But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Ahmaud Arbery, a year-old Black man, is shot dead by a white father and son while out for a jog in a suburb of Brunswick, Georgia on February 23, On May 7, following the release of a video of the killing that spurred national attention from the media, civil rights In actuality, the On February 23, , a group of children from Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine developed by Dr.
Jonas Salk. Though not as devastating as the plague or influenza, poliomyelitis was a highly contagious During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U. Marine photographer Louis On February 23, , speed skater Eric Heiden wins the 10,meter race at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, setting a world record with his time and winning an unprecedented fifth gold medal at the games.
Heiden had been training as a speed skater since the age of Though he Later that year DuBois married Nina Gomer and the couple had two children. After the death of his first wife in , DuBois married Shirley Graham who remained his wife until his death.
During this time, he became the first scholar to systematically study African American urban life. His work and conclusions initiated the field of African American urban history. DuBois lacked black public appeal of his contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington , Marcus Garvey , and Paul Robeson. He remained scathingly critical of white racism his entire life and unlike Washington he was unwilling to seek compromise in the quest for civil rights and racial justice. In , DuBois published a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk , which challenged the civil rights strategies of black leaders like Washington while inspiring a cadre of young black activist scholars to use their work to combat racial oppression.
In DuBois and other black leaders created the Niagara Movement to provide an organizational challenge to segregation and discrimination. DuBois, however, continued to believe scholarship could promote racial equality.
He wrote numerous books and articles including Black Reconstruction in America in The council had been organized in London in the late s by Max Yergan and Paul Robeson to push decolonization and to educate the general public about that issue. In the postwar period it, too, became tainted by charges of Communist domination and lost many former supporters including Yergan and Ralph Bunche ; it dissolved altogether in Having linked the causes of decolonialization and antiracism to the fate of peace in a nuclear-armed world, Du Bois helped organize the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in March , was active in organizing its meetings in Paris and Mexico City later that year, and attended its Moscow conference that August.
The center endorsed and promoted the Stockholm Peace Appeal, which called for banning atomic weapons, declaring their use a crime against humanity and demanding international controls. Their distribution of the Stockholm Appeal, alleged to be a Soviet-inspired manifesto, was the grounds for these charges, although the so-called foreign principal was never specifically identified in the subsequent indictment. Although the center disbanded on 12 October , indictments against its officers, including Du Bois, were handed down on 9 February Du Bois's lawyers won a crucial postponement of the trial until the following 18 November , by which time national and international opposition to the trial had been mobilized.
Given the good fortune of a weak case and a fair judge, Du Bois and his colleagues were acquitted. Meanwhile, following the death of his wife, Nina, in July , Du Bois married Shirley Graham, the daughter of an old friend, in With Shirley, a militant leftist activist in her own right, he was drawn more deeply into leftist and Communist Party intellectual and social circles during the s.
He was an unrepentant supporter of and apologist for Joseph Stalin, arguing that though Stalin's methods might have been cruel, they were necessitated by unprincipled and implacable opposition from the West and by U.
He was also convinced that American news reports about Stalin and the Soviet bloc were unreliable at best and sheer propaganda or falsehoods at worst. His views do not appear to have been altered by the Soviets' own exposure and condemnation of Stalin after From February to both W.
Thus he could not accept the many invitations to speak abroad or participate in international affairs, including most notably the independence celebrations of Ghana, the first of the newly independent African nations. When these restrictions were lifted in , the couple traveled to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. While in Moscow, Du Bois was warmly received by Nikita Khrushchev, whom he strongly urged to promote the study of African civilization in Russia, a proposal that eventually led to the establishment in of the Institute for the Study of Africa.
While there, he also received the Lenin Peace Prize. Indeed, his passport had been rescinded again after his return from China travel to that country was barred at the time , and it was only restored after intense lobbying by the Ghanaian government. Before leaving the United States for Ghana on 7 October , Du Bois officially joined the American Communist Party, declaring in his 1 October letter of application that it and socialism were the only viable hope for black liberation and world peace.
His desire to travel and work freely also prompted his decision two years later to become a citizen of Ghana. In some sense these actions brought full circle some of the key issues that had animated Du Bois's life. Having organized his life's work around the comprehensive, empirically grounded study of what had once been called the Negro Problem, he ended his years laboring on an interdisciplinary and global publication that might have been the culmination and symbol of that ambition: to document the experience and historical contributions of African peoples in the world.
Having posed at the end of the nineteenth century the problem of black identity in the diaspora, he appeared to resolve the question in his own life by returning to Africa.
Undoubtedly the most important modern African American intellectual, Du Bois virtually invented modern African American letters and gave form to the consciousness animating the work of practically all other modern African American intellectuals to follow. He authored seventeen books, including five novels; founded and edited four different journals; and pursued two full-time careers: scholar and political organizer.
But more than that, he reshaped how the experience of America and African America could be understood; he made us know both the complexity of who black Americans have been and are, and why it matters; and he left Americans—black and white—a legacy of intellectual tools, a language with which they might analyze their present and imagine a future.
From late to Du Bois lived a full life in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, working on the encyclopedia, taking long drives in the afternoon, and entertaining its political elite and the small colony of African Americans during the evenings at the comfortable home the government had provided him. It was a conjunction more than rich with historical symbolism. The life and work of Du Bois had anticipated this necessary synthesis of diverse terrains and solutions.
On 29 August Du Bois was interred in a state funeral outside Castle Osu, formerly a holding pen for the slave cargoes bound for America. Skip to main content. Main Menu Utility Menu Search. Hutchins Family Foundation W. Du Bois Donate. Entry from the African American National Biography.
Further Reading Du Bois, W. The Complete Published Works of W. Du Bois , comp. Herbert Aptheker Horne, Gerald. Black and Red: W. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, — Lewis, David Levering.
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