50 Fun Facts About W. E. B. Du Bois

Which Nobel-winning physicist offered to be a character witness for W. E. B. Du Bois at his 1951 federal trial?

Albert Einstein never took the stand: the judge dismissed the case before the defense needed to call him. Du Bois told the story of the trial in his memoir In Battle for Peace.

In which West African country did W. E. B. Du Bois settle at age 93 and later become a citizen?

Ghana gave Du Bois a state funeral when he died there in 1963, aged 95. He had taken its citizenship that year, after the United States refused to renew his passport.

Which Tuskegee educator's bargain of accepting segregation for jobs did W. E. B. Du Bois famously oppose?

Booker T. Washington struck the deal with white Southern leaders in 1895, and Du Bois at first sent him congratulations. He later argued that Black Americans should fight for full equal rights instead.

Which monthly NAACP magazine did W. E. B. Du Bois name, launch in 1910 and edit for more than two decades?

The Crisis reached a circulation of 100,000 in 1920. Du Bois filled it with editorials against lynching, and once printed a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 cases.

W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctorate from which university, after studying in Germany?

Harvard had already made him earn a second bachelor's degree, because it would not accept the credits from his first college. He paid his way with summer jobs, scholarships and loans.

Which 1903 essay collection by W. E. B. Du Bois was compared in impact to Uncle Tom's Cabin?

The Souls of Black Folk drew that comparison from the writer James Weldon Johnson. It turns personal near its end, where Du Bois recounts the death of his first child in infancy.

Which Jamaican founder of the Black Star Line did W. E. B. Du Bois denounce in a series of articles?

Marcus Garvey urged a return to Africa, while Du Bois wanted full equality at home. The feud turned personal, and the two leaders never made a serious attempt to work together.

W. E. B. Du Bois, borrowing a Frederick Douglass phrase, named what as the problem of the twentieth century?

The color line became his shorthand for the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine in American life. He used the phrase again to open his best-known book.

Which silent film did W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP fight to ban in 1915 over its racist portrayals?

The Birth of a Nation survived the campaign, and the controversy may even have added to its fame. The publicity did draw many new supporters to the young NAACP.

How did W. E. B. Du Bois insist his French-derived surname be pronounced, correcting anyone who got it wrong?

Doo-BOYSS, with the accent on the last syllable, was the only version he accepted. His great-grandfather was a French-American of Huguenot descent, but Du Bois refused the French pronunciation.

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, a largely white town in which New England state?

Massachusetts gave him an integrated childhood: he attended the local public school and played with white classmates. The site of his boyhood home there is now a National Historic Landmark.

Which historically Black university in Nashville did W. E. B. Du Bois attend on money raised by his hometown neighbors?

Fisk gave the young New Englander his first experience of Southern racism. Like many of his classmates, he taught school during a summer break to help pay for his studies.

Which city's 1900 world's fair awarded W. E. B. Du Bois a gold medal for an exhibit of photographs and charts?

Paris fairgoers saw hundreds of photographs of Black American life, which Du Bois compiled to challenge the racist caricatures of the day. The materials are now housed at the Library of Congress.

W. E. B. Du Bois's 1899 study of a Black city neighborhood was a landmark of which young academic discipline?

Sociology in America owes Du Bois an early debt: he mapped social data onto city neighborhoods years before the Chicago School made the method famous.

Which 1912 presidential candidate did W. E. B. Du Bois endorse, then regret backing once federal hiring was segregated?

Woodrow Wilson had promised to support Black causes in exchange for the endorsement. Backing a Democrat broke the rules of the Socialist Party, and Du Bois was forced to resign from it.

What name did W. E. B. Du Bois popularize for the college-educated Black elite he expected to lead the race?

The Talented Tenth was a phrase white Northern philanthropists coined in 1896, but Du Bois made it famous as the title of a 1903 essay. He wanted Black colleges to teach the liberal arts and train leaders.

Which activist group did W. E. B. Du Bois help found in 1905 at a hotel in Fort Erie, Ontario?

Niagara Movement members met in Canada only at the last minute: their conference had been planned for Buffalo, just across the river. The group took the nearby falls as its symbol.

Which political party did W. E. B. Du Bois join at the age of 93 to protest a Supreme Court ruling?

Communist Party membership was his answer to a ruling that upheld a law requiring communists to register with the government. He joined in October 1961, the same month he left the United States for good.

Which landmark US law, embodying reforms W. E. B. Du Bois had long demanded, passed the year after he died in 1963?

The Civil Rights Act became law almost a year after his death. Du Bois died the day before the great 1963 march on the US capital, where the crowd honored him with a moment of silence.

W. E. B. Du Bois joined an NAACP delegation in San Francisco in 1945 at the founding conference of which world body?

The United Nations disappointed him from the start: his proposal condemning the colonial system won support from only a few delegations and was left out of the final charter.

In which German city did W. E. B. Du Bois do graduate work in the 1890s on a Slater Fund fellowship?

Berlin was where Du Bois felt he came of age intellectually, studying under some of the country's leading social scientists and travelling widely across Europe.

At which Ohio university did W. E. B. Du Bois take his first faculty post and marry a student, Nina Gomer?

Wilberforce was one of several schools that offered him work in 1894, and Tuskegee Institute was another. He stayed two years before leaving for a research post.

Which term did W. E. B. Du Bois use in an 1897 Atlantic article for seeing oneself through hostile white eyes?

Double consciousness described the strain of being both an American and a Black person in a society that scorned the second. Du Bois thought the divided identity could yet become a strength.

Which 1899 book by W. E. B. Du Bois drew on thousands of door-to-door interviews in one city's Seventh Ward?

The Philadelphia Negro rested on more than 5,000 interviews gathered by Du Bois and a single assistant. Its evidence undercut the claim that Black poverty and illness were matters of biology.

Which 1935 history by W. E. B. Du Bois was virtually ignored by mainstream historians until the 1960s?

Black Reconstruction put freed people at the center of the story of the post-Civil War South. It is now widely seen as the founding text of a revised history of the era.

Which future African president, whom W. E. B. Du Bois met in Manchester in 1945, later invited him to Africa?

Kwame Nkrumah wanted Du Bois at his country's independence celebration in 1957, but the US government was still holding the scholar's passport. Du Bois finally made the trip in 1960.

Which Harlem Renaissance poet married Yolande, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, before a crowd of 3,000 in 1928?

Countee Cullen planned the wedding with his future father-in-law, with little input from the bride. The couple divorced within two years.

W. E. B. Du Bois angered fellow activists with "Close Ranks", an editorial urging Black Americans to support which war?

World War I brought him the offer of an Army officer's commission, tied to his writing the piece. Many Black leaders criticized the sudden reversal, and the commission was later withdrawn.

Which abolitionist was the subject of a biography W. E. B. Du Bois spent five years writing?

John Brown fascinated Du Bois, but the book was attacked by a magazine whose owner was writing a rival life of the same man. White scholars largely ignored it.

In which city did W. E. B. Du Bois give the closing address of the First Pan-African Conference in 1900?

London hosted delegates gathered by Caribbean organizers, among them a Trinidadian barrister. Du Bois's speech asked European leaders to let their colonies govern themselves.

Which German social theorist met W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1890s and later cited him to rebut racist theories?

Max Weber was highly impressed by the young American, and met him again in 1904 on a visit to the United States, just before publishing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Which playwright and composer became the second wife of W. E. B. Du Bois in 1951 and moved abroad with him?

Shirley Graham brought a son, David, to the marriage. He grew close to Du Bois, took his stepfather's name and worked for African-American causes himself.

Which singer and actor chaired the Council on African Affairs while W. E. B. Du Bois served as its vice-chair?

Paul Robeson was among the left-wing friends the NAACP wanted Du Bois to drop as the Cold War began. He refused, and the association helped end his NAACP career in 1948.

Down which New York street did the 1917 Silent Parade, which W. E. B. Du Bois helped organize, march?

Fifth Avenue fell quiet as thousands of Black marchers walked to a muffled drum beat, answering a massacre in East St. Louis. It was the first parade of its kind in New York.

At which Georgia institution did W. E. B. Du Bois teach for two long spells, hosting yearly conferences on Black life?

Atlanta University abruptly forced him out in the 1940s, when he was in his mid-seventies. An outcry from fellow scholars won him a lifelong pension and the title of professor emeritus.

Which US president designated W. E. B. Du Bois an Envoy Extraordinary to Liberia after a Pan-African Congress?

Calvin Coolidge gave him the title, and Du Bois rode a German freighter from the Canary Islands to reach Africa, visiting Sierra Leone and Senegal as well.

Which Soviet award did W. E. B. Du Bois receive in 1959, eight years after his US trial?

The Lenin Peace Prize came in the year he finished a long journey abroad that he called the most significant of his life, begun once a court ruling let him hold a passport again.

Which 1940 memoir did W. E. B. Du Bois subtitle as an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept?

Dusk of Dawn was the second of his three autobiographies. Its title voices his hope that Black Americans were passing out of the darkness of racism into a more equal age.

A feud with which NAACP chief helped push W. E. B. Du Bois to quit as its magazine editor in the 1930s?

Walter White ran the NAACP when Du Bois stunned it in 1934 by arguing that Black Americans could accept separate institutions. Asked to retract the statement, Du Bois refused and resigned.

Which 1928 novel did W. E. B. Du Bois, late in life, call the favorite of his own works?

Dark Princess follows a Black American medical student who flees racism at home and falls in love with the daughter of an Indian maharajah. Its reviews were mixed.

W. E. B. Du Bois, chair of the Peace Information Center, was tried in 1951 for failing to register as what?

A foreign agent was how the Justice Department classed his group, which had gathered signatures on a petition to ban all nuclear weapons. The case was dismissed, but his passport was withheld for eight years.

The B in W. E. B. Du Bois stands for which name, the surname of his mother's family?

Burghardt was the name of his mother's people, free Black landowners long settled in his home state. His great-great-grandfather Tom served briefly in the Continental Army.

Which monthly magazine did W. E. B. Du Bois launch in 1920 as the first for African-American children?

The Brownies' Book ran for two years and was the first publication to print the poetry of the young Langston Hughes. Du Bois wrote a current-affairs column for its young readers.

Which reference work did W. E. B. Du Bois, aged 93, move overseas to edit at a president's invitation?

Encyclopedia Africana was a project he had first conceived in 1909, and philanthropies had cancelled an earlier attempt in 1938. He died before the new work could be completed.

Which NAACP leader told the great 1963 march in the US capital that W. E. B. Du Bois had just died?

Roy Wilkins asked the hundreds of thousands of marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence. A day later, a state funeral for Du Bois began in his adopted country.

Which 1955 meeting of 29 Asian and African nations did the US government stop W. E. B. Du Bois from attending?

The Bandung Conference, held in Indonesia, was the culmination of forty years of his hopes. With no passport to travel on, he praised it from home as a pan-colored gathering.

Which historical pageant, tracing Black history from prehistoric times, did W. E. B. Du Bois first stage in 1913?

The Star of Ethiopia opened in New York in October 1913 and was later staged in other cities. Du Bois, who had little playwriting experience, saw pageants as a form of educational theatre.

Which scholarly journal of race and culture did W. E. B. Du Bois found in 1940 while teaching in Georgia?

Phylon resumed publication in 2015 as an online-only journal, three quarters of a century after Du Bois established it.

Which historian did W. E. B. Du Bois ask to be his literary executor, entrusting him with a lifetime of papers?

Herbert Aptheker saw the papers safely into a university collection, and that university's main library now bears the Du Bois name.

Which W. E. B. Du Bois science fiction story strands a Black man and a white woman in a lifeless New York?

The Comet first appeared as a chapter of his 1920 book Darkwater, and is now read as a foundation of Afrofuturism. In it, toxic gases from the sky kill everyone else in the city.