by Merton in his (1968) structure-strain theory of deviance. 64) states in The Philadelphia Negro:
"Naturally then, if men are suddenly transported from one environment to another, the result is lack of harmony with the new conditions; lack of harmony with the new physical surroundings leading to disease and death or modification of physique; lack of harmony with social surroundings leading to crime."

Civil rights activism


W.

Du Bois in 1904

Du Bois was the most prominent intellectual leader and political activist on behalf of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. It included Frances Benjamin Johnston's photos of Hampton Institute's black students. The Negro exhibition focused on African Americans' positive contributions to American society.
In 1905, Du Bois, along with Minnesota attorney Fredrick L.Believing that they should, in 1909 Du Bois with a group of like-minded supporters founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1910, Du Bois left Atlanta University to work full-time as Publications Director at the NAACP. For 25 years, Du Bois worked as editor-in-chief of the NAACP publication, The Crisis, then subtitled A Record of the Darker Races.

He commented freely and widely on current events and set the agenda for the fledgling NAACP. They disagreed over whether African Americans could be assimilated as equals into American society (the view held by Du Bois).

Du Bois’s way of thinking transcended the common belief among the population that religion is an either/or when it comes to being good or bad.
Du Bois believed that religious organizations serve as communal centers. According to David Levering Lewis, "His would be the first and last appearance of an African American on the program until 1940."
In a review of the second volume of Lewis's biography of Du Bois, Michael R.

Winston observed that, in understanding American history, one must question "how black Americans developed the psychological stamina and collective social capacity to cope with the sophisticated system of racial domination that white Americans had anchored deeply in law and custom." Winston continued, "Although any reasonable answer is extraordinarily complex, no adequate one can ignore the man (Du Bois) whose genius was for 70 years at the intellectual epicenter of the struggle to destroy white supremacy as public policy and social fact in the United States."
Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany
Du Bois became impressed by the growing strength of Imperial Japan following the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. In 1936, Yasuichi and the Japanese ambassador arranged a trip to Japan for Du Bois and a small group of academics. The trip was to include stops in Japan, China, and the Soviet Union.

He later noted that he had received more respect from German academics than he had from white American colleagues. On his return to the United States, he voiced his ambivalence about the Nazi regime.

While admiring how the Nazis had improved the German economy, he was horrified by their treatment of the Jews, which he described as "an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade".
On scientific racism and eugenics
Du Bois was an outspoken opponent of the scientific racism of his day. Along with cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, Du Bois argued extensively against the then prevalent notion that African-Americans were biologically inferior to whites. Also, in the March 16, 1953, issue of The National Guardian, Du Bois wrote "Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature."
Du Bois was chairman of the Peace Information Center at the start of the Korean War.