W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from His Writings

W.E.B. Du Bois

Nov 2013 · Courier Corporation

About this eBook

A towering figure in African-American history, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) created a substantial literary legacy beyond such seminal works as The Souls of Black Folk. This volume highlights his other nonfiction writings and should be of great value to students in secondary school and college as well as to other readers.
Contents include:
Strivings of the Negro People (1897); A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South (1899); The Song of the Smoke (1899); The Black North: A Social Study (1901); The Sorrow Songs (1903); The Talented Tenth (1903); Credo (1904); Address of the Niagara Movement to the Country (1906); Religion in the South (1907); The Value of Agitation (1907); The Case (1907); The Burden of Black Women (1907); Evolution of the Race Problem (1909); Politeness (1911); Jesus Christ in Georgia (1911); The Upbuilding of Black Durham: The Success of the Negroes and Their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City (1912); Intermarriage (1913); Socialism and the Negro Problem (1913); Woman Suffrage (1915); Booker T. Washington (1915); The Shadow of Years (1918); Returning Soldiers (1919); Let Us Reason Together (1919); The Souls of White Folk (1920); The Damnation of Women (1920); and Again, Social Equality (1920).

About the author

Civil rights leader and author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868. He earned a B.A. from both Harvard and Fisk universities, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and studied at the University of Berlin. He taught briefly at Wilberforce University before he came professor of history and economics at Atlanta University in Ohio (1896-1910). There, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he pointed out that it was up to whites and blacks jointly to solve the problems created by the denial of civil rights to blacks. In 1905, Du Bois became a major figure in the Niagara Movement, a crusading effort to end discrimination. The organization collapsed, but it prepared the way for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in which Du Bois played a major role. In 1910, he became editor of the NAACP magazine, a position he held for more than 20 years. Du Bois returned to Atlanta University in 1932 and tried to implement a plan to make the Negro Land Grant Colleges centers of black power. Atlanta approved of his idea, but later retracted its support. When Du Bois tried to return to NAACP, it rejected him too. Active in several Pan-African Congresses, Du Bois came to know Fwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, and Jono Kenyatta the president of Kenya. In 1961, the same year Du Bois joined the Communist party, Nkrumah invited him to Ghana as a director of an Encyclopedia Africana project. He died there on August 27, 1963, after becoming a citizen of that country.