The Sesquicentennial of W.E.B. Du Bois' Birth

Civil rights advocate, scholar, educator, and global activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born 150 years ago on February 23, 1868, and died August 27, 1963.

Among his many outstanding contributions were his roles in founding, in 1905, the Niagara Movement, an African American group of scholars and professionals that challenged racial discrimination, and in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was also the founder and editor of The Crisis, which was the NAACP's monthly magazine.

Du Bois earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1895, the first African American to ever do so. His dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870," was the inaugural publication of the Harvard Historical Series. In 1899, he published a major sociological work called The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Du Bois authored many other works over the course of his career, notable among them, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935).

As a global citizen, Du Bois was long committed to Pan-Africanism. He attended the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, and later organized a series of Pan-African congresses around the world. In 1961, at the invitation of its president, Du Bois received citizenship in Ghana, where he worked as director of the new Encyclopedia Africana, which was devoted to the African diaspora; he died in Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95.

For additional information on the life and work of Du Bois, check out the online guide to resources held by the Library of Congress. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has a very substantial collection, the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, 1803-1999, containing nearly 100,000 digital items. Other resources include the W.E.B. Du Bois National Historic Site in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Du Bois was born and raised, and the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, where an instrumental meeting of the Niagara Movement took place at Storer College in 1906.

Note: The photograph above was taken by Cornelius Marion Battey on May 31, 1919, and is in the collections of the Library of Congress.