Biography dubois race w.e.b
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
To live other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived.
Du Bois began his intellectual life in the 1870s, a prodigious New England preteen saving odd job money to buy Macaulay’s History of England on an installment plan—and died in 1963, a Pan-Africanist Marxist with a villa in Accra, capital of newly-independent Ghana, and a chauffeured limousine provided by the Soviet embassy. So yeah, Lewis had a lot of ground to cover, plenty of change “to live over.”
Du Bois requires two +500 page volumes (this is the first) in which Lewis synchronizes his subject’s restless ninety-five years with an account of the turbulent modernity he inhabited and strove so variously to interpret. This book is full of fascinating microhistories. Every page is dense, chewy with a trenchant portrait or ideological summary or sketch of socio-political context; the history of the United States from Andrew Johnson to Lyndon Johnson, from the Civil War in which Du Bois’s father fought to the Vietnam War he predicted and denounced a decade in advance; imperialism, Gilded Age economics, race and class dynamics, assimilation and separatism, Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Bismarck and Négritude, German philosophy, Romantic Nationalism, and every stripe of social thought. In some people egoism is a revelation of spirit; Du Bois’ life is a political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.
T
December 12, 1993
A Great and Difficult ManBy WALDO E. MARTIN JR.
W. E. B. DU BOIS Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. By David Levering Lewis. |
n 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) observed that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." That prophecy haunts us as we stumble toward the 21st. Early in his life Du Bois concluded that his personal destiny was inextricably tied to the liberation struggle of his people, "the race" -- first African-Americans and later Africans everywhere. Du Bois saw himself as an intellectual and activist working for the realization of the hopes of the world's dispossessed and for progressive social movements in all nations. For him, the black liberation struggle was neither narrow nor provincial; it was a driving wedge in all movements for liberation and self-determination, especially those waged by people of color, the third world, or what he also called "the darker peoples." So the subtitle of David Levering Lewis's remarkable study, "W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919," is most apt.
Mr. Lewis -- the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of books on King, the Dreyfus Affair and the Harlem Renaissance -- has written an engaging history of Du Bois's exciting and long life. This volume, covering the first half of that life, provides multilayered readings of issues and developments in American and world history during the turbulent period from just after the Civil War until just after World War I. Mr. Lewis examines a tremendous amount of information, but never overwhelms the reader. He carefully analyzes the historical, sociological, literary and journalistic works of Du Bois, including the often self-contradictory autobiographical volumes, without confusing the reader. Likewise, he reveals the political, economic and social development of the nation in a way that illuminates Du Bois Nonfiction book written by David Levering Lewis First edition Publication date W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 is a nonfiction book written by historian David Levering Lewis and published in 1993 by Henry Holt and Company. The book studies the early and middle years of Du Bois's life. It is the first in a two-part biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994, as did Lewis's second installment, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963, winning the Pulitzer in 2001.W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
Author David Levering Lewis Language English Genre Nonfiction Publisher Henry Holt 1993 Publication place United States Media type Print (hardback & paperback) Pages 752 ISBN 978-0-8050-3568-1 Preceded by The Harlem Renaissance Reader (editor) Followed by When Harlem Was in Vogue References
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W.E.B. Du Bois
(1868-1963)
Who Was W.E.B. Du Bois?
Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. He wrote extensively and was the best-known spokesperson for African American rights during the first half of the 20th century. Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Early Life and Education
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, better known as W.E.B. Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
While growing up in a mostly white American town, Du Bois identified himself as mulatto, but freely attended school with white people and was enthusiastically supported in his academic studies by his white teachers.
In 1885, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Fisk University. It was there that he first encountered Jim Crow laws. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism.
After earning his bachelor's degree at Fisk, Du Bois entered Harvard University. He paid his way with money from summer jobs, scholarships and loans from friends. After completing his master's degree, he was selected for a study-abroad program at the University of Berlin.
While a pupil in Germany, he studied with some of the most prominent social scientists of his day and was exposed to political perspectives that he touted for the remainder of his life.
Harvard Ph.D.
Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895.
He went on to enroll as a doctoral student at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität). He would be awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Humboldt decades later, in 1958.
Writing and Activism
Du Bois published his landmark study — the first case study of an African American community — The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), marking the beginning of his expansive writing career.
In the study, he coined the