(Courtesy of Negroartist.com)
William Edward Burghardt was born on February 23rd, 1868, in Barrington, Massachusetts. His mother was a domestic worker, and his father, a barber, had left when he was very young. Since the society he lived in was in the north, there was little discrimination compared to what was going on in the south, so he actually got a decent education. He had worked as a time keeper at the local mill, and ended up being the first African American to pass high school. His mother had died that year, and he went to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee for three years. Nashville had a huge effect on him, and also made him start thinking about how wrong discrimination was. Great Barrington had very little exposure to African American culture, while Nashville did. For the first time in his life, he saw racism. After Nashville, he went to Harvard University, where he got his Bachelor of Arts degree and Ph.D. This was the part in his life to where he starting creating his ideas about his opinion on racial segregation. He had also worked at several universities and schools. In 1888, he taught at several rural schools and wrote The Souls of Black Folk based on his experiences. DuBois became a professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University. He then became a teacher at Atlanta University, where he taught history economics from 1897 to 1910. He had hoped that social science would be enough to stop discrimination. He challenged Brooker T. Washington, a white man that wanted the blacks to accept discrimination, by saying that discrimination wasn’t good, and that it was depressing the blacks. The place ended up splitting into two sides of those who supported Washington, and the supporters of William. From 1910 to the 1930’s, he was the main voice of the black community. He ended up resigning from the N.A.A.C.P. in 1934, because he thought that they were being unfair, but then returned in 1944 through 1948, and wrote “An Appeal to the World”. In 1949, he attended to New York, Paris, and Moscow for peace conferences, and attended the first Pan-African conference held in London. He also traveled to communist China and the Soviet Union where he was greatly honored, and, in 1959, received the Soviet Lenin Peace Price for strengthening world peace. He ended up joining the communist party in 1961 and went to Ghana where he became a secretariat, and died there on August 28th, 1963, at age 95. William also had some very impacting achievements.
(Courtesy of Harvard University's official website)