W.E.B. Du Bois

1868-1963 · American · Race, Political Philosophy, Historical Sociology, Pan-Africanism

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

Born three years after Emancipation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, W.E.B. Du Bois became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, studied historical economics in Berlin, and declared in 1900 that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." His early work set a new standard: "The Philadelphia Negro" (1899) combined statistical rigor with door-to-door fieldwork, and his Atlanta University Studies produced sixteen volumes of sociology on Black American life.

Topics W.E.B. Du Bois addresses

• the color line
• double consciousness
• the Veil
• second-sight
• the sorrow songs
• the Talented Tenth
• the conservation of races
• the race concept
• the seventh son
• abolition-democracy
• the propaganda of history
• the dark proletariat
• Pan-Africanism
• the Pan-African Congresses
• the Niagara Movement
• the Atlanta Compromise
• the New Negro
• all art is propaganda
• criteria of Negro art
• the folk and the masses
• the Talented Tenth Memorial Address
• the counter-sublime
• race and the human sciences
• the gift of Black folk

Converse with W.E.B. Du Bois on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in W.E.B. Du Bois's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.