WEB Dubois in his Youth, College Years, and Early Career, Autobiography and Biography

Today we will study and reflect on the autobiography
and the leading biography of by the black civil rights
activist WEB Dubois.
WEB Dubois belonged to the third generation of
black leaders.

Frederick Douglass belonged to the first generation
of black leaders, he was born around 1817 and
escaped from slavery in the 1830’s. He was an
abolitionist, orator and best-selling author, and was
an advisor to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

Booker T Washington was a second-generation black
leader, also born into slavery, who was a teacher and
founder of the black industrial college, Tuskegee Institute.
Washington raised vast sums from northern white
businessmen and philanthropists to fund black schools
during the dark days of Jim Crow racism, he was an
accommodationist who encouraged blacks to be
subservient, work hard, and save their pennies so that
someday their lives will improve.

WEB Du Bois was a third-generation black leader and activist,
born after the Civil War, who demanded dignity, civil rights, and
real economic opportunity for blacks. He often publicly clashed
with Booker T Washington and the Tuskegee Machine.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this
video. Please feel free to follow along our PowerPoint script
posted to SlideShare. Please, we welcome interesting questions
in the comments. Let us learn and reflect together!

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Was WEB Dubois a Communist?

To understand WEB Du Bois, you must first know
that he was truly an intellectual, you could almost
say that he was incapable of pouring out his feelings;
rather, he can instead deliver a thirty-minute
soliloquy of his feelings, displaying little emotion.

Indeed, this is how WEB
Dubois describes his
autobiography: “This book is
the Soliloquy of an old man
on what he dreams his life
has been as he sees it slowly
drifting away; and what he
would like others to believe.”
Portrait of WEB Du Bois, by V. Floyd Campbell, 1903

Like all blacks, WEB Du Bois was conscious of his race.
In his book, Souls of Black Folk, he coined the term
double-consciousness, a term that has been used by
American sociologists ever since.

WEB Du Bois explains, “It is a peculiar
sensation, this double consciousness of
blacks, this sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others, of measuring
one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks
on in amused contempt and pity. One ever
feels his two-ness, one American, another a
Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in
one dark body, who dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.”

WEB Du Bois was also a contrarian, he always marched to his own drum,
which was why he was such a successful activist. From an early age he
felt compelled to fight for the civil rights of his fellow blacks, he always
had a sense that he was one of the black elite who would work tirelessly
for civil rights, and this sense of destiny made him a contrarian, an
idealist always building a better future. Since he often was ahead of
everyone, he was often out-of-step with everyone, and at the end of his
life he developed an overly romantic vision of communism.
Most people who write their autobiography begin with an account of
their childhood, but WEB Du Bois, ever the contrarian, starts his
autobiography with a statement that he was a communist, so yea, we
have to deal with this in our final video on his life.

WEB Du Bois was ambivalent
towards religion, he was not anti-
religious, he said that in his youth
that his attitude was simply that
that “God ruled the world, Christ
lived the world, and men did
right, or tried to.”
As a child, Du Bois attended the
Congregational Church in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts. Church members collected
donations to pay Du Bois's college tuition.

WEB Du Bois tells us
that “one thing I
avoided, and that was
envy. I tried to give the
other fellow his due
even when I disliked him
personally and
disagreed with him
logically. It was a point
of honor to me never to
refuse appreciation to
one who had earned it,
no matter who he was.”
Cain and Abel, Andrei Mironov, 2015

Boyhood of WEB Du Bois, Great Barrington

But after some short chapters describing his tours of
Soviet Russia and China, WEB Du Bois tells us that he
was born in 1868, the year that the freedmen of the
South first gained the right to vote, five years after
the Emancipation Proclamation, during the years of
Radical Reconstruction.

Born as slaves, Frederick Douglass and Booker T
Washington lived in one-room dirt-floor shacks, but
WEB Du Bois had a normal childhood, he describes
his house as “quaint, with clapboards running up and
down, neatly trimmed; there were five rooms, a tiny
porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious
strawberries in the rear.” His mother’s family, the
Burghardts, had lived in the South Egremont Plain in
Massachusetts for two centuries, they had deep
roots and did not accept his father into the family.
WEB Du Bois recounts, “the black Burghardts did not
like him. He was too good-looking, too white. He had
apparently no property and no job, so far as they
knew; and they had never heard of the Du Bois
family in New York.” WEB Dubois as an infant.

His father moved to Connecticut away
for employment, sent for his wife, but
she refused to leave home. His father
never returned, and WEB Du Bois says
he “never saw him, and knew not
where or when he died.” His mother
sank into a depression that never really
lifted, she always worried, she never
married, they always lived at the edge
of poverty, but their many relations
ensured that young WEB Du Bois never
went hungry, always had decent clothes
and shoes, and after the age of twelve
always had his own room.

Academically, WEB Du Bois was a precocious child, always did well in
school, he was the “first of his clan to finish high school,” and was one of
the top students. He the only black graduate of his high school class, and
WEB Du Bois was a favorite of his white teachers. There was no explicit
discrimination, the memories of the struggles of the Civil War lingered,
many in the North supported civil rights for blacks in abstract terms,
though there was no enthusiasm for desegregated housing and
opportunity. He had white playmates when he was younger, and was
invited into many of their houses, but his white acquaintances became
more distant as he grew older. The school’s working-class neighborhood
was not overtly prosperous, there was no ostentatiously wealthy families,
and the few paupers were looked after by the local charities.”

Great
Barrington
High School,
Class of 1884

.”
Emancipation Proclamation, AA Lamb, painted 1864

Attending Fisk University, Deep South TN
Fisk 1888 University Class, alma mater of WEB Dubois

His high school class has thirteen graduates, few had the
ambition to attend college, but WEB Du Bois had no doubts
about his academic future, and several local white teachers and
civic leaders assisted with a scholarship for his studies, several
encouraged him to go South for his education. WEB Du Bois
wanted to attend Harvard, but readily accepted a place at Fisk
University in Tennessee.
This highlights a reality all blacks faced after Emancipation.
Blacks were so destitute that they needed the assistance of
sympathetic whites to really get ahead in life.

WEB Du Bois saw this
as a detour, he said
that “of course I
would go to Harvard
in the end. But Fisk
was an adventure. I
was going into the
South; the South of
slavery, rebellion and
black folk; above all, I
was going to meet
colored people of my
own age and
education, of my
own ambitions.”
Morning prayers at Fisk University Class, 1900

His family and colored friends resented this idea.
They might dictate how his miserably unhappy
mother lived her life, but her son was far more
independent, far more contrarian. Could his contrary
nature be, in part, a rebellion against the miserable
life he watched his mother live because she did not
push back against her family’s intrusive meddling?

WEB Du Bois told them, “I wanted to go
to Fisk, not simply because it was at
least a beginning of my dream of
college, but also because I was
lonesome in New England.
Unconsciously, I realized that as I grew
older, and especially now that I had
finished the public school, the close
cordial intermingling with my white
fellows would fade. There would be
meetings, parties, clubs, to which I
would not be invited.” Due to his
advanced schooling, he was placed in
the sophomore class, and became the
editor of the school newspaper.
Students and teachers, Fisk training school, 1890 - 1906.

Class at Fisk University, 1900
Fisk University, like Atlanta University, as described by
his biographer Lewis, was committed to “producing
African-American versions of New England ladies and
gentlemen, Black Puritans or Afro-Saxons, as they were
sometimes mockingly called.”

But Fisk was also located in the Deep South, blacks
had to be careful in the city streets, many of his
classmates were armed when they went into town.

Much to the consternation of his teachers and classmates,
during his summer vacation our contrarian WEB Du Bois insisted
on trudging through the countryside looking for a small school
where he could instruct the local black children. When he later
became an academic, he contracted with the Department of
Labor and applied for grants for sociological surveys of blacks in
America, and in this first project he was curious how blacks were
able to improve themselves through education in the rural
backwaters of the Deep South. You can read more details of his
Deep South school teaching days in his Souls of Black Folk.

After long walks over several days through many
towns, he encountered an eager black student, Josie
Dowell, who wanted to learn how to read. He met
Colonel Wheeler, the civic minded white man who
charitably paid his small salary, and was invited to
dinner. WEB Dubois assumed everyone would eat at
the same table; but no, in the Deep South, if you were
a Negro and were invited to dinner, that meant you
waited your turn and ate after the white people ate.

The Misses Cooke's
school room,
Freedmen's Bureau,
Richmond, Virginia,
1866.

WEB Dubois describes his one-room schoolhouse:
“The schoolhouse was a log hut, where Colonel
Wheeler used to shelter his corn. It sat in a lot behind
a rail fence where a door once was, and within, a
massive rickety fireplace; great chinks between the
logs served as windows. Furniture was scarce. A pale
blackboard crouched in the corner. My desk was
made of three boards, reinforced at critical points,
and my chair, borrowed from the landlady, had to be
returned each night.”
Tolson's Chapel and Freedmen’s
School, Sharpsburg, Maryland,
built in 1866.
“Seats for the children, these puzzled me much. I was haunted by a New England
version of neat little desks and chairs, but alas! The reality was rough plank
benches without backs, and at times without legs. The had the one virtue of
making naps dangerous, possibly fatal, for the floor was not to be trusted.”

When WEB Du Bois first started his
classes, he had as many as thirty
students, but attendance dwindled
away. Sometimes he visited the
parents to coax them to send their
children to school. He remembers
that one “father would tell me how
the crops needed the boys; and the
thin slovenly mother, whose face
was pretty when washed, assured
me that Lugene must mind the baby.
‘But we’ll start them again next
week.’ When the Lawrence children
stopped coming, I knew that the
doubts of the old folks about book
learning had conquered again.”
Freedmen's School, James Plantation, North Carolina, 1866

Onward to Harvard and Berlin
Harvard Yard 2009

After spending three years at Fisk, WEB Du Bois was selected for a scholarship to
attend Harvard, as they were seeking to expand their student body with bright
students with meager means. The colleges taught the classics in that era, he could
read and was conversant in Greek, Latin, and German. WEB Du Bois held his own at
Harvard, and was a favored student of famous professors, he read Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason with Santayana, studied under Josiah Royce, and listened
to William James debate the existence of God, and reflect on sensations and
consciousness. WEB Du Bois remembers that “William James guided me out of the
sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism,” and James encouraged
our student to join the Philosophical Club, and often invited him to his house for
dinner. WEB Du Bois did not seek out white friends his age at Harvard but found
friends among the blacks of Boston.

WEB Du Bois graduated cum laude from Harvard with a
bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1890, during the Jim Crow era
when blacks were robbed of their right to vote and denied due
process in the Deep South. WEB Du Bois was one of five students
asked to give a speech at commencement, he chose to speak on
Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, this
earned a mention in the New York Nation publication. WEB Du
Bois then earned his master’s degree; his thesis was on the
enforcement of the slave laws. He was elected to the American
Historical Society and was asked to speak at their meeting on
this topic, which again was mentioned in the Nation.

WEB Du Bois,
Harvard
graduation,
1890

The Prison Life of Jefferson Davis, by John J Craven, 1866, unknown artist

WEB Du Bois then decided to continue his studies
the University of Berlin, and not only did he lobby
Rutherford B Hayes for a scholarship; he also met
with the former president! He spent several years
studying at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a
world-renowned university.

Many leading blacks liked to tour Europe;
they left the world of Jim Crow behind
them. WEB Du Bois remembers, “in
Germany in 1892, 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.” WEB Du Bois even
had a white German girlfriend!

The University of Berlin would not recognize his work at Harvard, he would have
had to spend another year before he could sit for his doctorate, and he did not
want to reapply for an extension to his scholarship, so he decided to return home
and earn his doctorate at Harvard.

WEB Du Bois had fond
memories of Germany, he
proclaims, “as a student in
Germany, I built great castles
in Spain and lived therein. I
dreamed and loved and
wandered and sang; then
after two long years I
dropped suddenly back into
‘nigger’ hating America!”

Professor Du Bois at Wilberforce College

WEB Du Bois thought that with a Harvard PhD he would have no
problem finding a teaching job at a black college. He wrote to all the
black colleges in the country and watched the summer months roll by,
finally nabbing a position at Wilberforce University. Then better paying
offers from other schools were received, including an offer from
Tuskegee Institute, run by his future frenemy Booker T Washington, but
he turned them down as he already accepted the Wilberforce position.
WEB Du Bois was hired to teach Latin and Greek at Wilberforce, a small
black school affiliate with the African Methodist Church. He soon earned
a reputation for his contrariness, when he wandered into a prayer
meeting, it was announced that Professor Du Bois will lead us in prayer,
to which he answered, “No, he won’t,” which was a shocking retort in a
religious college, guaranteed to generate gossip and chatter.

But this contrariness was also a
strength, WEB Du Bois gives us a
frank self-analysis: “I was cocky
and self-satisfied. I doubtless
strutted and I certainly knew
what I wanted. My redeeming
feature was infinite capacity for
work and terrible earnestness,
with appalling and tactless
frankness.”

At Wilberforce WEB Du Bois “met the slender, quiet, and dark-eyed girl
Nina Gomer, who became Mrs. Du Bois in 1896.”
WEB DuBois with his wife Nina and daughter Yolande,
1901, born after the death of his son.
Like many young men, he also wanted
to raise a family, but WEB Du Bois had
this odd notion: “If a man and woman
are friends, they must be married and
their friendship may become a cloying
intimacy, often lasting 24 hours a day,
with few outside friends of the
opposite sex on pain of gossip, scandal
and even crime engulfing the family.
My travel and work away from home
saved us from that.”

Nina Gomer was not an intellectual, she devoted
herself to her children and family, and WEB Du
Bois reciprocated in his odd way, they were
married until her death five decades later. His
biographer does note that he had at least a few
affairs with adoring younger intellectuals.

Groom’s
party at the
wedding of
his daughter,
Yolanda Du
Bois, many
years later.

WEB Du Bois would not stay long at Wilberforce; the
school was often late in paying its salaries. And our
contrary Du Bois led the faculty revolt against the leader of
the school, Bishop Arnett, because he wanted to appoint
his unqualified son as a professor at the school. He knew
his days were numbered, so he accepted a one-year
position at the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant
instructor of sociology, conducting a study of the Negroes
living in Philadelphia. The thousand-page study, the
Philadelphia Negro, was published a year later.

University of
Pennsylvania, 9th
Street, lithograph by
John Caspar Wild,
1842. Benjamin
Franklin was the
primary founder and
benefactor.

As WEB Du Bois remembers,
this study “revealed the
Negro group as a symptom,
not a cause; as a striving,
palpitating group, and not an
inert, sick body of crime; as a
long historic development
and not a transient
occurrence.” He was invited
to present his findings at the
American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences in
Philadelphia, and eventually
lead to a series of studies for
the Department of Labor. Marion Anderson Concert at Lincoln Memorial, 1939

Atlanta University, Lynchings Increase

WEB Du Bois summarizes his
early teaching years, “from the
Fall of 1894 to the Spring of
1910, for sixteen years, I was a
teacher and a student of social
science. For two years I
remained at Wilberforce; for a
year and a half at the University
of Pennsylvania; and for thirteen
years at Atlanta University.” Bust of W.E.B. DuBois by Ayokunle
Odeleye at Clark Atlanta University

WEB Du Bois also remembers, “Lynchings
were a continuing horror at the start of my
teaching career. Lynchings climaxed in 1892,
when 235 persons were publicly murdered,
and in the sixteen years of my teaching
career nearly two thousand persons were
publicly killed by mobs, and not a single one
of the murderers punished.” During his early
years of Atlanta University, a race riot came
uncomfortably close to his home and his
wife and child, this helped him on his road
to increased activism.

Another experience that he relates in the Soul of
Black Folk is when his first-born son died because
the white hospital refused to admit black patients.
This caused a permanent rift in his marriage,
although his wife gave birth to a delightful daughter
a few years later, she never got over his death. His
biographer suggests that he may not have paid
enough attention to his son’s illness in its early
stages due to his heavy work burdens.

https://youtu.be/x212gx1lNIA
WEB Du Bois remembers that “his death
tore our lives in two. I threw myself more
completely into my work, while most
reason for living left the soul of my wife.”

WEB Du Bois started to gain a national reputation as a black civil rights
leader at the time of his hiring at Atlanta University. One of my recurrent
themes in my civil rights videos, and in the philosophy of this channel, is
that the black civil rights movement always shows tension between the
accommodationist Booker T Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute
and fund raiser for many black colleges, and WEB Du Bois, civil rights
activist and contrarian rebel. While Booker T Washington preaches
accommodation and hard work to prove your worth, WEB Du Bois insists
on fighting for dignity and civil rights.

After the death of Booker T Washington, the
Tuskegee Machine declined in influence, and WEB
Du Bois’ NAACP became the leading civil rights
organization.

DISCUSSION OF SOURCES:
WEB Du Bois’ autobiography is witty, he is ever the sociologist,
so in addition to writing a soliloquy, he is also describing his life
as only a sociologist can, with surprising self-revelations.
We enjoyed the description of his younger years from his
biographer, David Levering Lewis, although out of necessity the
autobiography is his major source for the boyhood and school
years of WEB Dubois. His independent observations about a
rather personal matter, his marital life, does add context.

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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WEB Dubois in his Youth, College Years, and Early Career, Autobiography and Biography

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