W. E. B. Du Bois
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free W. E. B. Du Bois trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
W. E. B. Du Bois lived for 95 years, from the aftermath of the Civil War to the summer of 1963, and he seemed to fit several careers into them. He was a scholar, an editor, a novelist, an organizer and, to the very end, an agitator who refused to be quiet. This quiz covers the whole span. There are questions on his childhood and schooling, the books and phrases that made his name, the organizations and magazines he helped build, and his long public argument with the most powerful Black leader of his day. Later questions follow him into politics, a federal courtroom and his last years far from home. It is pitched for students of Black history, teachers who want a ready-made review, and anyone curious about the man behind the initials. The opening questions are the gentlest, and every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Nobel-winning physicist offered to be a character witness for W. E. B. Du Bois at his 1951 federal trial?
Albert Einstein
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.
Q 02In which West African country did W. E. B. Du Bois settle at age 93 and later become a citizen?
Ghana
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.
Q 03Which Tuskegee educator's bargain of accepting segregation for jobs did W. E. B. Du Bois famously oppose?
Booker T. Washington
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.
Q 04Which monthly NAACP magazine did W. E. B. Du Bois name, launch in 1910 and edit for more than two decades?
The Crisis
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.
Q 05W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctorate from which university, after studying in Germany?
Harvard
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.
Q 06Which 1903 essay collection by W. E. B. Du Bois was compared in impact to Uncle Tom's Cabin?
The Souls of Black Folk
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.
Q 07Which Jamaican founder of the Black Star Line did W. E. B. Du Bois denounce in a series of articles?
Marcus Garvey
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.
Q 08W. E. B. Du Bois, borrowing a Frederick Douglass phrase, named what as the problem of the twentieth century?
The color line
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.
Q 09Which 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
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.
Q 10How did W. E. B. Du Bois insist his French-derived surname be pronounced, correcting anyone who got it wrong?
Doo-BOYSS
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.
Q 11W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, a largely white town in which New England state?
Massachusetts
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.
Q 12Which historically Black university in Nashville did W. E. B. Du Bois attend on money raised by his hometown neighbors?
Fisk
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.
Q 13Which city's 1900 world's fair awarded W. E. B. Du Bois a gold medal for an exhibit of photographs and charts?
Paris
Q 21In which German city did W. E. B. Du Bois do graduate work in the 1890s on a Slater Fund fellowship?
Berlin
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.
Q 22At which Ohio university did W. E. B. Du Bois take his first faculty post and marry a student, Nina Gomer?
Wilberforce
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.
Q 23Which term did W. E. B. Du Bois use in an 1897 Atlantic article for seeing oneself through hostile white eyes?
Double consciousness
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.
Q 14W. E. B. Du Bois's 1899 study of a Black city neighborhood was a landmark of which young academic discipline?
Sociology
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.
Q 15Which 1912 presidential candidate did W. E. B. Du Bois endorse, then regret backing once federal hiring was segregated?
Woodrow Wilson
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.
Q 16What name did W. E. B. Du Bois popularize for the college-educated Black elite he expected to lead the race?
The Talented Tenth
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.
Q 17Which activist group did W. E. B. Du Bois help found in 1905 at a hotel in Fort Erie, Ontario?
Niagara Movement
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.
Q 18Which political party did W. E. B. Du Bois join at the age of 93 to protest a Supreme Court ruling?
Communist
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.
Q 19Which landmark US law, embodying reforms W. E. B. Du Bois had long demanded, passed the year after he died in 1963?
Civil Rights Act
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.
Q 20W. E. B. Du Bois joined an NAACP delegation in San Francisco in 1945 at the founding conference of which world body?
The United Nations
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.
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.
Q 24Which 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
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.
Q 25Which 1935 history by W. E. B. Du Bois was virtually ignored by mainstream historians until the 1960s?
Black Reconstruction
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.
Q 26Which future African president, whom W. E. B. Du Bois met in Manchester in 1945, later invited him to Africa?
Kwame Nkrumah
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.
Q 27Which Harlem Renaissance poet married Yolande, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, before a crowd of 3,000 in 1928?
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen planned the wedding with his future father-in-law, with little input from the bride. The couple divorced within two years.
Q 28W. E. B. Du Bois angered fellow activists with "Close Ranks", an editorial urging Black Americans to support which war?
World War I
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.
Q 29Which abolitionist was the subject of a biography W. E. B. Du Bois spent five years writing?
John Brown
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.
Q 30In which city did W. E. B. Du Bois give the closing address of the First Pan-African Conference in 1900?
London
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.