![]() ![]() from Harvard, and he was also one of the most influential figures in the constrained world of black higher education, and a passionate chronicler of the lives of the black rural poor. He was a, or maybe the, pioneer elite black academic, with a master’s degree from Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin and a Ph.D. He spent most of his life looking for some other solution to “the problem of the color-line”-his resonant phrase-than the one the civil rights movement achieved.ĭu Bois was almost unbelievably prodigious. He died the day before the 1963 March on Washington-the last of his copious writings was a telegram of support to the organizers of the march-and he would have been surprised that the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments in the South, which ended in 1876, was just on the verge of resuming. Du Bois was born, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and, as he liked to point out, almost exactly coincident with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which ushered in “Radical Reconstruction,” the brief experiment with civil and voting rights for former slaves in the former Confederacy. Du Bois’s very long life coincided almost exactly with the period in African-American history between slavery and citizenship. Du Bois detail of a drawing by Winold Reiss, circa 1925 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource ![]()
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