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License: Creative Commons - Attributions/No Derivities[1]
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Remembering W.E.B. Du Bois: a giant in the struggle for Black freedom in the US
By: []
Date: None
Today marks the birthday of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an intellectual giant who committed his life to advancing Black freedom in the US and abroad.
Born in Massachusetts in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, Du Bois attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically Black college, and became the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Harvard University in 1895.
His massive corpus of work – from ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ to ‘Black Reconstruction in America’ – is a testament to his academic genius and desire for establishing a truly equitable society.
Now, as America faces a renewed time of political crisis and racial polarization, the words of Du Bois , which offer a vision for building a multi-racial democracy, are more relevant than ever.
The long legacy of white supremacy
Du Bois’s critique of American society, in works such as his 1910 essay ‘The Souls of White Folk’, is a reminder of the historical legacy of white supremacist violence in the US.
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