An American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks.
Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era. He wrote the first scientific treatise in the field of sociology; and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains insightful essays on sociology, politics and history.
Contents
The Negro in the South (1907)
The Conservation of Races (1897)
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue
The Negro Problem (1908)
The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911)
The Negro (1915)
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (1896)
Darkwater (1920)
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
The Negro (1915)
The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro peoples. Archæological research in Africa has just begun, and many sources of information in Arabian, Portuguese, and other tongues are not fully at our command; and, too, it must frankly be confessed, racial prejudice against darker peoples is still too strong in so-called civilized centers for judicial appraisement of the peoples of Africa. Much intensive monographic work in history and science is needed to clear mooted points and quiet the controversialist who mistakes present personal desire for scientific proof.
Darkwater (1920)
A human document of extraordinary intensity and insight, dealing with the place of the darker races in the modern world.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
An extraordinarily vital and interesting book by an able advocate of his race's spiritual rights. Mr. Du Bois is a graduate of Harvard University and a professor in the University of Atlanta, and himself a man of great culture, he has always contended for the spiritual uplifting of the negro as opposed to Mr. Booker Washington's practical and material theories.
