Review of A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (Ed. Nick Bromell) (original) (raw)

W.E.B. Du Bois: Reshaping the American Civil Rights Movement - In Contrast to Booker T. Washington

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois was the preeminent scholar, thinker, writer and African-American social realist, who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advocated for the strengthening of black civil rights, voting rights, equality and higher educational opportunities. In his greatest literary production, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois tackles the most important and highly-divisive issue of his time, the color line between blacks and whites in America. He speaks to the African-American struggle of coping with the “double-consciousness” that afflicted the black man’s sense of worth and made him look at himself as if through the eyes of others. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His childhood was one of fun, family and friendship, but he would learn where he stood as a young black man early on when he found himself rejected by a white girl in school. Du Bois would harness lofty ambitions, his thirst for knowledge and graduate from Fisk University in 1888. Later that year, he began his graduate studies at Harvard University and then graduated 1892 with a degree in History. Du Bois would commence his doctoral studies at the University of Berlin before moving back to the United States and returned to Harvard where he wrote The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 as his doctoral dissertation. This inaugural production would become one of his most famous literary works and it would earn him his Ph.D plus the honor of becoming the first African-American to do so. After a stint at the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois moved on to Atlanta University in 1897 where he would teach Sociology and begin his intense research and study into African-American history and life. Du Bois would forever refocus his energies towards activism for black rights soon after he found a black man, who was accused of rape and murder, whom he was scheduled to present an appeal for, brutally lynched, dismembered and burned at the stake. Six years later, in 1903, Du Bois would release The Souls of Black Folk, a far-reaching and learned sociological study of the quest for black equality and civil rights in a country that neither guaranteed them their rights and looked upon them as sub-human, property and ⅗ of a man. One particular chapter in The Souls of Black Folk castigates Booker T. Washington’s stance regarding black suffrage, equality and civil rights. It would be damning indictment against a man, in Washington, who up until then, was looked upon and revered as the preeminent black scholar and advocate for African-American rights. Du Bois would forever change how the black community, whites in the South and North, and history in general view Washington’s soft-handed and conciliatory tone toward the oppressive white masters in the South.