Du Bois, W. E. B.

(1868-1963) A Black American intellectual and activist, also in part a sociologist in everything but official recognition, whose work (though largely ignored by modern sociologists) prefigures some of the classic themes of early American sociology.

Du Bois studied at the Universities of Harvard and Berlin ( was an admirer), contributed to the American Journal of Sociology, chaired the Department of Sociology at Atlanta University, and published the first systematic sociological studies of African American communities. His The Philadelphia Negro is a comprehensive report on what nowadays would be called the Black urban underclass. It pre-dates W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant by more than twenty years and could serve equally well as the locus classicus of American urban ethnography. In a famous article published in Atlantic Monthly in 1897 (and reprinted in his Souls of Black Folk, 1899/1903), Du Bois formulated a theory of dual consciousness which shows the influence of William James's ideas about the self (James taught Du Bois at Harvard), noting that ‘it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels this twoness-an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder.’

Du Bois was a co-founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) and a major figure in the renaissance of Harlem as a cultural centre in the 1920s. He was, however, much criticized for his support for African American participation in the First World War. His contribution to the development of sociology is described in the first part of the biography by, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993).