As NOAA celebrates both the new presidency of Barack Obama and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Centennial, we embrace the 2009 Black History Month theme, The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas. But it is also a time for reflecting on the sacrifices of millions whose quest failed even as they yielded up the movement's heroes, including the revered W. E. B. Du Bois — criminologist, scholar, intellectual leader and the most prominent human and civil rights activist of the first half of the twentieth century.
Born in Massachusetts on Feb. 23, 1868, the mixed-race William Edward Burghardt Du Bois earned undergraduate degrees from Fisk University and then Harvard College, and in 1895, became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. While teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he completed his benchmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, followed by works that cemented his place as one of the nation's premier scholars and political theorists: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), The Negro (1915), and Black Folk, Then and Now (1939). Perhaps most notable was Black Reconstruction (1935): in the face of white scholars' denial of African-American cultural, political, and social relevance, Du Bois clearly documented how black Americans in the Civil War and Reconstruction created vital political and economic alliances with white politicians, and established robust public education and social systems in the South even as white America failed to support black citizenship.
Many of Du Bois' other theses were similarly revolutionary. He correlated unemployment and poor education with criminal activity, and, examining the mass exodus of blacks from the rural south to cities, was the first criminologist to relate historical fact to social change. But it was as a founder and promoter of the NAACP in 1909 that Du Bois is perhaps today best known. In spite of his great achievements, he was refused a passport in 1961 because of his association with the Communist Party USA and became a citizen of Ghana, where he died in 1963 one day before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech.
Much of Du Bois' work coincided with the civil rights and suffragist campaigns of Ida Bell Wells, social worker, muckraker, and champion of those marginalized because of their race and gender. Born in 1862 to slave parents in Mississippi, Wells also graduated from Fisk, and went into teaching. She first became a public figure in 1884 when, furious at being ordered into a segregated car in violation of the 1875 Civil Rights Act, she led a civil rights campaign against the powerful local railway. Her energies soon encompassed what was to be her lifelong passion, exposing and eliminating the horrifying practice of lynching black Americans. Founding a new type of journalism, secret investigatory writing, Wells was for decades a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America and one of the founders, along with Du Bois, of the NAACP that this year celebrates its Centennial and rejoices, along with Americans of all backgrounds, in the successful quest of Barack Obama to reach the mountaintop.