The Souls of Black Folk -- W.E.B. Du Bois

The Souls of Black Folk

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [and women] in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”

So wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk at the beginning of the new century. The Souls of Black Folk went into some 28 editions and was translated into many languages.

Du Bois was born of African, French and Dutch ancestry in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in1868. At sixteen he graduated from high school and for the first time went into the South of the United States. He studied at Fisk University where he wrote his first articles and edited the Fisk Herald.

In 1888 he entered Harvard University and there won the Boylston oratorical contest. Among his teachers were the famous: William James and others. Of to Germany for two years of study, he then returned to Harvard University to receive his doctorate in 1895, the first Ph. D. conferred upon a Black person by that institution.

He taught at Wilberforce and at the University of Pennsylvania; he headed the department of history and economics for thirteen years at Atlanta University.

Du Bois was a counterpoise to Booker T. Washington’s program of apprenticeship and the new liberation movement took on these two faces at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For More on W.E.B. Du Bois, the link below:

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/0history/hwny-dubois.html

Well wishes,

F. Stanley Boyd