W. E. B. Du Bois used door-to-door fieldwork to demolish racial stereotypes
In 1896 a young sociologist walked Philadelphia's Black neighbourhoods, mapping who lived where, how they worked and how they died. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, became the country's first detailed case study of any Black community. Its method anticipated the famous Chicago School, and its author became a towering activist.
Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Du Bois arrived on February 23, 1868, was a mostly white town where he attended an integrated school and was encouraged by his teachers. His mother's family descended from Tom Burghardt, born in West Africa around 1730 and enslaved by a Dutch colonist, who may have won his freedom by serving in the Revolutionary army. When Du Bois chose college, his church congregation raised his tuition.
At Fisk University in Nashville he met Southern racism for the first time. Harvard refused to credit his Fisk degree, so he earned a second bachelor's there, studying under the philosopher William James. A fellowship then took him to Berlin, where he studied with leading German social scientists and met Max Weber, who later cited him as proof against claims of Black inferiority. In Germany, he wrote, he was simply treated as a student, not a curiosity. In 1895 he became the first African American to receive a Harvard doctorate.
His Philadelphia research countered the neighbourhoods' reputation for crime and poverty with evidence, convincing him that integration was essential to democratic equality. At Atlanta University he produced a stream of studies on a thin budget and hosted an annual conference on Black life; students found him brilliant but aloof. His ideas had blind spots too: he wrote dismissively of the poor he called the submerged tenth, while blaming slavery for much of their hardship, and championed an educated talented tenth.
Activism followed. He led the Niagara Movement against the Atlanta Compromise, helped found the NAACP in 1909 and edited its journal The Crisis. The Souls of Black Folk became a landmark, and Black Reconstruction in America, in 1935, rejected the claim that Black Americans caused Reconstruction's failures. A lifelong Pan-Africanist who spoke at the first Pan-African gathering in London in 1900, he later embraced socialism, was targeted by the FBI, and died in Accra, Ghana, on August 27, 1963.
Source: W. E. B. Du Bois
