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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts. His mother, Mary Burghardt, was descended from a West
African slave. His father, Alfred Du Bois, came from a long line of French
Huguenots (Protestants). As W.E.B. Du Bois himself later put it, he was born
“with a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but thank God!
no Anglo-Saxon.”
The town of Great Barrington had a small African American population and a
rather informal color line. The only people explicitly oppressed on the basis of
race were Irish immigrants. But, as Du Bois explains in our reading, there was
also a deeper, more implicit, kind of racism. Du Bois came to see himself as part
of a “problem”: the “problem of the Negro.” He understood that he was different
from others in school and that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil.”
Du Bois’s initial response was to excel at whatever he did, to make himself
exhibit A in putting the lie to racial inferiority. While still in high school, Du Bois
became a correspondent for the New York Globe,a black newspaper. He excelled
academically and, following graduation, several local churches collected money
to send him to college. In 1885, Du Bois enrolled at Fisk University, an all-black
school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Following graduation from Fisk, Du Bois received a Harvard scholarship for a
second bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Studying with William James and
George Santayana, Du Bois developed a Hegelian philosophy that made sense of
the black experience. Du Bois went on to receive an M.A. at Harvard in 1892.
Following travel in Europe, Du Bois taught Greek and Latin at Wilberforce
University, a black institution in Xenia, Ohio. At the same time, he completed his
doctorate in sociology, becoming the first African American to receive a Ph.D.
from Harvard. His dissertation,The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to theW.E.B. DU BOIS
1868–1963