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Who Is William Edward Burghardt Du Bois?

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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts during the Reconstruction Era. Born to Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt, Du Bois was mainly raised by his mother because his father had abandoned the family when he was two. Many important things happening during Du Bois’s adolescence. Firstly, he was born in the year in which the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. This amendment granted former slaves citizenship and equal protection under the law. Du Bois grew up in the midst of the Jim Crow laws, which basically promoted segregation and restricted black suffrage. He also had the chance to experience the rise of emancipation movements which contributed to his interest in racial relations. Du Bois’s and ambition can be rooted to quite humble beginnings. Du Bois’s mother had been very poor and struggled to provide for him. Despite her death in 1885, Du Bois’s mother had raised a motivated, ambitious, and intellectually talented young man. Du Bois graduated from his local high school being the only black student in his class of 13. After a year, the seventeen-year-old enrolled in Fisk University, a black college founded during the Reconstruction Era in Nashville, Tennessee. At Fisk, Du Bois earned his …show more content…

In his essays, he took to redefine race. Prior to the publishing of Souls, racial identity was fixed by one’s racial type. Many racial theorist used this argument to explain the different characteristics and social tendencies which different racial groups expressed. However, Du Bois thought that it was the sociohistorical and spiritual factors which accounted for the differences among the racial groups. Soul’s effects its readers intellectually and aesthetically. It poetically explains the suffering of black folk through metaphors of “double consciousness” and mentions a cultural history that pleads for

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