Sunday, January 27, 2013

Social and philosophical foundations

UKWilliam Edward Burghardt DuBois
William Edward Burghardt DuBois was born on February 23, 1868 and died on August 27, 1963. Dr. Du Bois was an American civil rights activist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar who became a naturalized citizen of Ghana in 1963.
Dr. Du Bois graduated valedictorian from high school and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. After spending his summers teaching African American schools in rural areas, he entered Harvard University earning another Bachelor of Arts degree graduating cum laude and was one of six speakers at commencement exercises. In 1892 he pursued his graduate studies in history and economics at the University of Berlin on a Slater Fund fellowship. After completing his studies in Germany, he returned to the United States and graduated with a Doctoral degree from Harvard University, the first person of African descent to do so. His tenure as a teacher continued as he served two years as a professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
Dr. DuBois was one of the cofounders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also directed the Atlanta Conferences which generated concise scientific research on the living conditions of African Americans. As a cofounder of the NAACP and editor for the Crisis (official magazine for the NAACP) he used his position to write many influential articles on blacks in America. As a representative of the NAACP he went to the Peace Conference to discuss the situations of Africans everywhere, realizing that for blacks to be free, they must be free everywhere. One of Dr. DuBois most famous books was The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of American which proposed to set forth the efforts made in the United States of America to repress the slave trade between Africa and the United States, which has yet to be surpassed.
Dr. DuBois position as an educator and agitator often ran afoul of other influential famous blacks. He was on the opposite side of blacks such as Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington because he was a firm believer in working toward making blacks leaders and educators of their race. He especially had a tumultuous relationship with Booker T. Washington because Washington believed in forgiving the South and its treatment of blacks and their separate but equal doctrines. DuBois believed in immediate and uncompromising equality between the races. Booker T. Washington remarked that, "the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing." Although both leaders believed in eliminating racism, segregation, and discrimination, the means to achieve such ends were immensely different.
DuBois always remained a controversial and social activist. Because of his beliefs, he would become a supporter of Communism. The U.S. Department of Justice ordered him to register as a foreign principle and he refused. DuBois refusal to do so was grounds for indicting him under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Although he was acquitted, the damage was done and he went to Ghana where he resided until his death. While in Ghana, he became an official member of the Communist Party and a Ghanian citizen.
Dr. DuBois educational philosophy was that neither segregated schools nor integrated schools mattered, but education was the pivotal point. He also believed in immediate and uncompromising equality between the races

UK Essays

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