W.E.B Du Bois W.E.B. Dubois

W.E.B Du Bois

W.E.B. Dubois is one of the great precursors of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and other civil right activists from the 20th century. His ideas of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. Symbolically, his death came on the eve of the 1963 march on Washington, one of the key moments of civil rights actions in the United States. Born in Massachusetts, Dubois had an early interest about the condition of the Black individual in the U.S., as well as his origins and history. Despite the fact that he lived in a community with few Black inhabitants, he went south at an early age, traveling to Nashville, Tennessee, where he studied at Fisk.

The discrimination seen in Tennessee and the general attitude towards the Black population turned Dubois into a determined activists, aiming to obtain complete, de facto emancipation of the Black population. As a writer and editor, he would begin dedicating his time to encourage emancipation and equal rights. As a teacher at a local county school, he would also use this opportunity to drive down in the conscience of the Black population, to obtain first hand information on the problems they faced and their necessities.

While continuing his education at Harvard and then in Europe, at the prestigious University of Berlin, Dubois had the chance to see and analyze race problems at a global level and different continents and to witness and research such issues in Africa, Asia or the Americas, while at the same time living the European developments. His final doctoral research paper is called the Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America and was presented at Harvard. As we can see from the title, this tends to be an exhaustive (it is considered the authority on this subject even today) study of slave trade and its suppression in America. Dubois contribution to civil rights in this phase is research-based, an approach aimed at understanding the past and its present effects before working on improving these.

Study continued in the following years as well. Benefiting from a position with the University of Pennsylvania, he obtained the opportunity of conducting a research project on Philadelphia's slums, but also of digging more into the Black social system.

He continued to write while working at the Atlanta University and his studies and research began to spread over a wide variety of subjects related to Black culture, morality, urbanization, church and beliefs or crime. His research included research on Africa and African history and culture, as a potential framework of explanations and cultural development.

As a civil rights activist, Dubois proposed the existence of higher education for a small, privileged share of the Black population, thus placing himself on an opposing position than Booker T. Washington, who had believed that an industrial education of the Black population should be approached, which would ensure basic education for most of the population. He formed the Niagara Movement in 1906, with the declared objective to "advocate civil justice and abolish caste discrimination." The movement merged with some other activist organization to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1909. Dubois was editor in chief of the Crisis magazine, the main mean of expression for the association in the press. The magazine was successfully used to promote civil rights for Blacks, especially after the First World War, when the climate was not encouraging it.

It was in 1919, when Dubois represented the NAACP at the Paris Peace Conference that he decided on organizing a Pan-African conference, aimed at bringing Africa and Africa's problems to the knowledge of the entire world. Although the conference eventually was not organized, mainly because Dubois failed to coagulate sufficient participants and other African- American organizations, it reflected Dubois Pan-Africanism and the idea of double conscious.

Indeed, Dubois promoted and sustained the idea that, in order for Blacks to be free anywhere, they should be free everywhere. At that point, after the end of the First World War, there were only two free countries in Africa: Liberia and Ethiopia, the rest being European colonies. Dubois wanted to tie the Negro emancipation and civil rights campaigns in the United States with a more global idea of universal civil rights and Black emancipation on the African continent as well.

The conference was eventually organized in 1921, Dubois's intellectual approach was not successful in generating enough momentum to create any real change or action for the future. However, at the end of the conference, Dubois traveled to Africa for the first time and this was an opportunity to better understand Black roots and philosophy. He would continue to participate throughout his life to Pan-African conferences and he would meet with many of the intellectuals and revolutionaries who would obtain independence for the countries in Africa after 1945. It was also that Dubois would continue to protest against imperialism in Africa throughout his life and advocate for African independence.