1868–1963
○ Natural causes
"Capitalism cannot reform itself": father of the modern Negro liberation movement who joined the Communist Party at 93
"Communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day." — from his 1961 application to join the Communist Party USA, submitted at age 93
American sociologist, historian, Pan-Africanist, and the single most important African American intellectual of the 20th century. A co-founder of the NAACP, he edited its magazine The Crisis for 24 years, shaping the direction of the black civil rights movement, while his books The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America transformed American sociology and historiography. He viewed capitalism as the root cause of racism and pursued a synthesis of Marxism and Pan-Africanism. In 1961, at age 93, he joined the Communist Party USA; invited by Kwame Nkrumah, he settled in Ghana to begin work on the Encyclopedia Africana, and died there in 1963.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1895–1897Wilberforce University; University of Pennsylvania researcher, published The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
- 1897–1910Atlanta University professor; published The Souls of Black Folk (1903); founded Niagara Movement (1905)
- 1910–1934NAACP co-founder, editor of The Crisis; organized Pan-African Congresses
- 1934–1944Atlanta University professor; published Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
- 1944–1948NAACP Director of Special Research; attended UN founding conference
- 1950–1951Peace Information Center chair; indicted under FARA, acquitted
- 1961–1963Joined CPUSA; emigrated to Ghana, began Encyclopedia Africana
Black Labor and Democracy in Reconstruction
In Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, Du Bois examined the role of Black people in efforts to reconstruct democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860–1880. He challenged the dominant academic account that treated Reconstruction as a failure and minimized African Americans’ contributions, placing the political agency of freed people at the center. Du Bois interpreted enslaved people’s withdrawal from plantation labor and flight to Union lines during the war as a large-scale general strike that disrupted the economy and power relations of the slave South. He argued that this movement deepened the Confederacy’s labor crisis, supplied workers and soldiers to the Union, and demonstrated that slavery could not survive.
Du Bois disputed the claim that the post-emancipation South had descended into chaos, documenting Reconstruction governments’ establishment of public education, public health and charitable institutions, and public infrastructure. At the same time, he analyzed former planters’ efforts to regain land and political control, and the paramilitary violence used to suppress Black organizing and voting. He argued that Black freedpeople and poor white workers remained divided by race instead of forming a coalition against the propertied class. That division, in his account, enabled white Democrats to retake state governments, impose Jim Crow laws, and disfranchise Black people and many poor whites. The book treated collective action by Black workers and racial division together, analyzing democracy through the relations between labor and political power.