W.E.B. Du Bois
PoliticalModernAmerican
He coined 'double consciousness' — the sense of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others — and spent sixty years fighting the world that made it necessary.
Du Bois was born in Massachusetts, became the first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, and went south to study the conditions of Black life in Philadelphia and Atlanta. The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, introduced double consciousness: the sense in which Black Americans must see themselves both as they are and through the eyes of a world that regards them as a problem. This is not merely psychological description — it names a specific social damage. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited its journal The Crisis for decades, making it the most influential African-American publication of the early twentieth century. He debated Booker T. Washington on whether Black Americans should seek accommodation or demand full equality. He traveled to Weimar Germany, to Soviet Russia, to Maoist China, searching for models of what a just society might look like — and was persecuted by the American government for what he found there. He died in Ghana at ninety-five, the night before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech, having lived long enough to see that the century's end was not in sight.
Places
Ideas
Words
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
“One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
Works
The Souls of Black Folk
·
The founding text of African-American philosophy. Du Bois introduces double consciousness — the sense of always looking at yourself through the eyes of others — and argues that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. Each chapter opens with a bar of slave music, placed beside lines from European poetry, enacting the double inheritance the book describes.
Black Reconstruction in America
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A revisionist history of the Reconstruction era, arguing that Black workers and freedmen were active agents of democratic change after the Civil War — and that their exclusion from the historical record is itself an act of political suppression. Du Bois coined the term 'the wages of whiteness' to describe how poor white workers were compensated in status rather than wages for their racial loyalty.
Life & Moments
First Black American PhD from Harvard
In 1895, W.E.B. Du Bois became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University. His dissertation, 'The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870,' was published as the first volume in Harvard Historical Monographs. He had also studied in Berlin under Heinrich von Treitschke and Gustav von Schmoller, encountering European social science and carrying it back to the American question.
The Souls of Black Folk published
Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk gathered essays Du Bois had written for The Atlantic and other journals. Its opening line — 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line' — remains perhaps the most prescient sentence in American intellectual history. The concept of double consciousness, of the veil, and of the gift of second sight became foundational to African-American thought and shaped Fanon, Baldwin, and a century of successors.
Co-founded the NAACP
In 1909, Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the civil rights organization that would become the country's most powerful. He edited its journal, The Crisis, from its founding in 1910 until 1934, building it to a circulation of 100,000. The journal published poetry by Langston Hughes, fiction by Jessie Fauset, and Du Bois's own increasingly urgent political analyses.
Influence
Influenced by
- Rabindranath Tagore
Du Bois and Tagore exchanged admiration across the Atlantic; both critiqued Western nationalism while engaging with its forms. Tagore's insistence that Asian civilization had something to teach the West, not merely to receive from it, paralleled Du Bois's argument that the 'gift of Black folk' was a specific cultural contribution, not just a claim on rights.
Influenced
- Frantz Fanon
Fanon cited Du Bois's concept of double consciousness as a predecessor to his own analysis of the colonized psyche — the internal split produced when the colonized person must see themselves through the colonizer's eyes. Both argued that this psychological damage precedes and shapes economic and political oppression.
- Kwame Anthony Appiah
Appiah grew up reading Du Bois and wrote In My Father's House partly as a sustained engagement with Du Bois's philosophy of race. He challenged Du Bois's racial essentialism — the idea that there is a 'gift' specific to African peoples — while honoring the moral seriousness of his project.
- Steve Biko
Du Bois's account of double consciousness — the sense of seeing oneself always through alien eyes — provided Biko with a framework for analyzing what apartheid had done to Black South Africans' self-perception. Black Consciousness was, among other things, a program for undoing the psychological damage Du Bois had named.
- bell hooks
hooks extended Du Bois's analysis of how race shapes self-perception to the specific position of Black women, arguing that mainstream feminism and mainstream civil rights thought each captured only part of a Black woman's double, or triple, consciousness.
