Politics
1868 to 1963, Massachusetts, USA
Double consciousness, the color line, and the sociology of race.
Start learning W. →In 1903 Du Bois named the inner experience of being Black in America - the sense of seeing yourself forever through hostile eyes, of carrying two warring identities in a single body.
Du Bois declared that the great problem of his century was the color line - and argued, against the optimism of his age, that race was not a fading relic but a global system organizing the modern world.
Against the most powerful Black leader of his age, Du Bois argued that accepting second-class citizenship in exchange for economic crumbs was a fatal bargain - and that the race needed full rights, higher education, and…
In a monumental 1935 work, Du Bois overturned the reigning history of Reconstruction, recasting the freedpeople not as the ruin of the South but as the heroes of a brief, real, betrayed experiment in interracial democra…
Across nearly a century of life, Du Bois moved from faith in American reform toward radical disillusion, becoming the father of Pan-Africanism and dying, at ninety-five, a citizen of newly independent Ghana.
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