W. E. B. DuBois
W.E.B. Du Bois spent most of his career focusing on race relations and he defined the problem of the color line. For most of his life he believed in integration, but towards the end of his life he began to focus on Black Nationalism after he became discouraged with the lack of progress in race relations (Allan, 2013). Du Bois was an author, a poet, civil-rights activist, Pan-Africanist, a sociologist, and he was known for many other trades that he spent his time doing throughout his life. He graduated valedictorian from high school then earned his bachelor’s degree of arts from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Then he attended Harvard University and got his bachelor of arts cum laude, and then he pursued graduate studies in history and economics at the University of Berlin. One of his biggest contributions would be founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois achieved many things throughout his life and left a mark on the social sciences and in race relations, but was not satisfied with the way things in society were when his life was ending. W.E.B. Du Bois was an important role model of his time for young African Americans and one of the key civil rights leaders of his time. His literary contributions have played a role for other civil rights leaders and been a template for society to look at as blueprints for improving racial relations. A key contribution of his was the “Philadelphia Negro” that was published in 1899. The way he conducted his research was what made the book popular and it showed how life was for African Americans in the 7th Ward. He studied the daily lives of African Americans and began to classify the black community into four major classes; Black Aristocracy, Black working class, Black working poor, and the Submerged tenth (Harrison, 2013). Du Bois’s most famous book was “Souls of Black Folk” because this book was one of the first books written by a social scientist to analyze the situation of
Cited: Allan, Kenneth. Explorations in Classical Sociological Theory: Seeing the Social World. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge, 2005. Print. Harrison, Daniel. Lecture. 2013. "NAACP History: W.E.B. Dubois." NAACP. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2013. . "W.E.B. DuBois: Picking Up Where Marx Left Off." Yahoo Contributor Network. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013. .