Retracing Du Bois’ missteps

Radcliffe fellow probes ‘tragedy’ of pioneering African-American scholar’s failed book on WWI

Radcliffe fellow Chad Williams is working on a book about what he considers one of W.E.B. Du Bois’ greatest missteps: “The Black Man and the Wounded World,” an unfinished history of the African-American experience during World War I.

By any measure, W.E.B. Du Bois was an intellectual giant. A historian, writer, editor, teacher, sociologist, and civil rights activist, he was also the first African-American to receive a Harvard Ph.D., co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and author of several groundbreaking books, including “Black Reconstruction in America” (1935).

Biographies / W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

 W.E.B. Du Bois

1868–1963

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1869, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Raised primarily by his mother, he was an African American writer, civil rights activist, sociologist, historian, educator, and poet.

As a civil rights leader, Du Bois founded both the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, striving for equality in America for the African American community.

As a trailblazer for sociology, he conducted several social studies on the Black communities of Southeast America under the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the late 1890s, introducing the importance of statistical analysis in sociological studies.

His many books include Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Dover Publications, 1920), an autobiographical collection of essays and poems, and the novels The Quest of the Silver Fleece (Broadway Books, 1911), Dark Princess: A Romance (University Press of Mississippi, 1928), several Atlanta University publications Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans (1907), and his most prominent book The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), among other works. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, in Ghana. 

POETS