Du Bois
was born three years after the
American Civil War on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington,
Massachussetts.
His mother was Mary Sylvania Burghardt, a short
and attractive brown-skinned woman who worked most of her life
as a domestic in Great Barrington.
His mulatto father, Alfred
Du Bois, was a descendant of French Huguenot ancestry from Haiti
and a barber by trade.
Du Bois knew much less about his father, although he was
able trace his father's ancestry to a seventeenth-century
white French Huguenot farmer residing in the west Indies named
Chretien Du Bois. Further down the lineage was Du bois's grandfather,
the short, stern Alexander Du Bois, who was light enough to
pass for white but chose a black identity instead.Du Bois was prolific as a scholar, author, editor, writer,
and social activist. He combined his scholarship with organized
social protest from 1896 to 1963, producing an enormous amount
of written work in history and sociology as well as critical
pieces about current events. His amazing ability to utilize
the unique insights of so many disciplines gave his work depth
and beauty.
Beginning with his dissertation, published in
1896- the first of the Harvard historical studies project-
Du Bois commenced a long career of examining key aspects of
the black experience. In his work he showed America's failure
to stop the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of Africans because
of economic considerations, even though its abolition was
a matter of morality and the enforcement of constitutional
law.In the 1950s Du Bois was leaning more and more towards a
socialist conception of the world and became acutely critical
of capitalism, a system he felt was incapable of providing
food, clothing, and shelter for the masses of working-class
people, both black and non-black.
Du Bois always believed
that there was a connection between world war and who controlled
the rich mineral and material resources in Africa. He ran
for senator of New York on the Progressive Party ticket and
collected a quarter-million votes.Du-Bois is probably the greatest example of a black intellect
in America. It was his vast knowledge and skill at utilizing
the specific insights of so many disciplines that made his
written work so profound and insightful.
The amount of work
he produced is so voluminous that his literary executor Herbert
Aptheker compares him to Charles Dickens. henry Louis Gates
estimates that his Annotated Bibliography of writings in magazines,
journals, books, encyclopedias, pamphlets, leaflets, and manifestos
balances out to Du Bois writing something scholarly every
twelve days of his life for over fifty years.
He was indeed
a "Renaissance man" in the sense that at the turn
of the century, few blacks were trained in history and one
on sociology; he wrote two novels and a play; he produced
studies on religion, business, education, and labor; he organized
conferences; he taught at three universities; he wrote hundreds
of essays and articles for several newspapers, some of which
he submitted weekly; he created periodicals for adults and
children; and he was a husband and a father.
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