In Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935), he wrote about the role Black Americans played during Reconstruction, a role that had been hitherto ignored by white historians. In addition to the articles and editorials he wrote for the Crisis, Du Bois produced a number of books on the history of Black American experience and on the problems of racial prejudice. Du Bois: Essays and Editorials from “The Crisis.” In 1973 Henry Lee Moon gathered a number of essays and articles written by Du Bois for Crisis and published them in book form as The Emerging Thought of W. As the editor of the Crisis, a journal put out by the NAACP, he became a well-known spokesman for the Black cause. Du Bois helped to establish the NAACP and worked as its director of publicity and research for many years. Although this movement disintegrated, it served as the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Indeed, his reputation may largely rest on this remarkable document, which had a profound effect on the minds of black people.”Ī few years after The Souls of Black Folk was published, Du Bois banded with other Black leaders and began the Niagra Movement, which sought to abolish all distinctions based on race. Cruse and Carolyn Gipson noted in the New York Review of Books that “nowhere else was Du Bois’s description of the Negro’s experience in American Society to be given more succinct expression… Souls is probably his greatest achievement as a writer. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men.” In retrospect, many scholars have pointed to The Souls of Black Folk as a prophetic work. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds-so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this-we must unceasingly and firmly oppose him. Washington and his followers, who favored assimilation and argued for the gradual development of the “Negro race” through vocational training. explained in his Black Literature in America that white Americans were not “ready to respond favorably to Du Bois’s scrupulously accurate portrayal of the hypocrisy, hostility, and brutality of white America toward black America.” Many Black readers were also shocked by the book because Du Bois announced his opposition to the conciliatory policy of Booker T. The Souls of Black Folk was not well received when it first appeared. By 1903 he stated in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and he spent the remainder of his long life trying to break down racial barriers. Trained as a sociologist, Du Bois began to document the oppression of Black people and their strivings for equality in the 1890s. Du Bois eventually received his doctorate from Harvard. After graduating from Fisk, he enrolled at Harvard, and later at the University of Berlin though he returned to the US after his funding ran out. Of French and African descent, Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and attended Fisk University in Tennessee. Du Bois was at the vanguard of the civil rights movement in America.
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