What did w.e.b. du bois accomplish

W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a scholar, educator, editor, and civil rights activist.  He was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. and a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Du Bois was also a strong advocate of women’s rights.

Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.  As a child, Du Bois reported for the local newspaper, and in 1884 he graduated as valedictorian from his high school.  He went on to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and received a bachelor degree in 1888.  While in Tennessee, Du Bois spent his summers teaching at rural African American schools.  Upon receiving his degree, Du Bois moved on to Harvard University, where he received another bachelor degree in 1890 and his masters in 1891.  While still at Harvard in 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D.  His degree was in history and his dissertation focused on the African slave trade.  Next, Du Bois went to the University o

W.E.B. Du Bois

Before becoming a founding member of NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois was already well known as one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era. The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, Du Bois published widely before becoming NAACP's director of publicity and research and starting the organization's official journal, The Crisis, in 1910.

Leading Intellectual

Du Bois, a scholar at the historically Black Atlanta University, established himself as a leading thinker on race and the plight of Black Americans. He challenged the position held by Booker T. Washington, another contemporary prominent intellectual, that Southern Blacks should compromise their basic rights in exchange for education and legal justice. He also spoke out against the notion popularized by abolitionist Frederick Douglass that Black Americans should integrate with white society. In an essay published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897, "Strivings of the Negro People," Du Bois wrote that Black Americans should instead embrace their African heritage even as they worked and lived in

W. E. B. Du Bois

Holt, Thomas C.. "Du Bois, W. E. B.." African American National Biography. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford African American Studies Center.

W. E. B. Du Bois,

(23 Feb. 1868–27 Aug. 1963),

scholar, writer, editor, and civil rights pioneer, was born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, a barber and itinerant laborer. In later life Du Bois made a close study of his family origins, weaving them rhetorically and conceptually—if not always accurately—into almost everything he wrote. Born in Haiti and descended from mixed race Bahamian slaves, Alfred Du Bois enlisted during the Civil War as a private in a New York regiment of the Union army but appears to have deserted shortly afterward. He also deserted the family less than two years after his son's birth, leaving him to be reared by his mother and the extended Burghardt kin. Long resident in New England, the Burghardts descended from a fr

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