Brown was a founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which in 1894 merged into the National Association of Colored Women. She was president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs from 1905 until 1912, and of the National Association of Colored Women from 1920 until 1924. She spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1924 and later directed campaign work among African-American women for President Calvin Coolidge. Brown was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.


She was a prominent member of the A. M. E. Church; also a member of the "King's Daughters," "Human Rights League," and the "Isabella Association." Brown died on September 16, 1949, in Wilberforce, Ohio, and is buried at Massies Creek Cemetery in Cedarville, Ohio. Her biography, "Hallie Quinn Brown, Black Woman Elocutionist, 1845(?)-1949", was published by Annjennette Sophie in 1975.


Ashley Nicole Black (born June 15, 1985) is an American comedian, actress, and writer from Los Angeles, California. She was a writer and correspondent for "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee" from 2016-2019. She left the show in February 2019 to write and act in "A Black Lady Sketch Show" on HBO.


Black received the 2017 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for her work on "Full Frontal."


Black was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in Walnut, California, a suburb of said city.


Black graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2007 with a degree in theatre arts. She then attended Northwestern University, where she earned a master's degree in performance studies. Black was four years into a PhD program at Northwestern University when she decided to drop out and pursue her dream of working in comedy.


Black's comedy career began at the Second City, where she first attended an improv class that her parents paid for her to attend.


In 2016, she was hired as a correspondent on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. She worked on the show for three years, during which time she received six total Primetime Emmy Award nominations, winning in 2017 for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special. Her last episode on "Full Frontal" was on February 13, 2019.


Black has also appeared as an actor on Comedy Central's "Drunk History" and in the 2014 film "An American Education".


In 2019, Black joined other WGA writers in firing their agents as part of the WGA's stand against the ATA and the unfair practice of packaging.


She is a cast member and writer on HBO's "A Black Lady Sketch Show", which debuted in 2019.


Mary Elizabeth Carnegie (19 April 1916 – 20 February 2008) was an educator and author in the field of nursing. Known for breaking down racial barriers, she was the first black nurse to serve as a voting member on the board of a state nursing association. She was later president of the American Academy of Nursing and edited the journal "Nursing Research".


She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, received a diploma from the Lincoln School of Nurses, bachelor's degree from West Virginia State College, master's degree from Syracuse University, and doctor of public administration degree from New York University.


After receiving her bachelor's degree from West Virginia State College, Carnegie took a job in a hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She became a clinical instructor at St. Philip Hospital School of Nursing. While working at St. Philip, Carnegie was exposed to a different social system in the nursing world in the south.


Carnegie joined the Florida Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (FACGN) in 1945. She was elected president of the organization three years later. Traditionally, the FACGN was named a courtesy (non-voting) board member of the Florida State Nurses Association the next year. After Carnegie's service with the FACGN, the FSNA board decided to grant her full rights and responsibilities on their board. She was the first black nurse to serve on the board of a state nursing association.


Between 1945 and 1953, Carnegie was a professor and dean of the nursing school at Florida A&M University. She later served as president of the American Academy of Nursing and was the editor of "Nursing Research". She was awarded eight honorary doctorates and was inducted into the hall of fame of the American Nurses Association. She was inducted into the Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame in 2009.


After developing hypertensive cardiovascular disease, Carnegie died in 2008 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She had lived there for 25 years. Carnegie had been married once; her husband died in 1954.


Williams held some good memories of his early years, saying that of the family that enslaved him and his relatives, they were "of all slave holders, the very best." The younger children had almost all of their time free to play. Early on, Williams would play with the neighbor's white children, and later with other black children on the plantation that to which he moved.


However, Sam makes sure to clearly indicate, "There is nothing good to be said of American slavery. I know it is sometimes customary to speak of its bright and its dark sides. I am not prepared to admit that it had any bright sides, unless it was the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln..."


In his early childhood, while the four white children Williams played with were at school, Williams was taught how to read and write by the three unmarried white ladies who were most likely part of the family that enslaved Williams' father. He was taught using only one book, which he called "Thomas Dilworth's," referring to "A New Guide to the English Tongue" by Thomas Dilworth. From the book, Williams claims he learned about grammar, weights and measures, ciphers, and morals. In addition, Williams describes the popular use of slates for his lessons, as well as his fascination with fable illustrations that instructed what was moral and what was not:


"...such as that of the man who prayed to Hercules to take his wagon out of the mire; of the two men who stole a piece of meat; of the lazy maids and of the kindhearted man who took a half frozen serpent into his house."


He also states many slaves were punished for being found in possession of the schoolbook, though the reward of mastering the book was being considered a "prodigy of learning" within the slave community.


"Mr. Ward was what was called a 'good master.' His people were well-fed, well-housed, and not over-worked. There were certain inflexible rules however, governing his plantation of which he allowed not the slightest infraction, for he had his place for the Negro... His place for the Negro was in subjection and servitude to the white man."


Williams alludes to his master's classism, pointing out that his white supremacy ideology did not extend to all whites and that there were some he would have barred from slaveholding. Ward, like many other slaveholders, asserted his role as owner and enslaver with a paternalistic view. He provided well for his slaves while demanding complete obedience. Ward, for example, took care to always know their whereabouts by insisting he authorize any departure from his land and as Williams depicts in his memoir, Ward had no qualms about punishing those slaves he felt defied him.


As a boy, Williams learned to ride horses from one of his enslavers. Williams states, "He taught me to ride, and when I could sit my horse well 'bare-back' he had a saddle made for me at the then famous 'McKinzie's' saddlery, sign of the 'White Horse' at the corner of Church and Chalmers Street." This training to ride was not wholly unique to Williams' experience. In fact, enslaved people were essential to the world of horse racing in the American South. Jockeys and trainers were commonly enslaved people. Despite limited privileges, these enslaved horse riders were still subjected to the realities of being slaves in a slave society. Williams never became a formal jockey, however, and of this he says the following:


"Possibly Mr. Dane had 'views', concerning me for he owned several fast horses, but before I was old enough to be of practical service, 'Sherman came marching through Georgia.'"


"And here I must admit I wore the 'gray.' I have never attended any of the Confederate reunions. I suppose they overlooked my name on the army roll!"


Williams' childhood home on Guignard Street was destroyed by the Great Charleston Fire on December 11, 1861. This fire destroyed many of the main landmarks such as the Charleston Circular Church and Institute Hall where the Ordinance of Secession was signed, and Williams remembered it to be the biggest blaze he would ever see in Charleston. Remembering the event in his memoir, Williams describes how "the sparks seemed to rain down as we ran." Thus, Williams' memoir serves as an eye-witness account of the chaos and fear created by the Great Fire.


Once the Confederates surrendered, life in South Carolina changed dramatically for Williams and his family. They were reunited under one roof; Alexander Williams and his family resided on Princess Street in Charleston for many years.


Williams' account of this era includes reflections about the "Black Code" or laws passed to restrict civil and social rights of freedmen. He wondered why, at least in his time when writing his memoir in the 20th century, one did not hear much about this, saying that perhaps "somebody is ashamed of it."


In 1876, Williams' employer asked him to vote for General Wade Hampton. Williams chose not to vote in the election at all, even though he heard the General speak:


"Our only desire he said, was to save our dear old state from utter ruin. Then, raising his right hand to heaven he said these very words as near as I can recollect, "If I am elected governor, I swear to God that not one right or privilege that you now enjoy shall be taken from you!"


Williams also noted that many of the promises that General Hampton made did not come to fruition and that, in fact, acts of disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws were being enacted against blacks during this era.


Sometime in the 1880s, Williams moved to Vermont (he appears to have moved initially to Springfield VT) and soon sent for his second wife and children (several from his first marriage and perhaps some step children or children from his second wife)to join him. While not much is known about his life in Vermont, he and his eldest daughter Susan show up in the 1910 census, living in Lebanon, NH where they worked as servants for the Carter family. In Vermont, both worked for author Thomas H. Thomas. They were listed in the 1920 United States Federal Census, living in Windsor with the Thomas Family.


Williams appears to have moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1920s with his daughter Susan, who married an African-American lawyer/dentist named William Alexander Cox. Cox was also heavily involved in the National Negro Business League.


After an illness weakened Williams' eyes and he feared going blind, he decided to record events from his past. He was also motivated in writing his memoir by the desire to remind future generations of African Americans of the cruel experience of slavery, a reason disclosed in the memoir's preface:


"It is a remarkable fact that very many of the immediate descendants of those who passed through the trying ordeal of American slavery know nothing of the hardships through which their fathers came. Some reason for this may be found in the fact that those fathers hated to harrow the minds of their children by the recital of their cruel experiences of those dark days... While it is sweet to forgive and forget, there are somethings that should never be forgotten. If this humble narrative will serve to cause the youth of my people to take a glance backward, the object of the writer will have been attained."


Williams continued to live with his family for several decades after publishing his memoir and died in Massachusetts in 1946.


Anita Cornwell (born September 23, 1923) is an American lesbian feminist author. In 1983 she wrote the first collection of essays by an African-American lesbian, "Black Lesbian in White America".


Born in Greenwood, South Carolina, Cornwell moved to Pennsylvania at the age of 16, living first in Yeadon with her aunt, then in Philadelphia with her mother, who moved north when Cornwell was aged 18. Cornwell has one sibling, an older brother. She graduated from Temple University with a B.S. in journalism and the social sciences in 1948. She worked as a journalist for local newspapers and a clerical worker for government agencies.


Cornwell's early writings, published in "The Ladder" and "The Negro Digest" in the 1950s, were among the first to identify the author as a black lesbian, and other publications where her work has appeared include "Feminist Review", "Labyrinth", "National Leader", and the "Los Angeles Free Press".


Published on October 1, 1983, Cornwell's first book "Black Lesbian in White America", which includes her essays and an interview with activist Audre Lorde, is widely noted as the first collection of essays by a black lesbian.


Cornwell was honored by the Annual Lambda Literary Festival, which was held in Philadelphia in 2000.


Robert Lee Allen (born May 29, 1942) is an American activist, writer, and Adjunct Professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and previously taught at San José State University and Mills College. He was Senior Editor (with Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Robert Chrisman) of "The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research", published quarterly or more frequently in Oakland, California, by the Black World Foundation since 1969.


In the 1980s he co-founded with Alice Walker the publishing company called Wild Trees Press, publishing the work of Third World writers.


Martha Gruening (1889–1937) was an American-Jewish journalist, poet, suffragette, and civil rights activist, born in Philadelphia. Gruening was an early advocate for the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. Her writings and research for the NAACP led to the advancement of the civil rights movement and worked to include women of color in the fight for women's suffrage.


Martha Gruening was born in Philadelphia in 1889 as one of five siblings. Her father was a renowned physician, and encouraged open discussions about political and social inequality within the United States. As a Jewish woman, she faced her own form of discrimination, but was otherwise privileged enough to pursue higher education. She attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, which reflected the progressive ideals of her family. In 1909, she graduated from Smith College, a private liberal arts college for women. Here, she founded the college league of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), to promote women's suffrage - which she later broke from over “its refusal to seat an African American delegate at its 1912 convention in Atlanta to placate increasingly powerful southern members”.


Gruening's essay "With Malice Afterthought" was published in The Forum (American magazine) in January 1916. Here, she vehemently advocated against the death penalty by writing the story of a Frank Johnson. The essay recounts Johnson's attempts to kill himself, only to be stopped by the doctors at the prison. The doctors then nurse him back to health until he begins to want to live again. Then, they execute him. Although short, it is an emotional and seminal article that conveys the horrific side of the death penalty.


Gruening served as the assistant secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and wrote reports on national events for the association. Gruening's research on lynchings within the United States was fundamental to the NAACP. Aided by the NAACP Field Investigator Helen Boardman, Gruening helped organize verifiable data into the NAACP's first book, "Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States 1889-1918." The two women gathered all of the data manually, documenting 2,224 lynchings: 702 whites (11 female), 2,522 “"colored"” (50 female). The information was accompanied by 100 individual accounts of lynchings, including the stories of 11 women (four pregnant) that confronted general perceptions of lynching. The book and Gruening's research was essential in raising awareness of the horror of lynchings in the United States.


Three years after having adopted an African-American child, David Butt, son of two African-American theatre performers from South Carolina, Gruening bought the Gomez Mill House, in 1918 to provide him a proper education. She set up Mill House as a “Libertarian International School” that provided education for children of all races. Martha encouraged progressive European models of education and partnered with Helen Boardman, an NAACP collaborator. Though it was listed as established in a 1921 almanac, there has been no further evidence that the school ever opened to the public. Later, Gruening allowed for the Gomez Mill House to be sold in 1923 by Helen Boardman.


Cecil Brown (born July 3, 1943) is an African-American writer and educator. He is a published novelist, short story writer, script writer, and college educator. His noted works include "The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger" (1969) and work on the 1977 Richard Pryor film "Which Way Is Up?" as a screenwriter.


Born in rural Bolton, North Carolina, Brown attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University of Greensboro, North Carolina, where he earned his B.A. in English in 1966. He later attended Columbia University, and earned his M.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Brown while residing in Berkeley, California (to which he returned in the late 1980s and still lives and works), earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies, Folklore and Narrative in 1993. He is a professor at UC Berkeley.


James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As the executive secretary of SNCC from 1961 to 1966, Forman played a significant role in the freedom rides, the Albany movement, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma to Montgomery marches.


After the 1960s, Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing black people around issues of social and economic equality. He also taught at American University and other major institutions. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including "Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement" (1969), "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" (1972 and 1997) and "Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People" (1984).


"The New York Times" called him "a civil rights pioneer who brought a fiercely revolutionary vision and masterly organizational skills to virtually every major civil rights battleground in the 1960s."


James' first experience with lynching came when a white man showed up on his doorstep, asking for food and asking that they not tell anyone where he was. The next day, news spread that a white man had been lynched although Forman never learned why. When Forman was around the age of six he had his first experience with racial segregation. While visiting an aunt in Tennessee, Forman attempted to buy a Coca-Cola from a local drugstore.


He was told that if he wanted to buy one that he would have to drink it in the back and not at the counter.


Confused, Forman asked why and was told "Boy, you're a nigger." This was the first time in his life he realized that because of the color of his skin that there were "things [he] could and could not do, and other people had the 'right' to tell [him] what [he] could and could not do."


From the age of seven onward, James earned a small amount from selling issues of the "Chicago Defender". He would often read these papers which helped develop a "strong sense of protest." He read the works of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and was heavily influenced by Du Bois. He called Washington an "apologist" and often quoted Du Bois and his call for advancing blacks through education. He had yet to enter high school but for James the "race issue was on my mind, before my eyes, and in my blood."


When Forman returned to high school he returned to general coursework and was an honors student. During school he was influenced by the writings of such figures as Richard Wright and Carl Sandburg. He received ROTC training and the "Chicago Tribune" Silver and Gold medal for efficiency as a non-commissioned officer; he was a lieutenant upon graduation. He was also the honor student of his graduating class which landed him an interview in the "Chicago Tribune". During the interview he said that when he grew up he wanted to become a "humanitarian" and a minister as opposed to a preacher. He graduated high school in January 1947.


In 1961, Forman joined the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick"). From 1961 to 1966, Forman, a decade older and more experienced than most of the other members of SNCC, became responsible for providing organizational support to the young, loosely affiliated activists by paying bills, radically expanding the institutional staff and planning the logistics for programs. Under the leadership of Forman and others, SNCC became an important political player at the height of the civil rights movement. SNCC began as an affiliate of another direct action group of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At times, Forman's more confrontational and radical style of activism clashed with King's Christian pacifist approach.


In August 1961, Forman was jailed with other freedom riders protesting segregated facilities in Monroe, North Carolina. This episode brought him into contact with Robert F. Williams who won Forman's admiration. During a visit to Williams' home in Monroe, Forman discussed the positive role of using armed self-defense in the struggle against white oppression. After his sentence was suspended, Forman agreed to become executive secretary of SNCC.


Forman's occasional criticism of Dr. King was not simply a political exercise, but reflected a genuine concern about the direction King was leading the movement in. He specifically questioned King's top-down leadership style, which he saw as undermining the development of local grassroots movements. For example, following W. G. Anderson's invitation to King to join the Albany Movement, Forman criticized the move because he felt "much harm could be done by interjecting the Messiah complex." He recognized that King's presence "would detract from, rather than intensify," the focus on local people's leadership in the movement. Forman echoed the concerns of those in SNCC and the broader civil rights movement who saw the potential dangers of relying too heavily upon one dynamic leader.


In an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book "Who Speaks for the Negro?", Forman laid out many of his ideologies concerning SNCC, commenting that it is "the one movement in this country that has within its spheres of activity room for intellectuals."


Years before the famous Selma marches of 1965, Forman and other SNCC organizers visited the city to assist the voter registration work of Amelia Boynton and J. L. Chestnut. In addition to frontline organizing, Forman facilitated a visit by celebrities James Baldwin and Dick Gregory for Selma's first "Freedom Day" in October 1963—a day of mass African-American voter registration in a Jim Crow area.


Forman did significant work for SNCC in the cultural community. For instance, Forman recruited the young folk star Bob Dylan to play benefits and rallies for SNCC ( One of these rallies in Mississippi makes an appearance in the classic documentary "Don't Look Back"). When Dylan received an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee he said the honor really belonged to "James Forman and SNCC."


On March 15 and 16, SNCC led several hundred demonstrators, including Alabama students, Northern students, and local adults, in protests near the capitol complex. The Montgomery County sheriff's posse met them on horseback and drove them back, whipping them. Against the objections of James Bevel, some protesters threw bricks and bottles at police. At a mass meeting on the night of the 16th, Forman "whipped the crowd into a frenzy" demanding that the President act to protect demonstrators, and warned, "If we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fucking legs off."


"The New York Times" featured the Montgomery confrontations on the front page the next day. Although Dr. King was concerned by Forman's violent rhetoric, he joined him in leading a march of 2000 people in Montgomery to the Montgomery County courthouse.


According to historian Gary May, "City officials, also worried by the violent turn of events… apologized for the assault on SNCC protesters and invited King and Forman to discuss how to handle future protests in the city." In the negotiations, Montgomery officials agreed to stop using the county posse against protesters, and to issue march permits to blacks for the first time.


After being replaced by Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson as executive secretary, Forman remained close to the leadership of SNCC helping to negotiate the ill-fated "merger" of SNCC and the Black Panther Party in 1967 and even briefly taking a leadership position within the Panthers. In 1969, after the failure of the merger and the decline of SNCC as an effective political organization, Forman began associating with other Black political radical groups. In Detroit he participated in the Black Economic Development Conference, where his Black Manifesto was adopted. He also founded a nonprofit organization called the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee.


As a part of his "Black Manifesto", on a Sunday morning in May 1969, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries. Although Riverside's preaching minister, the Rev. Ernest T. Campbell, termed the demands "exorbitant and fanciful," he was in sympathy with the impulse, if not the tactic. Later, the church agreed to donate a fixed percentage of its annual income to anti-poverty efforts.


On May 30, 1969, Forman made plans to pursue a similar course at a Jewish Synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York. Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, showed up carrying chains and clubs promising to confront Forman if he attempted to enter the synagogue. Kahane and the JDL forewarned Forman and the public about their intended actions and Forman never showed up at the synagogue.


During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman completed graduate work at Cornell University in African and African-American Studies and in 1982, he received a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies.


Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing black and disenfranchised people around issues of progressive economic and social development and equality. He also taught at American University in Washington, D.C. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including "Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement" (1969), "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" (1972 and 1997) and "Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People" (1984).


Forman died on January 10, 2005, of colon cancer, aged 76, at the Washington House, a hospice in Washington, DC.


Forman's marriages to Mary Forman and Mildred Thompson ended in divorce. He was married to Mildred Thompson Forman (now Mildred Page) from 1959 to 1965, during the most active period of SNCC. Mildred Forman moved to Atlanta with James and worked at the Atlanta SNCC office as well as working as coordinator for tours of The Freedom Singers.


During the 1960s and 1970s, Forman lived with Constancia "Dinky" Romilly, the second and only surviving child of the British-born journalist, anti-fascist activist and aristocrat, the Hon. Jessica Mitford, and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, who was a nephew-by-marriage of Sir Winston Churchill. Though obituaries and other posthumous articles about Forman have stated that he and Romilly were married, correspondence between Romilly's mother and aunts state that the couple were not legally husband and wife.


Forman and Romilly had two sons: Chaka Forman and James Forman Jr., who is a professor at Yale Law School.


In his autobiography "The Making Of Black Revolutionaries" Forman devoted an entire chapter to explaining his atheism. He believed that "belief in God hurts my people." He also received the African American Humanist Award in 1994.


Jayson Thomas Blair (born March 23, 1976) is a former American journalist who worked for "The New York Times". He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of fabrication and plagiarism in his stories.


Blair published a memoir of this period, entitled "Burning Down My Masters' House" (2004), recounting his career, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder after his resignation, and his view of race relations at the newspaper. He later established a support group for people with bipolar disorder and became a life coach.


Blair was born in Columbia, Maryland, the son of a federal executive and a schoolteacher. While attending the University of Maryland, College Park, he was a student journalist. For the 1996–1997 academic year, he was selected as the second African-American editor-in-chief of its student newspaper, "The Diamondback". According to a 2004 article by the "Baltimore Sun", some of his fellow students opposed his selection describing him as "an elbows-out competitor".


After a summer interning at "The New York Times" in 1998, Blair was offered an extended internship there. He declined in order to complete more coursework for graduation. But he returned to the "Times" in June 1999, with a year of coursework left to complete. That November, he was classified as an "intermediate reporter". He was later promoted to a full reporter and then to editor.


On April 28, 2003, Blair received a call from "Times" national editor James Roberts asking him about similarities between a story he had written two days earlier and one published April 18 by "San Antonio Express-News" reporter Macarena Hernandez. The senior editor of the "Express-News" had contacted the "Times" about the similarities between Blair's article in the "Times" and Hernandez's article in his paper.


The resulting inquiry led to the discovery of fabrication and plagiarism in a number of articles written by Blair. Some fabrications include Blair's claims to have traveled to the city mentioned in the dateline, when in fact he did not.


After internal investigations, "The New York Times" reported on Blair's journalistic misdeeds in an "unprecedented" 7,239-word front-page story on May 11, 2003, headlined "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception." The story called the affair "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."


After the scandal broke, some 30 former staffers of "The Diamondback", who had worked with Blair when he was editor-in-chief at the university newspaper, signed a 2003 letter alleging that Blair had made four serious errors as a reporter and editor while at the University of Maryland. They said these and his work habits brought his integrity into question. The letter-signers alleged that questions raised by some of these staffers at the time were ignored by Maryland Media, Inc. (MMI), the board that owned the paper.


The investigation, known as the Siegal committee, found heated debate among the staff over affirmative action hiring, as Blair is African American. Jonathan Landman, Blair's editor, told the Siegal committee he felt that Blair's being black played a large part in the younger man's initial promotion in 2001 to full-time staffer. "I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion," he said. "I thought then and I think now that it was the wrong decision."


Others disagreed. Five days later, "New York Times" op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, an African American, asserted in his column that race had nothing to do with the Blair case:


"Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair's reporting." Herbert said, "[F]olks who delight in attacking anything black, or anything designed to help blacks, have pounced on the Blair story as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with "The New York Times"s effort to diversify its newsroom, and beyond that, with the very idea of a commitment to diversity or affirmative action anywhere. And while these agitators won't admit it, the nasty subtext to their attack is that there is something inherently wrong with blacks."


Executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned after losing newsroom support in the aftermath of the scandal.


After resigning from the "Times," Blair struggled with severe depression and, according to his memoir, entered a hospital for treatment. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder for the first time. He has acknowledged that he had been self-medicating when he was dealing with substance abuse of alcohol and cocaine in earlier years.


Blair later returned to college to complete his postponed degree. At one time he said he considered going into politics.


The year after he left the "Times", Blair wrote a memoir, "Burning Down My Masters' House", published by New Millennium Books in 2004. Its initial print run was 250,000 copies; some 1,400 were sold in its first nine days. The Associated Press reported that the potential audience for his book may have gained enough information from the "New York Times" coverage of the reporting scandal. Although most reviews were critical, sales of the book increased after Blair was interviewed by Larry King and Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly.


In his book Blair revealed extended substance abuse, which he had ended before he resigned from the newspaper, and a struggle with bipolar disorder, which was diagnosed and first treated after he resigned. He also discussed journalistic practices at the "Times", and his view of race relations and disagreements among senior editors at the newspaper.


In 2006 Blair was running a support group for people with bipolar disorder, for which he has received continuing treatment.


In 2007 he became a life coach, working in Virginia, opening his own coaching center five years later. He was still working in this field in 2016.


Molefi Kete Asante (; born Arthur Lee Smith Jr.; August 14, 1942) is an American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.


Asante is known for his writings on Afrocentricity, a school of thought that has influenced the fields of sociology, intercultural communication, critical theory, political science, the history of Africa, and social work. He is the author of more than 66 books and the founding editor of the "Journal of Black Studies". He is the father of author and filmmaker M. K. Asante.


Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia, the fourth of sixteen children. His father, Arthur Lee Smith, worked in a peanut warehouse and then on the Georgia Southern Railroad; his mother worked as a domestic. During the summers Asante would return to Georgia to work in the tobacco and cotton fields in order to earn tuition for school. An aunt, Georgia Smith, influenced him to pursue his education; she gave him his first book, a collection of short stories by Charles Dickens.


Smith attended Nashville Christian Institute, a Church of Christ-founded boarding school for black students, in Nashville, Tennessee. There he earned his high school diploma in 1960. While still in high school, he became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, joining the Fisk University student march in Nashville.


After graduation, he initially enrolled in Southwestern Christian College of Terrell, Texas, another historically black institution with Church of Christ roots. There he met Nigerian Essien Essien, whose character and intelligence inspired Smith to learn more about Africa.


Smith received his B.A. from Oklahoma Christian College (now Oklahoma Christian University) in 1964. He did graduate work, earning his master's degree from Pepperdine University in 1965 with a thesis on Marshall Keeble, a black preacher in the Church of Christ. Smith earned his PhD from UCLA in 1968 in communication studies. He worked for a time at UCLA, becoming the director of the Center for Afro-American Studies. At the age of 30, he was appointed by the University at Buffalo as a full professor and head of the Department of Communication.


In 1976, Asante chose to make a legal name change because he considered "Arthur Lee Smith" a slave name.


At the University at Buffalo, Asante advanced the ideas of international and intercultural communication; he wrote and published with colleagues, "Handbook of Intercultural Communication," the first book in the field. Asante was elected president of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research in 1976. His work in intercultural communication made him a leading trainer of doctoral students in the field. Asante has directed more than one hundred PhD dissertations.


Asante published his first study of the black movement, "Rhetoric of Black Revolution," in 1969. Subsequently, he wrote "Transracial Communication," to explain how race complicates human interaction in American society. Soon Asante changed his focus to African-American and African culture in communication, with attention to the nature of African-American oratorical style.


Asante wrote "Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change" (1980) to announce a break with the past, where African-Americans believed they were on the margins of Europe and did not have a sense of historical centrality. He wrote on the conflict between white cultural hegemony and the oppressed African culture, and on the lack of victorious consciousness among Africans, a theme found in his principal philosophical work, "The Afrocentric Idea" (1987). Additional works on Afrocentric theory included "Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge" (1990), and "An Afrocentric Manifesto" (2007).


The "Utne Reader" identified Asante as one of the 100 leading thinkers in America, writing, "Asante is a genial, determined, and energetic cultural liberationist whose many books, including "Afrocentricity" and "The Afrocentric Idea," articulate a powerful African-oriented pathway of thought, action, and cultural self-confidence for black Americans."


In 1986 Asante proposed the first doctoral program in African-American studies to the administration at Temple University. This program was approved, and the first class entered the doctorate in 1988. More than 500 applicants had sought admission to the graduate program. Temple became known as the leader among the African-American Studies departments; it was 10 years before the next doctoral program was introduced in this field, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997. Alumni from the Temple program are found in every continent, many nations, and many direct African American Studies programs at major universities.


According to "The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Historical Writing Since 1945," Asante has "based his entire career on Afrocentricity, and continues to defend it in spite of strong criticisms".


In 1980 Asante published "Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change", which initiated a discourse around the issue of African agency and subject place in historical and cultural phenomena. He maintained that Africans had been moved off-center in terms on most questions of identity, culture, and history. Afrocentricity sought to place Africans at the center of their own narratives and to reclaim the teaching of African-American history from where it had been marginalized by Europeans.


Asante's book "The Afrocentric Idea" was a more intellectual book about Afrocentricity than the earlier popular book. After the second edition of "The Afrocentric Idea" was released in 1998, Asante appeared as a guest on a number of television programs, including "The Today Show", "60 Minutes", and the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour", to discuss his ideas.


According to Asante's "Afrocentric Manifesto", an Afrocentric project requires a minimum of five characteristics: (1) an interest in a psychological location, (2) a commitment to finding the African subject place, (3) the defense of African cultural elements, (4) a commitment to lexical refinement, and (5) a commitment to correct the dislocations in the history of Africa.


Farai Chideya (; born July 27, 1969 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an American novelist, multimedia journalist, and radio host. She produced and hosted "Pop and Politics with Farai Chideya", a series of radio specials on politics for 15 years. She is the creator and host of the podcast "Our Body Politic", which launched in September 2020.


Additionally, since 2012 Chideya has held the position of distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, where she teaches courses in radio production and media economics.


Chideya was born on July 27, 1969, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother is from Baltimore, Maryland, and her father is from Zimbabwe.


Chideya holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Harvard College. She graduated from Harvard in 1990, Magna Cum Laude.


Chideya was a member of the improv comedy troupe The Immediate Gratification Players. In 2000, she was distinguished as the most honored alumna from Harvard. Her academic life includes being a professional in residence at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in addition to her current position as distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.


Chideya is also the founder and president of one of the earliest pop culture blogs in the US, PopandPolitics.com. During the 15 years of its existence, PopandPolitics.com was a training ground for young arts and culture journalists. In addition to her radio, video and online journalism, Chideya appears as a political analyst on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC News, Fox News, BET and HBO. She began working as a senior writer for the website FiveThirtyEight in 2015 covering issues including the 2016 presidential election.


In May 2009, Atria Books published Chideya's first novel, "Kiss the Sky", which details the life of a black female rock musician making a career comeback in New York. The book takes place just months before 9/11 and is rooted in the ethos of the Black Rock movement and the New York club scene. Chideya is also part of The Finish Party writing group, and is the author of three non-fiction books about race and politics: "Don't Believe the Hype", "The Color of Our Future" and "Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters".


Prior to 2009, Chideya was the host of the National Public Radio radio program "News & Notes". Before that, she hosted "Your Call", a daily radio call-in show on San Francisco, California's KALW public radio. She got her start in journalism working for "Newsweek" magazine, MTV News, the Oxygen Network and the non-profit community news website, TheBeehive.org. She has subsequently written pieces for "The New York Times", "The Los Angeles Times Syndicate", "The Chicago Tribune Syndicate", "The American Prospect", "The San Francisco Chronicle", "Time Magazine", "", "Vibe Magazine", "Spin Magazine" and "Glamour".


From 2014 to 2015, Chideya produced and hosted "One with Farai", a podcast for Public Radio International (PRI), in which she interviewed distinguished individuals with a range of stories and opinions, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Urvashi Vaid, and Alec Ross.


Chideya is the recipient of a Foreign Press Center fellowship that took her to Japan in 2002, a Knight Foundation fellowship based at Stanford University in 2001 and a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center fellowship in 1996.


Her speeches on civic engagement, electoral politics, digital media, hip-hop, race and politics have taken her around the world—from India to South Africa to Alaska. Syracuse University, the University of Southern California, the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles, M.I.T., the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Louisiana State University, De Anza Community College, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Wellesley College, Chicago State University, Harvard University and Smith College are just some of the places where she has spoken.


Thea Bowman (December 29, 1937 – March 30, 1990) was a Roman Catholic religious sister, teacher, and scholar who made a major contribution to the ministry of the Catholic Church toward her fellow African Americans. She became an evangelist among her people, assisted in the production of an African American Catholic hymnal, and was a popular speaker on faith and spirituality in her final years. She also helped found the National Black Sisters Conference to provide support for African-American women in Catholic religious institutes. In 2018, she was designated a Servant of God.


She was born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1937. Her grandfather had been born a slave but her father was a physician and her mother a teacher. She was raised in a Methodist home but, with her parents' permission, converted to the Roman Catholic faith at the age of nine. She joined the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at La Crosse, Wisconsin at age 15, overcoming her parents' objections.


Bowman attended Viterbo University, run by her congregation, and earned a B.A. in English in 1965. She went on to attend The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she earned an M.A. in English in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English in 1972, writing her doctoral thesis on Thomas More.


Bowman taught at an elementary school in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and then at a high school in Canton, Mississippi. She later taught at her alma maters, Viterbo College in La Crosse and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as well as at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana.


In his book "Eleven Modern Mystics", Victor M. Parachin, a meditation teacher, notes Bowman's impact upon Catholic liturgical music in providing an intellectual, spiritual, historical, and cultural foundation for developing and legitimizing a distinct worship form for Black Catholics. Bowman had explained: "When we understand our history and culture, then we can develop the ritual, the music and the devotional expression that satisfy us in the Church."


Bowman became instrumental in the 1987 publication of a new Catholic hymnal, "Lead Me, Guide Me: The African American Catholic Hymnal", the first such work directed to the Black community. James P. Lyke, Auxiliary Bishop of Cleveland (also an African-American), coordinated the hymnal project, saying it was born of the needs and aspirations of Black Catholics. Bowman was actively involved in selecting hymns to be included. The hymnal includes her essay titled "The Gift of African American Sacred Song." In it, she wrote, "Black sacred song is soulful song" and described it in five ways:


Her 1988 albums, "Songs of My People" and" 'Round the Glory Manger", released on stereo audiocassette by the Daughters of St. Paul, were re-released in 2020 for the 30th anniversary of Bowman's death under the title, "Songs of My People: The Complete Collection."


Arguably no person in recent memory did more to resist and transform the sad legacy of segregation and racism in the Catholic Church than Thea Bowman ... who inspired millions with her singing and message of God's love for all races and faiths. Sister Thea awakened a sense of fellowship in people both within and well beyond the Catholic world, first and foremost through her charismatic presence.


During an appearance on the show "60 Minutes" with Mike Wallace, she prodded him into saying "Black is beautiful" and she said:


I think the difference between me and some people is that I'm content to do my little bit. Sometimes people think they have to do big things in order to make change. But if each one would light a candle we'd have a tremendous light.


In 1989, shortly before her death, in recognition of her contributions to the service of the Church, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Religion by Boston College in Massachusetts.


Just months before her death from cancer, Bowman spoke to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1989 from her wheelchair, and the bishops "powerfully and visibly moved, applauded her. When she finished they stood linking arms and singing as Thea led them in the spiritual, 'We Shall Overcome'." Harry Belafonte met her in Mississippi in 1989 hoping to do a film on her life. Less than a week before her death, the University of Notre Dame announced that it would award Bowman the 1990 Laetare Medal. It was presented posthumously at the 1990 commencement exercises. She died on March 30, 1990, aged 52, in Canton, Mississippi, and was buried with her parents in Memphis, Tennessee. The 25th anniversary of her death brought forth, again, numerous tributes.


Boston College instituted the Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center (African, Hispanic, Asian, Native American), which in 2015 inaugurated an annual Thea Bowman Legacy Day. At the inaugural event of the legacy day, the keynote speaker mentioned how Bowman had stressed the importance of education for Blacks, and how she had legitimized a distinct form of worship for Black Catholics.


Shortly before her death, the Sister Thea Bowman Black Catholic Educational Foundation was established to raise scholarship money on a national scale, an endeavor Bowman saw as key to raising up the Black people. She conceived of the foundation as early as 1984 and articulated its mission for the students: "Walk with us. Don't walk behind us and don't walk in front of us; walk with us." By 2015 it had put more than 150 African American students through college.


A cause for canonization has been opened for Bowman. In mid-2018, she was officially designated a Servant of God, the first of the four steps toward possible sainthood. At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' 2018 Fall General Assembly, the Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance indicated unanimous support for the advancement of Sister Thea Bowman's canonization cause on the diocesan level.


William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.


Earlier, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth, a concept under the umbrella of Racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.


Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice and racism in the United States military.


Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, "The Souls of Black Folk", is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, "Black Reconstruction in America", challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens "The Souls of Black Folk" with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."


His 1940 autobiography "Dusk of Dawn" is regarded in part as one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published two other life stories, all three containing essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal "The Crisis", he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.


William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred and Mary Silvina (née Burghardt) Du Bois. Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state. She was descended from Dutch, African and English ancestors. William Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave (born in West Africa around 1730) who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, which may have been how he gained his freedom during the late 18th century. His son Jack Burghardt was the father of Othello Burghardt, who in turn was the father of Mary Silvina Burghardt.


William Du Bois claimed Elizabeth Freeman as his relative; he wrote that she had married his great-grandfather Jack Burghardt. But Freeman was 20 years older than Burghardt, and no record of such a marriage has been found. It may have been Freeman's daughter, Betsy Humphrey, who married Burghardt after her first husband, Jonah Humphrey, left the area "around 1811", and after Burghardt's first wife died ( 1810). If so, Freeman would have been William Du Bois's step-great-great-grandmother. Anecdotal evidence supports Humphrey's marrying Burghardt; a close relationship of some form is likely.


William Du Bois's paternal great-grandfather was James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, an ethnic French-American of Huguenot origin who fathered several children with slave women. One of James' mixed-race sons was Alexander, who was born on Long Cay in the Bahamas in 1803; in 1810 he immigrated to the United States with his father. Alexander Du Bois traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, with a mistress. Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother.


Sometime before 1860, Alfred Du Bois immigrated to the United States, settling in Massachusetts. He married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic, a village in Great Barrington. Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after their son William was born. Mary Du Bois moved with her son back to her parents' house in Great Barrington, and they lived there until he was five. She worked to support her family (receiving some assistance from her brother and neighbors), until she suffered a stroke in the early 1880s. She died in 1885.


Great Barrington had a majority European American community, who generally treated Du Bois well. He attended the local integrated public school and played with white schoolmates. As an adult, he wrote about racism that he felt as a fatherless child and being a minority in the town. But teachers recognized his ability and encouraged his intellectual pursuits, and his rewarding experience with academic studies led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans. He graduated from the town's Searles High School. When he decided to attend college, the congregation of his childhood church, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, raised the money for his tuition.


Relying on money donated by neighbors, Du Bois attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1885 to 1888. Like other Fisk students who relied on summer and intermittent teaching to support their university studies, Du Bois taught school during the summer of 1886 after his sophomore year. His travel to and residency in the South was Du Bois's first experience with Southern racism, which at the time encompassed Jim Crow laws, bigotry, suppression of black voting, and lynchings; the lattermost reached a peak in the next decade.


After receiving a bachelor's degree from Fisk, he attended Harvard College (which did not accept course credits from Fisk) from 1888 to 1890, where he was strongly influenced by professor William James, prominent in American philosophy. Du Bois paid his way through three years at Harvard with money from summer jobs, an inheritance, scholarships, and loans from friends. In 1890, Harvard awarded Du Bois his second bachelor's degree, "cum laude", in history. In 1891, Du Bois received a scholarship to attend the sociology graduate school at Harvard.


In the summer of 1894, Du Bois received several job offers, including from the prestigious Tuskegee Institute; he accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio. At Wilberforce, Du Bois was strongly influenced by Alexander Crummell, who believed that ideas and morals are necessary tools to effect social change. While at Wilberforce, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, one of his students, on May 12, 1896.


After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in the summer of 1896. He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, which formed the foundation for his landmark study, "The Philadelphia Negro", published in 1899 while he was teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a black community in the United States.


By the 1890s, Philadelphia's black neighborhoods had a negative reputation in terms of crime, poverty, and mortality. Du Bois's book undermined the stereotypes with empirical evidence and shaped his approach to segregation and its negative impact on black lives and reputations. The results led him to realize that racial integration was the key to democratic equality in American cities. The methodology employed in "The Philadelphia Negro", namely the description and the mapping of social characteristics onto neighborhood areas was a forerunner to the studies under the Chicago School of Sociology.


While taking part in the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass's plea for black Americans to integrate into white society. He wrote: "we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland". In the August 1897 issue of "The Atlantic Monthly", Du Bois published "Strivings of the Negro People", his first work aimed at the general public, in which he enlarged upon his thesis that African Americans should embrace their African heritage while contributing to American society.


In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University in Georgia. His first major academic work was his book "The Philadelphia Negro" (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on his fieldwork in 1896–1897. This breakthrough in scholarship was the first scientific study of African Americans and a major contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S.


Du Bois coined the phrase "the submerged tenth" to describe the black underclass in the study. Later in 1903, he popularized the term, the "Talented Tenth", applied to society's elite class. His terminology reflected his opinion that the elite of a nation, both black and white, were critical to achievements in culture and progress. During this period he wrote dismissively of the underclass, describing them as "lazy" or "unreliable", but – in contrast to other scholars – he attributed many of their societal problems to the ravages of slavery.


Du Bois's output at Atlanta University was prodigious, in spite of a limited budget: he produced numerous social science papers and annually hosted the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems. He also received grants from the U.S. government to prepare reports about African-American workforce and culture. His students considered him to be a brilliant, but aloof and strict, teacher.


Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London on 23−25 July 1900, shortly ahead of the Paris Exhibition of 1900 ("to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events".) The Conference had been organized by people from the Caribbean: Haitians Anténor Firmin and Bénito Sylvain and Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams. Du Bois played a leading role in drafting a letter ("Address to the Nations of the World"), asking European leaders to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government and to demand political and other rights for African Americans. By this time, southern states were passing new laws and constitutions to disfranchise most African Americans, an exclusion from the political system that lasted into the 1960s.


Du Bois was primary organizer of "The Exhibit of American Negroes" at the "Exposition Universelle" held in Paris between April and November 1900, for which he put together a series of 363 photographs aiming to commemorate the lives of African Americans at the turn of the century and challenge the racist caricatures and stereotypes of the day. Also included were charts, graphs, and maps. He was awarded a gold medal for his role as compiler of the materials, which are now housed at the Library of Congress.


Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise.


In the first decade of the new century, Du Bois emerged as a spokesperson for his race, second only to Booker T. Washington. Washington was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and wielded tremendous influence within the African-American and white communities. Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal that he had struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction. Essentially the agreement provided that Southern blacks, who overwhelmingly lived in rural communities, would submit to the current discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement, and non-unionized employment; that Southern whites would permit blacks to receive a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; and that Northern whites would invest in Southern enterprises and fund black educational charities.


Despite initially sending congratulations to Washington for his Atlanta Exposition Speech, Du Bois later came to oppose Washington's plan, along with many other African Americans, including Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar – representatives of the class of educated blacks that Du Bois would later call the "talented tenth". Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights and higher opportunities, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise.


Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred near Atlanta in 1899. Hose was tortured, burned and hung by a mob of two thousand whites. When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display. The episode stunned Du Bois, and he resolved that "one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved". Du Bois realized that "the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth".


The Niagarites held a second conference in August 1906, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's birth, at the West Virginia site of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Reverdy C. Ransom spoke, explaining that Washington's primary goal was to prepare blacks for employment in their current society: "Today, two classes of Negroes, ... are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations; ... The other class believe that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place ... it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain."


In an effort to portray the genius and humanity of the black race, Du Bois published "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903), a collection of 14 essays. James Weldon Johnson said the book's effect on African Americans was comparable to that of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". The introduction famously proclaimed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line". Each chapter begins with two epigraphs – one from a white poet, and one from a black spiritual – to demonstrate intellectual and cultural parity between black and white cultures.


A major theme of the work was the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future: "Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation."


Jonathon S. Kahn in "Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of Du Bois" shows how Du Bois, in his "The Souls of Black Folk", represents an exemplary text of pragmatic religious naturalism. On page 12 Kahn writes: "Du Bois needs to be understood as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist. By this I mean that, like Du Bois the American traditional pragmatic religious naturalism, which runs through William James, George Santayana and John Dewey, seeks religion without metaphysical foundations." Kahn's interpretation of religious naturalism is very broad but he relates it to specific thinkers. Du Bois's anti-metaphysical viewpoint places him in the sphere of religious naturalism as typified by William James and others.


Du Bois wrote the essay, "A Litany at Atlanta", which asserted that the riot demonstrated that the Atlanta Compromise was a failure. Despite upholding their end of the bargain, blacks had failed to receive legal justice in the South. Historian David Levering Lewis has written that the Compromise no longer held because white patrician planters, who took a paternalistic role, had been replaced by aggressive businessmen who were willing to pit blacks against whites. These two calamities were watershed events for the African-American community, marking the ascendancy of Du Bois's vision of equal rights.


In addition to writing editorials, Du Bois continued to produce scholarly work at Atlanta University. In 1909, after five years of effort, he published a biography of abolitionist John Brown. It contained many insights, but also contained some factual errors. The work was strongly criticized by "The Nation", which was owned by Oswald Villard, who was writing his own, competing biography of John Brown. Possibly as a result, Du Bois's work was largely ignored by white scholars. After publishing a piece in "Collier's" magazine warning of the end of "white supremacy", Du Bois had difficulty getting pieces accepted by major periodicals, although he did continue to publish columns regularly in "The Horizon" magazine.


Du Bois was the first African American invited by the American Historical Association (AHA) to present a paper at their annual conference. He read his paper, "Reconstruction and Its Benefits," to an astounded audience at the AHA's December 1909 conference. The paper went against the mainstream historical view, promoted by the Dunning School of scholars at Columbia University, that Reconstruction was a disaster, caused by the ineptitude and sloth of blacks. To the contrary, Du Bois asserted that the brief period of African-American leadership in the South accomplished three important goals: democracy, free public schools, and new social welfare legislation.


Du Bois asserted that it was the federal government's failure to manage the Freedmen's Bureau, to distribute land, and to establish an educational system, that doomed African-American prospects in the South. When Du Bois submitted the paper for publication a few months later in the "American Historical Review", he asked that the word Negro be capitalized. The editor, J. Franklin Jameson, refused, and published the paper without the capitalization. The paper was mostly ignored by white historians. Du Bois later developed his paper as his ground-breaking 1935 book, "Black Reconstruction," which marshaled extensive facts to support his assertions. The AHA did not invite another African-American speaker until 1940.


In May 1909, Du Bois attended the National Negro Conference in New York. The meeting led to the creation of the National Negro Committee, chaired by Oswald Villard, and dedicated to campaigning for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities. The following spring, in 1910, at the second National Negro Conference, the attendees created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At Du Bois's suggestion, the word "colored", rather than "black", was used to include "dark skinned people everywhere". Dozens of civil rights supporters, black and white, participated in the founding, but most executive officers were white, including Mary Ovington, Charles Edward Russell, William English Walling, and its first president, Moorfield Storey.


Feeling inspired by this, Indian social reformer and civil rights activist Dr. B.R. Ambedkar contacted Du Bois in the 1940s. In a letter to Du Bois in 1946, he introduced himself as a member of the "Untouchables of India" and "a student of the Negro problem" and expressed his interest in the NAACP's petition to the U.N. He noted that his group was "thinking of following suit"; and requested copies of the proposed statement from Du Bois. In a letter dated July 31, 1946, Du Bois responded by telling Ambedkar he was familiar with his name, and that he had "every sympathy with the Untouchables of India."


NAACP leaders offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research. He accepted the job in the summer of 1910, and moved to New York after resigning from Atlanta University. His primary duty was editing the NAACP's monthly magazine, which he named "The Crisis". The first issue appeared in November 1910, and Du Bois wrote that its aim was to set out "those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people". The journal was phenomenally successful, and its circulation would reach 100,000 in 1920. Typical articles in the early editions polemics against the dishonesty and parochialism of black churches, and disussions on the Afrocentric origins of Egyptian civilization.


A 1911 Du Bois editorial helped initiate a nationwide push to induce the Federal government to outlaw lynching. Du Bois, employing the sarcasm he frequently used, commented on a lynching in Pennsylvania: "The point is he was black. Blackness must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes ... It is therefore necessary, as every white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this crime of crimes. Of course if possible, the pretext should be great and overwhelming – some awful stunning crime, made even more horrible by the reporters' imagination. Failing this, mere murder, arson, barn burning or impudence may do."


"The Crisis" carried Du Bois editorials supporting the ideals of unionized labor but denouncing its leaders' racism; blacks were barred from membership. Du Bois also supported the principles of the Socialist Party (he held party membership from 1910 to 1912), but he denounced the racism demonstrated by some socialist leaders. Frustrated by Republican president Taft's failure to address widespread lynching, Du Bois endorsed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential race, in exchange for Wilson's promise to support black causes.


During 1915 − 1916, some leaders of the NAACP – disturbed by financial losses at "The Crisis", and worried about the inflammatory rhetoric of some of its essays – attempted to oust Du Bois from his editorial position. Du Bois and his supporters prevailed, and he continued in his role as editor. In a 1919 column titled "The True Brownies", he announced the creation of "The Brownies' Book", the first magazine published for African-American children and youth, which he founded with Augustus Granville Dill and Jessie Redmon Fauset.


The 1910s were a productive time for Du Bois. In 1911 he attended the First Universal Races Congress in London and he published his first novel, "The Quest of the Silver Fleece." Two years later, Du Bois wrote, produced, and directed a pageant for the stage, "The Star of Ethiopia". In 1915, Du Bois published "The Negro", a general history of black Africans, and the first of its kind in English. The book rebutted claims of African inferiority, and would come to serve as the basis of much Afrocentric historiography in the 20th century. "The Negro" predicted unity and solidarity for colored people around the world, and it influenced many who supported the Pan-African movement.


In 1915, "The Atlantic Monthly" carried a Du Bois essay, "The African Roots of the War", which consolidated his ideas on capitalism and race. He argued that the scramble for Africa was at the root of World War I. He also anticipated later Communist doctrine, by suggesting that wealthy capitalists had pacified white workers by giving them just enough wealth to prevent them from revolting, and by threatening them with competition by the lower-cost labor of colored workers.


Du Bois used his influential NAACP position to oppose a variety of racist incidents. When the silent film "The Birth of a Nation" premiered in 1915, Du Bois and the NAACP led the fight to ban the movie, because of its racist portrayal of blacks as brutish and lustful. The fight was not successful, and possibly contributed to the film's fame, but the publicity drew many new supporters to the NAACP.


The private sector was not the only source of racism: under President Wilson, the plight of African Americans in government jobs suffered. Many federal agencies adopted whites-only employment practices, the Army excluded blacks from officer ranks, and the immigration service prohibited the immigration of persons of African ancestry. Du Bois wrote an editorial in 1914 deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts, and he supported William Monroe Trotter when Trotter brusquely confronted Wilson about the President's failure to fulfill his campaign promise of justice for blacks.


"The Crisis" continued to wage a campaign against lynching. In 1915, it published an article with a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914. The April 1916 edition covered the group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia. Later in 1916, the "Waco Horror" article covered the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American. The article broke new ground by utilizing undercover reporting to expose the conduct of local whites in Waco, Texas.


The early 20th century was the era of the Great Migration of blacks from the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest and West. Du Bois wrote an editorial supporting the Great Migration, because he felt it would help blacks escape Southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society.


Also in the 1910s the American eugenics movement was in its infancy, and many leading eugenicists were openly racist, defining Blacks as "a lower race". Du Bois opposed this view as an unscientific aberration, but still maintained the basic principle of eugenics: that different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the "stocks" of humanity.


The Houston riot of 1917 disturbed Du Bois and was a major setback to efforts to permit African Americans to become military officers. The riot began after Houston police arrested and beat two black soldiers; in response, over 100 black soldiers took to the streets of Houston and killed 16 whites. A military court martial was held, and 19 of the soldiers were hung, and 67 others were imprisoned. In spite of the Houston riot, Du Bois and others successfully pressed the Army to accept the officers trained at Spingarn's camp, resulting in over 600 black officers joining the Army in October 1917.


When the war ended, Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1919 to attend the first Pan-African Congress and to interview African-American soldiers for a planned book on their experiences in World War I. He was trailed by U.S. agents who were searching for evidence of treasonous activities. Du Bois discovered that the vast majority of black American soldiers were relegated to menial labor as stevedores and laborers. Some units were armed, and one in particular, the 92nd Division (the Buffalo soldiers), engaged in combat. Du Bois discovered widespread racism in the Army, and concluded that the Army command discouraged African Americans from joining the Army, discredited the accomplishments of black soldiers, and promoted bigotry.


In 1920, Du Bois published "", the first of his three autobiographies. The "veil" was that which covered colored people around the world. In the book, he hoped to lift the veil and show white readers what life was like behind the veil, and how it distorted the viewpoints of those looking through it – in both directions. The book contained Du Bois's feminist essay, "The Damnation of Women", which was a tribute to the dignity and worth of women, particularly black women.


Concerned that textbooks used by African-American children ignored black history and culture, Du Bois created a monthly children's magazine, "The Brownies' Book". Initially published in 1920, it was aimed at black children, who Du Bois called "the children of the sun".


Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1921 to attend the second Pan-African Congress. The assembled black leaders from around the world issued the "London Resolutions" and established a Pan-African Association headquarters in Paris. Under Du Bois's guidance, the resolutions insisted on racial equality, and that Africa be ruled "by" Africans (not, as in the 1919 congress, with the "consent" of Africans). Du Bois restated the resolutions of the congress in his "Manifesto To the League of Nations", which implored the newly formed League of Nations to address labor issues and to appoint Africans to key posts. The League took little action on the requests.


Another important African-American leader of the 1920s was Marcus Garvey, promoter of the Back-to-Africa movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey denounced Du Bois's efforts to achieve equality through integration, and instead endorsed racial separatism. Du Bois initially supported the concept of Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping company that was intended to facilitate commerce within the African diaspora. But Du Bois later became concerned that Garvey was threatening the NAACP's efforts, leading Du Bois to describe him as fraudulent and reckless. Responding to Garvey's slogan "Africa for the Africans", Du Bois said that he supported that concept, but denounced Garvey's intention that Africa be ruled by African Americans.


Du Bois wrote a series of articles in "The Crisis" between 1922 and 1924 attacking Garvey's movement, calling him the "most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world." Du Bois and Garvey never made a serious attempt to collaborate, and their dispute was partly rooted in the desire of their respective organizations (NAACP and UNIA) to capture a larger portion of the available philanthropic funding.


When Du Bois became editor of "The Crisis" magazine in 1911, he joined the Socialist Party of America on the advice of NAACP founders Mary Ovington, William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell. However, he supported the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential campaign, a breach of the rules, and was forced to resign from the Socialist Party. In 1913, his support for Wilson was shaken when racial segregation in government hiring was reported. Du Bois remained "convinced that socialism was an excellent way of life, but I thought it might be reached by various methods."


Nine years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Du Bois extended a trip to Europe to include a visit to the Soviet Union, where he was struck by the poverty and disorganization he encountered in the Soviet Union, yet was impressed by the intense labors of the officials and by the recognition given to workers. Although Du Bois was not yet familiar with the communist theories of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, he concluded that socialism might be a better path towards racial equality than capitalism.


Although Du Bois generally endorsed socialist principles, his politics were strictly pragmatic: in 1929, he endorsed Democrat Jimmy Walker for mayor of New York, rather than the socialist Norman Thomas, believing that Walker could do more immediate good for blacks, even though Thomas's platform was more consistent with Du Bois's views. Throughout the 1920s, Du Bois and the NAACP shifted support back and forth between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, induced by promises from the candidates to fight lynchings, improve working conditions, or support voting rights in the South; invariably, the candidates failed to deliver on their promises.


Du Bois did not have a good working relationship with Walter Francis White, president of the NAACP since 1931. That conflict, combined with the financial stresses of the Great Depression, precipitated a power struggle over "The Crisis". Du Bois, concerned that his position as editor would be eliminated, resigned his job at "The Crisis" and accepted an academic position at Atlanta University in early 1933. The rift with the NAACP grew larger in 1934 when Du Bois reversed his stance on segregation, stating that "separate but equal" was an acceptable goal for African Americans. The NAACP leadership was stunned, and asked Du Bois to retract his statement, but he refused, and the dispute led to Du Bois's resignation from the NAACP.


The book's thesis ran counter to the orthodox interpretation of Reconstruction maintained by white historians, and the book was virtually ignored by mainstream historians until the 1960s. Thereafter, however, it ignited a "revisionist" trend in the historiography of Reconstruction, which emphasized black people's search for freedom and the era's radical policy changes. By the 21st century, "Black Reconstruction" was widely perceived as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography."


In the final chapter of the book, "XIV. The Propaganda of History", Du Bois evokes his efforts at writing an article for the "Encyclopædia Britannica" on the "history of the American Negro". After the editors had cut all reference to Reconstruction, he insisted that the following note appear in the entry: "White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools." The editors refused and, so, Du Bois withdrew his article.


In 1932, Du Bois was selected by several philanthropies, including the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the General Education Board, to be the managing editor for a proposed "Encyclopedia of the Negro", a work which Du Bois had been contemplating for 30 years. After several years of planning and organizing, the philanthropies canceled the project in 1938 because some board members believed that Du Bois was too biased to produce an objective encyclopedia.


Du Bois took a trip around the world in 1936, which included visits to Nazi Germany, China and Japan. While in Germany, Du Bois remarked that he was treated with warmth and respect. After his return to the United States, he expressed his ambivalence about the Nazi regime. He admired how the Nazis had improved the German economy, but he was horrified by their treatment of the Jewish people, which he described as "an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade."


Following the 1905 Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Du Bois became impressed by the growing strength of Imperial Japan. He came to view the ascendant Japanese Empire as an antidote to Western imperialism, arguing over for over three decades after the war that its rise represented a chance to break the monopoly that white nations had on international affairs. A representative of Japan's "Negro Propaganda Operations" traveled to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, meeting with Du Bois and giving him a positive impression of Imperial Japan's racial policies.


In 1936, the Japanese ambassador arranged a trip to Japan for Du Bois and a small group of academics, visiting China, Japan, and Manchukuo (Manchuria). Du Bois viewed Japanese colonialism in Manchuria as benevolent; he wrote that "colonial enterprise by a colored nation need not imply the caste, exploitation and subjection which is has always implied in the case of white Europe." While disturbed by the eventual Japanese alliance with Nazi Germany, Du Bois also argued Japan was only compelled to enter the pact because of the hostility of the United States and United Kingdom, and he viewed American apprehensions over Japanese expansion in Asia as racially motivated both before and after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.


Du Bois opposed the US intervention in World War II, particularly in the Pacific, because he believed that China and Japan were emerging from the clutches of white imperialists. He felt that the European Allies waging war against Japan was an opportunity for whites to reestablish their influence in Asia. He was deeply disappointed by the US government's plan for African Americans in the armed forces: Blacks were limited to 5.8% of the force, and there were to be no African-American combat units – virtually the same restrictions as in World War I. With blacks threatening to shift their support to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Republican opponent in the 1940 election, Roosevelt appointed a few blacks to leadership posts in the military.


"Dusk of Dawn", Du Bois's second autobiography, was published in 1940. The title refers to his hope that African Americans were passing out of the darkness of racism into an era of greater equality. The work is part autobiography, part history, and part sociological treatise. Du Bois described the book as "the autobiography of a concept of race ... elucidated and magnified and doubtless distorted in the thoughts and deeds which were mine ... Thus for all time my life is significant for all lives of men."


In 1943, at age 75, Du Bois was abruptly fired from his position at Atlanta University by college president Rufus Clement. Many scholars expressed outrage, prompting Atlanta University to provide Du Bois with a lifelong pension and the title of professor emeritus. Arthur Spingarn remarked that Du Bois spent his time in Atlanta "battering his life out against ignorance, bigotry, intolerance and slothfulness, projecting ideas nobody but he understands, and raising hopes for change which may be comprehended in a hundred years."


Turning down job offers from Fisk and Howard, Du Bois re-joined the NAACP as director of the Department of Special Research. Surprising many NAACP leaders, Du Bois jumped into the job with vigor and determination. During his 10−years hiatus, the NAACP's income had increased fourfold, and its membership had soared to 325,000 members.


Du Bois was a member of the three-person delegation from the NAACP that attended the 1945 conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established. The NAACP delegation wanted the United Nations to endorse racial equality and to bring an end to the colonial era. To push the United Nations in that direction, Du Bois drafted a proposal that pronounced "[t]he colonial system of government ... is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars". The NAACP proposal received support from China, India, and the Soviet Union, but it was virtually ignored by the other major powers, and the NAACP proposals were not included in the final United Nations charter.


After the United Nations conference, Du Bois published "Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace", a book that attacked colonial empires and, in the words of one reviewer, "contains enough dynamite to blow up the whole vicious system whereby we have comforted our white souls and lined the pockets of generations of free-booting capitalists."


In late 1945, Du Bois attended the fifth, and final, Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, England. The congress was the most productive of the five congresses, and there Du Bois met Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana, who would later invite him to Africa.


Du Bois helped to submit petitions to the UN concerning discrimination against African Americans, the most noteworthy of which was the NAACP's "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress". This advocacy laid the foundation for the later report and petition called "We Charge Genocide", submitted in 1951 by the Civil Rights Congress. "We Charge Genocide" accuses the U.S. of systematically sanctioning murders and inflicting harm against African Americans and therefore committing genocide.


Du Bois was a lifelong anti-war activist, but his efforts became more pronounced after World War II. In 1949, Du Bois spoke at the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in New York: "I tell you, people of America, the dark world is on the move! It wants and will have Freedom, Autonomy and Equality. It will not be diverted in these fundamental rights by dialectical splitting of political hairs ... Whites may, if they will, arm themselves for suicide. But the vast majority of the world's peoples will march on over them to freedom!"


In the spring of 1949, he spoke at the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace in Paris, saying to the large crowd: "Leading this new colonial imperialism comes my own native land built by my father's toil and blood, the United States. The United States is a great nation; rich by grace of God and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens ... Drunk with power we are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us; and to a third World War which will ruin the world."


Du Bois affiliated himself with a leftist organization, the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions, and he traveled to Moscow as its representative to speak at the All-Soviet Peace Conference in late 1949.


During the 1950s, the U.S. government's anti-communist McCarthyism campaign targeted Du Bois because of his socialist leanings. Historian Manning Marable characterizes the government's treatment of Du Bois as "ruthless repression" and a "political assassination".


The FBI began to compile a file on Du Bois in 1942, investigating him for possible subversive activities. The original investigation appears to have ended in 1943 because the FBI was unable to discover sufficient evidence against Du Bois, but the FBI resumed its investigation in 1949, suspecting he was among a group of "Concealed Communists". The most aggressive government attack against Du Bois occurred in the early 1950s, as a consequence of his opposition to nuclear weapons. In 1950 he became chair of the newly created Peace Information Center (PIC), which worked to publicize the Stockholm Peace Appeal in the United States. The primary purpose of the appeal was to gather signatures on a petition, asking governments around the world to ban all nuclear weapons.


In , the U.S. Justice Department alleged that the PIC was acting as an agent of a foreign state, and thus required the PIC to register with the federal government. Du Bois and other PIC leaders refused, and they were indicted for failure to register. After the indictment, some of Du Bois's associates distanced themselves from him, and the NAACP refused to issue a statement of support; but many labor figures and leftists – including Langston Hughes – supported Du Bois.


He was finally tried in 1951 and was represented by civil rights attorney Vito Marcantonio. The case was dismissed before the jury rendered a verdict as soon as the defense attorney told the judge that "Dr. Albert Einstein has offered to appear as character witness for Dr. Du Bois". Du Bois's memoir of the trial is "In Battle for Peace". Even though Du Bois was not convicted, the government confiscated Du Bois's passport and withheld it for eight years.


Du Bois was bitterly disappointed that many of his colleaguesparticularly the NAACPdid not support him during his 1951 PIC trial, whereas working class whites and blacks supported him enthusiastically. After the trial, Du Bois lived in Manhattan, writing and speaking, and continuing to associate primarily with leftist acquaintances. His primary concern was world peace, and he railed against military actions such as the Korean War, which he viewed as efforts by imperialist whites to maintain colored people in a submissive state.


The U.S. government prevented Du Bois from attending the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The conference was the culmination of 40 years of Du Bois's dreams – a meeting of 29 nations from Africa and Asia, many recently independent, representing most of the world's colored peoples. The conference celebrated those nations' independence as they began to assert their power as non-aligned nations during the Cold War.


Du Bois regained his passport in 1958, and with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, he traveled around the world, visiting Russia and China. In both countries he was celebrated. Du Bois later wrote approvingly of the conditions in both countries.


Du Bois became incensed in 1961 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1950 McCarran Act, a key piece of McCarthyism legislation which required Communists to register with the government. To demonstrate his outrage, he joined the Communist Party in October 1961, at the age of 93. Around that time, he wrote: "I believe in Communism. I mean by Communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part." He asked Herbert Aptheker, a Communist and historian of African-American history, to be his literary executor.


Nkrumah invited Du Bois to Ghana to participate in their independence celebration in 1957, but he was unable to attend because the U.S. government had confiscated his passport in 1951. By 1960the "Year of Africa"Du Bois had recovered his passport, and was able to cross the Atlantic and celebrate the creation of the Republic of Ghana. Du Bois returned to Africa in late 1960 to attend the inauguration of Nnamdi Azikiwe as the first African governor of Nigeria.


While visiting Ghana in 1960, Du Bois spoke with its president about the creation of a new encyclopedia of the African diaspora, the "Encyclopedia Africana". In early 1961, Ghana notified Du Bois that they had appropriated funds to support the encyclopedia project, and they invited him to travel to Ghana and manage the project there. In October 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to take up residence and commence work on the encyclopedia. In early 1963, the United States refused to renew his passport, so he made the symbolic gesture of becoming a citizen of Ghana.