W.E.B. Dubois pioneered progress through his activism and his literary works

Brother W.E.B. Dubois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. As early as age 15 Brother DuBois began publishing editorials in the The New York Globe. From 1885-1888 DuBois attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. This was DuBois' first trip south. And in those three year he witnessed racism as he had never before. These experiences made him more determined than ever to seek empowerment and true freedom for Black people. After graduation from Fisk DuBois entered Harvard, his first college choice. At first focusing on philosophy and history, he later turned his studies towards economics and social problems. Though able to become the first Black person to graduate from the prestigious university, racism left him in an alienated environment. Later in life he remarked "I was in Harvard but not of it." He received his bachelor's degree in 1890 and immediately began working toward his master and doctor's degree. With the advancement of Black people ever present on his mind, he urged political action as a means of gaining liberties. DuBois chose to continue his study at the University of Berlin in Germany, at the time one of the world's finest institutions of higher learning. It was while studying in Berlin that DuBois began to see the race issue as a global one, affecting Black people not only in America but South America, Africa, Asia and Europe as well. At the age of twenty-six, with twenty years of schooling behind him, DuBois began his life's work. For several decades he strived for Black people world wide through such endeavors as the Pan-African Congress and publications in news journals such as the Crisis. A harbinger of the Civil Rights Movement and Pan-Africanism, he died in self-imposed exile in the land of his ancestors, Africa. For his endeavors, DuBois was made an honorary member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. during his lifetime. On August 27,1963, on the eve of the March On Washington, DuBois died in Accra, Ghana. His role in the development of Black social and political ideologies is without dispute. His life was one of continuous change and growth as he, like the black world, tested various methods of dealing with the oppression around them. W.E.B. DuBois was in the truest fashion, a revolutionary. Labeled as a radical, he was ignored by those who hoped that his massive contributions would be buried along side of him. But as Brother Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, "history cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois..."