Willam Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He earned his BA degree from Fisk University located in Nashville, Tennessee but later earned a bachelor’s from Harvard in 1890 because Harvard didn’t acknowledge the Fisk degree. In 1892, he received the opportunity to go to the University of Berlin through a stipend.
In 1895, he crossed over an educational milestone that would go down in the history books. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard.
Du Bois is known for various reasons but his writing includes a long list of accomplished works. He wrote three autobiographies and published over one hundred articles which included essays as well. He wrote over twenty books in his lifetime and was an accomplished playwright and poet.
In the first part of the twentieth century, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a prominent political activist. He became known affectionately as the "Father of Pan-Africanism". The FBI once investigated Du Bois pointing an accusing finger at him as a socialist. Interestingly enough, Du Bois was called a communist and yet he was
adamantly opposed by the communist party.
In 1959, Du Bois was adorned with the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, he actually did join a communist group. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois joined the Communist Party USA. He was ninety-three years old when he joined. In 1963, Du Bois wasn’t able to get a new US passport. Du Bois and his wife became citizens of Ghana.
Du Bois died at the age of ninety-five in Ghana. He died one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his eloquent speech, "I Have a Dream."
|