W. E. B. Du Bois

Agora

W. E. B. Du Bois

1868–1963

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Black Americans are forced to see themselves through the eyes of a society that looks down on them – a “double consciousness” – and the colour line is the central problem of the modern world.

Placement

African & Africana Philosophy · North America · Society & History, Politics & Law, Epistemology

Sociologist, historian and civil-rights leader, the first African American with a Harvard doctorate: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”, and Black Americans live with a “double consciousness”, seeing themselves through the eyes of others.

Key ideas

Double consciousness
The color line and the veil
Pan-Africanism
The “psychological wage” of whiteness

Teachers: William James

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Influence

Influenced by 7

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

influenced by disputed
Zamir traced Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) to Hegel’s Phenomenology; others derive it from psychology or Emerson, so the Hegel link is disputed. S. Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (1995); D. D. Bruce Jr., “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness”, American Literature 64 (1992); SEP “W. E. B. Du Bois”
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Frederick Douglass

influenced by
Du Bois called Douglass ‘the greatest of American Negro leaders’ and set his tradition of self-assertion against Booker T. Washington’s accommodation (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”; SEP “W. E. B. Du Bois”
Evidence: AI draft
Frederick Douglass › 1818–1895
Karl Marx

influenced by
Du Bois used Marxist categories in Black Reconstruction (1935), reading the flight of the enslaved from plantations as a ‘general strike’ against slavery. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935); “Marxism and the Negro Problem”, The Crisis 40 (1933); SEP “W. E. B. Du Bois”
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Alexander Crummell

influenced by ✓
Du Bois devoted a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to Crummell, portraying his life of struggle against prejudice and doubt, and joined his American Negro Academy (1897). W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ch. XII “Of Alexander Crummell”; SEP “Alexander Crummell” (S. Thompson)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Alexander Crummell › 1819–1898
William James studied with

studied with ✓
Du Bois studied at Harvard from 1888, took James’s courses and was a guest in his home; he later called James ‘my friend and guide to clear thinking’. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (1968); Dusk of Dawn (1940)
Evidence: AI draft
William James › 1842–1910
Franz Boas

influenced by
Du Bois recalled how Boas’s Atlanta address on African kingdoms and iron-working (1906) showed that scientific neglect had let African history disappear (Black Folk Then and Now, 1939). W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now (1939); F. Boas, Atlanta University commencement address (31 May 1906)
Evidence: AI draft
Franz Boas › 1858–1942
Anna Julia Cooper

influenced by
Du Bois quoted Cooper’s ‘when and where I enter’ passage, introduced only as ‘one of our women’, in ‘The Damnation of Women’ (Darkwater, 1920). W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women”, in Darkwater (1920); A. J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892); V. M. May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist (2007)
Evidence: AI draft
Anna Julia Cooper › 1858–1964

Influenced 7

Max Weber

influenced disputed
Whether Du Bois shaped Weber’s stance on racial theory is disputed; Weber corresponded with him (1904–05), printed his essay (1906) and cited him against racial biology (1910). M. Weber to W. E. B. Du Bois, 8 Nov. 1904 and 30 Mar. 1905; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten”, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 22 (1906); Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages (1911); L. A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (2011)
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Kwame Nkrumah

influenced
Nkrumah, co-organiser of the Manchester Pan-African Congress chaired by Du Bois (1945), invited him to Ghana in 1961 to direct the Encyclopedia Africana. K. Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957); D. L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (2000)
Evidence: AI draft
Kwame Nkrumah › 1909–1972
Sylvia Wynter

influenced
Wynter took Du Bois’s ‘problem of the color line’ as the central problem of the order of ‘Man’ she seeks to overcome (‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being’, 2003). S. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Evidence: AI draft
Sylvia Wynter › b. 1928
Martin Luther King Jr.

influenced
King honoured Du Bois as a scholar who countered myths about Black history with research (‘Honoring Dr. Du Bois’, 1968); an early influence is not attested. M. L. King Jr., “Honoring Dr. Du Bois”, speech at Carnegie Hall, 23 Feb. 1968, Freedomways 8 (1968)
Evidence: AI draft
Martin Luther King Jr. › 1929–1968
Walter Mignolo

influenced
Mignolo counted Du Bois’s “double consciousness” (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) among the forms of border thinking – the consciousness of those who live on the colonial border – beside Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness; the interview is checked, the passage in the book not. W. D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (2000); interview with E-International Relations (1 June 2017)
Evidence: AI draft
Walter Mignolo › b. 1941
Charles W. Mills

influenced
Mills took up Du Bois’s ‘color line’ as a global structure of white supremacy (The Racial Contract, 1997) and later read him as a ‘Black radical liberal’ (2018). C. W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997); “W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal”, in N. Bromell (ed.), A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois (2018)
Evidence: AI draft
Charles W. Mills › 1951–2021
Paul Gilroy

influenced
Gilroy made Du Bois’s “double consciousness” a central figure of The Black Atlantic (1993): being at once inside and outside the modern West. P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), ch. 4
Evidence: AI draft
Paul Gilroy › b. 1956

Criticism

Criticized by 2

Alain Locke

criticised by
Against Du Bois’s ‘all Art is propaganda’ (1926), Locke held that propaganda perpetuates group inferiority even in protest; art should be expression (‘Art or Propaganda?’, 1928). A. Locke, “Art or Propaganda?”, Harlem 1 (1928); W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The Crisis 32 (1926); SEP “Alain LeRoy Locke”
Evidence: AI draft
Alain Locke › 1885–1954
Kwame Anthony Appiah

criticised by
Appiah argued that Du Bois’s socio-historical concept of race in ‘The Conservation of Races’ (1897) relies on the biological one it seeks to replace (‘The Uncompleted Argument’, 1985). K. A. Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race”, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 21–37; In My Father’s House (1992), ch. 2
Evidence: AI draft
Kwame Anthony Appiah › b. 1954

Works

1899The Philadelphia Negro
A door-to-door survey of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward: one of the first empirical community studies in American sociology, tracing Black poverty to discrimination and history rather than to “race”.
1903The Souls of Black Folk
Essays on “double consciousness”, the veil and the colour line – and, against Booker T. Washington’s accommodation, a claim to higher education and civil rights.
1935Black Reconstruction in America
The years after the Civil War retold from the side of the freed people: emancipation driven by a “general strike” of the enslaved, Reconstruction as an experiment in democracy overthrown by the “counter-revolution of property”.

Position

“The Souls of Black Folk” announces that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”. Black Americans, Du Bois writes, live behind a “veil” that separates them from white America, and they develop a “double consciousness”, a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”: two warring ideals, American and Black, in one body. Against Booker T. Washington’s strategy of accommodation and vocational training he demanded civil rights and higher education. In “The Conservation of Races” he asked whether races are biological or historical and cultural groups – a question still debated in the philosophy of race. “Black Reconstruction in America” reinterpreted the years after the Civil War: the enslaved had freed themselves through a “general strike”, and a “public and psychological wage” of whiteness had divided white from Black workers. Its final chapter, “The Propaganda of History”, indicted the historians who had written Black people out of the story.

Life & context

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He studied at Fisk University and at Harvard, where William James and Josiah Royce were among his teachers, spent 1892–94 at the University of Berlin, chiefly with the economist Gustav von Schmoller, and in 1895 became the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. He taught at Atlanta University, wrote “The Philadelphia Negro” (1899), a community study based on house-to-house interviews, helped found the Niagara Movement and then the NAACP, and edited its magazine “The Crisis” from 1910 to 1934. A leading organiser of the Pan-African Congresses, he moved to Ghana in 1961 at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, became a Ghanaian citizen in 1963 and died in Accra that year.