W.E.B. Du Bois Biography
“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” ~ W.E.B. Du Bois.
Our world is ethnically diverse, with each culture possessing its own exclusive character. Even within a single nation like the United States, certain sectors of the population diverge from the more dominant society. Consequently, such heterogeneity results in varying forms of racial prejudice and other discriminatory acts. From the creation of man until the modern day, the recurring effects of racial stratification and civil injustice have inevitably imprinted the many lives of those pressed under the global spread of social inequality. Specifically within the United States, the fine line between blacks and whites is drawn boldly, setting greater social restrictions upon Americans. Though ethnocentrism and largely racism, whites have associated African Americans with the term “inferior”, establishing racial hatred and disunity that has risen to become the rallying force for many African American activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who has participated in a life-long fight for racial equality through words, established by both pen and by mouth.
Born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up within the Reconstruction era in the United States, which followed the bloody Civil War. In his youth, Du Bois had endured the divorce of his parents while working consistently at a demanding factory to maintain his meager subsistence, which indirectly allowed him to eventually publish a story within the community newspaper about his adolescent years. Within these years of his early life, he was able to become the first black student to graduate from Great Barrington High. Furthering his education, he proceeded on to Fisk University, where he had received a partial scholarship. Along with a scholarship, Du Bois studied in Europe at the University of Berlin, and by 1895, had earned his B.A.,...