W.E.B. Du Bois (jan 1, 1868 – jan 1, 1963)

Description:

About:
-American, PhD at Harvard (1st black man to do so)
-founding member NAACP
-sociologist, historian, civil rights activist
-pioneer of empirical sociology
-leader of "Pan-African" anti-colonial movement

Major works:
-The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
→ first major sociological study of an African American community
→ data-driven approach to studying the conditions of Black life, helped establish sociology as a serious discipline in the US
-The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
→ introduces the concept of "double consciousness", the idea that African Americans must navigate two conflicting identities: one as an American and the other as a Black person in a racist society
→ critiques Booker T. Washington's philosophy of accommodation to white supremacy, advocation instead for political action, education, and civil rights
-Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
→ provides a revisionist history of the Reconstruction Era in the United States, arguing that African Americans played a central role in the transformation of the South after the Civil War
→ Marxist analysis of race, labor, and class conflict in the post-Civil War South reshaped the understanding of Reconstruction--from a failed experiment to one sabotaged by white supremacy and economic exploitation

Major Concepts:
-"Double-Consciousness" was revolutionary in its articulation of the psychological toll of racism and became a foundational concept in race theory and identity studies
-his combined history of race and class has been influential in the civil rights movement, intersectionality, and critical-race theory
-challenged the scientific racism of the time, arguing that the social and economic disparities faced by Black Americans were the result of historical and structural oppression, not biological inferiority

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