The Education of W.E.B. Du Bois

William E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was a leader in the civil rights movement and the campaign to achieve equality of educational opportunity for African Americans. Du Bois was born in and received his elementary and secondary education in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. From 1885 to 1890, he attended Fisk University, a historically black institution in Tennessee. The following selection describes reactions that Du Bois, a northern African American, had to racism and segregation in the South. Du Bois would later earn his doctorate from Harvard University and devote his life to writing, teaching, and advocating equality for all races and peoples.

[My] three years at Fisk [University] were years of growth and development. I learned new things about the world. My knowledge of the race problem became more definite. I saw discrimination in ways of which I had never dreamed: the separation of passengers on the railways of the South was just beginning; the race separation in living quarters throughout the cities and towns was manifest; the public disdain and even insult in race contact on the street continually took my breath; I came in contact for the first time with a sort of violence that I had never realized in New England; I remember going down and looking wide-eyed at the door of a public building, filled with buck-shot, where the editor of the leading daily paper had been publicly murdered the day before. I was astonished to find many of my fellow students carrying fire-arms and to hear their stories of adventure. On the other hand my personal contact with my teachers was inspiring and beneficial as indeed I suppose all personal contacts between human beings must be. Adam Spence of Fisk first taught me to know what the Greek language meant. In a funny little basement room crowded with apparatus, Frederick Chase gave me insight into natural science and talked with me about future study. I knew the President, Erastus Cravath, to be honest and sincere.

I determined to know something of the Negro in the country districts; to go out and teach during the summer vacation. I was not compelled to do this, for my scholarship was sufficient to support me, but that was not the point. I had heard about the country in the South as the real seat of slavery. I wanted to know it. I walked out into east Tennessee ten or more miles a day until at last in a little valley near Alexandria I found a place where there had been a Negro public school only once since the Civil War; and there for two successive terms during the summer I taught at $28 and $30 a month. It was an enthralling experience. I met new and intricate and unconscious discrimination. I was pleasantly surprised when the white school superintendent, on whom I had made a business call, invited me to stay for dinner; and he would have been astonished if he had dreamed that I expected to eat at the table with him and not after he was through. All the appointments of my school were primitive: a windowless log cabin; hastily manufactured benches; no blackboard; almost no books; long, long distances to walk. And on the other hand, I heard the sorrow songs sung with primitive beauty and grandeur. I saw the hard, ugly drudgery of country life and the writhing of landless, ignorant peasants. I saw the race problem at nearly its lowest terms.

Questions

1. How did the problem of racial discrimination become a reality for Du Bois?
2. How was Du Bois's education different from that which Booker T. Washington had prescribed for African Americans?
3. Based on Du Bois's narrative, describe the conditions of African American education in the rural South at the turn of the twentieth century.
4. After reflecting on how higher education changed Du Bois's views of racism in America, consider if and how it has changed your thinking of racial, ethnic, and gender relationships.
5. After reflecting on Du Bois's summer teaching experiences while a Fisk University student, consider if and how clinical experiences have either confirmed or changed your opinions about teaching.

Source: W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 30–31. Copyright © 1983 Transaction Publishers. Reprinted with permission; all rights reserved.