February is celebrated as Black History Month. In 1895 he became the first African American to receive a PhD from the prestigious Harvard University.

"History cannot ignore W.E.B." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

WILLIAM EDWARD Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His parents, Alfred and Mary, were of African and European ancestry. As a high school student, William was already aware of the need for African Americans to organise and unite in order to achieve their rights, and over the next fifty years became a leading civil rights figure and one of the great men of letters of his time.

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888, and in 1895 he became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870," was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard historical Studies. During this period, Du Bois obtained a fellowship to study in Europe.

While teaching Greek and Latin at Wilbeforce University in Ohio (1894-96), Du Bois met and married a student, Nina Gomer. In 1896, the University of Pennsylvania hired him to conduct a one-year study of African American society in Philadelphia, published in 1899 as "The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study". In this study, Du Bois noted that African Americans were deprived of opportunities, denied fair housing and equal employment by whites. He also blamed the "black aristocracy" of Philadelphia for their failure to assist their fellow African Americans, and to provide good role models. From 1897 to 1901, Du Bois taught at Atlanta Univeristy, and in 1898 embarked on a seventeen-year task of editing their annual study of African American life.

Colour line

In 1900, at a conference in London, Du Bois declared that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line." This theme was expanded in several essays, collected and published in 1903 as "The Souls of Black Folk". In these writings, Du Bois was highly critical of another African American leader of the time, Booker T. Washington, whose different approach to the question of race he described as "the old attitude of adjustment and submission". Du Bois believed that the system must be forced to change, from the outside, rather than a gradual change from within.

In 1905, Du Bois convened a group near Niagara Falls to form an organisation called the Niagara Movement, which demanded equal voting rights and educational opportunities for African Americans, and an end to racial discrimination. This group was the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), which Du Bois co-founded in 1910. As the NAACP's Director of Publications and Research, Du Bois edited the monthly journal Crisis, which became a forum for his views, as well as providing an outlet for emerging Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes. Within 10 years, the journal's circulation grew from 1,000 to 100,000.

Meanwhile, Du Bois led several Pan-African Congresses. Although he had disagreements with Marcus Garvey during the 1920s, he admired Garvey's beliefs in racial pride and upliftment. In 1934, Du Bois resigned from the "Crisis", after conflicts with NAACP officials over his increasingly radical editorials.

Disagreements

Du Bois returned to teaching at Atlanta University until 1944, when he was welcomed back to the NAACP, only to be fired two years later after further disagreements. He joined his old friend, Paul Robeson, at the Council of African Affairs (which they had co-founded in 1937), along with the Peace Information Centre, a group against nuclear weapons. Always on the left side of the political spectrum, Du Bois visited the Soviet Union and China, and was awarded the Soviet Lenin Peace Prize in 1958.

In 1960, Kwame Nkrumah, an admirer of Du Bois and Pan-Africanism, became President of the newly independent nation of Ghana, and invited Du Bois to go there and write an Encyclopaedia Africana. In 1963, the year of his death, Du Bois became a Ghanian citizen. He died on August 27, the day before the March on Washington.

Du Bois once wrote: "My leadership was a leadership of ideas. I never was, nor ever will be, personally popular." He never wavered, however, in his efforts to teach African Americans their rights as human beings (especially their educational rights), and pride in their heritage.

The W.E.B Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, founded in 1975, is dedicated to the study of the history, culture, and social institutions of African Americans, and is currently engaged in several major research projects -- including the "Harvard Guide to African American History" and the "Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database." The Institute's quarterly journal, "Transition" is edited by the Director, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

For further information on the work of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, look up its website at http://web-dubois.fas.harvard.edu/.