Constitutional Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois

This series of profiles features noteworthy people over the past 250 years who have shaped the American constitutional tradition in various ways. In this post, National Constitution Center content fellow Trey Sullivan looks at the pioneering work of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose work on race and justice included co-founding the NAACP.

A scholar and an activist, a poet and an essayist, a classically trained aesthete who died a Marxist––the life of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois defies easy categorization. Yet throughout his kaleidoscopic career, one constant remains: Du Bois’s meditations on race, justice, and democracy have endured as crucial touchstones for generations of Americans long after his death.

Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, to Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, who deserted the family when Du Bois was young. Within the supportive white community of Great Barrington, Du Bois was generally well-supported; he thrived in the town’s integrated school system, quickly rising to the top of his class. Yet, Du Bois’s later writings also reflect the moments in which he was made acutely aware of his racial difference. He describes an elementary school gift exchange abruptly ended when “one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card”; in this moment, he realized “with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others.” These early experiences shaped Du Bois’s lifelong commitment to combatting racial prejudice.

After graduating from high school, Du Bois matriculated at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from Fisk in 1888, Du Bois enrolled at Harvard, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree in 1890 and was selected to give the university’s commencement address. In 1895, Du Bois received his doctorate in history from Harvard, becoming the first African American to do so.

While enrolled at Harvard, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, a student at Wilberforce University. The couple remained together until Nina’s death in 1950 and had two children. Following Nina’s death, Du Bois remarried in 1951 to Shirley Graham, an old friend.

In 1896, Du Bois was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a sociological study of the Black population in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. For more than a year, Du Bois lived just a few blocks from the National Constitution Center. There, after over 800 hours of interviews in roughly 2,500 households, Du Bois authored his first major publication, The Philadelphia Negro. This exacting study was meant to analyze the “race problem” and identify effective solutions.

Building on these themes, in 1903 Du Bois published what has become the Ur-text in African American social thought, The Souls of Black Folk. The book opens with a simple, but powerful assessment of contemporary life: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Within the book, Du Bois advanced his now-famous formulation of “double consciousness” ––the idea that African Americans constantly wrestle with an inherent tension between “American” and “African” identity.

During this time, Du Bois also emerged as the most prominent counterweight to Booker T. Washington, another well-known Black leader. While Washington advocated a policy of political conservatism, economic self-help, accommodation to Jim Crow policies, Du Bois believed that African Americans should be fully integrated in the political, social, and intellectual life of the broader American community.

Still, Du Bois was not yet the political radical he would later become. At the turn of the century, he was not averse to placing limits on access to the ballot for Black and white voters alike, so long as exclusions were based on educational qualifications rather than race. Indeed, Du Bois generally adhered to a classist mindset, arguing in his controversial Talented Tenth essay that “the best of the race” —that is, the most talented ten percent of African Americans —would uplift the broader community.

Following his success in publishing, Du Bois turned to more grassroots activism. In 1904, Du Bois joined William Monroe Trotter and others to form the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization advocating full political equality for African Americans. Despite initial excitement, the Niagara Movement ultimately floundered; yet this experience laid the groundwork for Du Bois’s co-founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. At the NAACP, Du Bois served as an officer, board member, and editor of its newspaper, The Crisis.

While Du Bois was physically rooted in the United States, his interests in the issues of race and justice were global. In 1900, he attended the first Pan-African Conference, which was held in London. This would be the first of seven gatherings hosted between 1900 and the end of the Second World War. This growing interest in global systems of power and exploitation compelled Du Bois to study Marxist thought. In 1935, Du Bois published his most important historical work, Black Reconstruction in America, which provided a Marxian analysis of Black labor during and after the Civil War. Du Bois’s analysis was so incisive that nearly a century later, Black Reconstruction remains a foundational text among historians.

In the years following World War II, Du Bois became increasingly involved in progressive politics. Du Bois’s political shift coincided with the rise of Communist paranoia during the McCarthy era. Indeed, for most of the 1950s, Du Bois was denied a passport for foreign travel. When the restrictions were lifted, Du Bois relocated to the newly independent Ghana on the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah. Before leaving the United States for Ghana in 1961, Du Bois enrolled in the American Communist Party, believing it to be the only path towards an equitable future for Black Americans. Explaining his decision, Du Bois wrote, in part, “Capitalism cannot reform itself.” Communism, he concluded, was “the only way of human life.”

Du Bois never returned to the United States. He died on August 27, 1963, one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.

Trey Sullivan is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Marshall Scholar.