On Feb. 13, a panel of sociologists and anthropologists briefly showed an introduction to the life and work of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (W.E.B Du Bois), the scholar and activist for whom the library is named after. The event was held at the W.E.B. Du Bois library on floor 22 in the W.E.B. Du Bois Center.

Around 20 people joined panelists Dr. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Director at the W. E. B. Du Bois Center and Professor of Anthropology, with Aaron Yates, Du Bois Center Graduate Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology and Adam Holmes, Assistant Director at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center.

The fourth annual panel focused on the narrative themes of Du Bois’ life, according to Holmes.

W.E.B Du Bois, who lived from 1868 to 1963, had a very “New England childhood,” according to Battle-Baptiste. He was born in Great Barrington, Mass. to his father Alfred, and mother Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois.

Du Bois’s maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, an enslaved person who briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, which may be how he gained his freedom during the late 18th century. But there is a lack of sufficient evidence to support this claim.

Around the age of four, after Alfred and Mary separated, Du Bois and his mother went to live with his grandparents at Egremont Plains. He had a nurturing childhood, where his family looked at him to be the one to succeed, Battle-Baptiste said.

One memory was of his grandmother singing a song “that was in another tongue,” Battle-Baptiste said. “It was a tie to Africa, a tie to [the place] where he would end up laid to rest on the continent of Africa,” But Du Bois never learned the meaning of the words.

Mary was sure to instill an education and have Du Bois become “a student of life” even as Du Bois struggled with “microaggressions towards anti-blackness” in high school, according to Holmes.

Despite this, Du Bois described himself as “thoroughly New England” and “a son of Massachusetts” with ambitions to go to Harvard, according to Battle-Baptiste.

When his mother suffered a stroke, the possibility of higher education dwindled, according to Holmes. Mary still encouraged her son to pursue his plans, and with the help of funding and scholarships provided by the Great Barrington community, went to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.

In the South, Du Bois found “enormous inspiration in both ways and customs and music,” according to Holmes.

He also went to teach school in the summers in rural Tennessee, where he felt the violence of white supremacy from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, “that would from time to time terrorize and murder local Black populations,” Holmes said.

After completing his undergraduate studies, he went to Harvard and pursued his Ph.D., becoming the first Black man to graduate with a doctorate. He was often denied membership in clubs, had limited residency options and found it difficult to integrate into the full society, according to Holmes.

In 1892, Du Bois attended the Humboldt University of Berlin, originally known as Friedrich Wilhelm University, for his graduate studies. According to Holmes, Du Bois’ intellectual and personal exchanges with the faculty and students changed his life, because in Germany for the first time, “Du Bois was treated as an equal because his race did not precede the rest of his qualifications.”

“He was considered, first and foremost, as a student gentleman and a citizen of America,” Holmes said. “And because of his social standings, the racism that was of course a part of European society did not apply to him in the way that the ingrained systemic racism that was prevalent in the U.S. did.”

In Germany, Du Bois learned and focused on sociology. The U.S. had just begun to develop sociology departments in universities, according to Yates. Du Bois focused on data empirics, which is information gathered through observation and experimentation.

“This sparked his desire to understand better what was happening with people of African descent back home in the United States,” Yates said. “His doctoral dissertation at Harvard was on the suppression of the African slave trade and he sort of followed this line of inquiry into understanding, not just the history and past of slavery, but also the transition of people of African descent.”

“Their thinking was very much shaped at the time by the popularity of Darwin’s theory of evolution,” Yates said. “Pretty much all of them were Social Darwinists. Some of the early papers promoting eugenics and this idea of survival of the fittest, being not just allowed to play out, actually accelerated through social programs to make sure that only the most fit people survived.”

One of these theories were called armchair theories, focusing on white superiority and the inferiority of minorities according to Yates. Du Bois began his sociological work here, putting the science into sociology by using surveys, data, interviews and maps. One of his most famous books, “The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study,” became the first sociological case study of a Black community in the U.S. and an example of a statistically proven social science.

After being denied from working with the University of Pennsylvania due to institutional racism, Du Bois and his wife, Nina Gomer, headed down south, where he worked to facilitate the training of sociology to the students at Atlanta School of Sociology in what is today considered Clark Atlanta University, according to Battle-Baptiste.

After the birth of his first son Burghardt in 1899, Burghardt contracted diphtheria and died. If he would have been hospitalized, he could have been treated and lived. The family could not get a doctor to come out in time, according to Battle-Baptiste.

In the same year, the brutal lynching of a man named Sam Hose made the news. Hose was tortured, burned and hanged by a mob of two thousand white people, and his knuckles were displayed in a storefront window of a butcher shop, according to Battle-Baptiste.

This lynching stopped Du Bois’ data-driven sociology experiment. “Data was not enough, and this is where he shifts his work to what he would call propaganda,” Battle-Baptiste said.

During the Paris Exposition in 1900, Du Bois became the primary organizer of The Exhibit of American Negroes. In this exhibit, Du Bois compiled a series of 363 photographs commemorating the lives of Black Americans to challenge the racist stereotypes of the time.

Du Bois demonstrated the advancement of education and literature within the Black American communities with charts, graphs and maps that showed the economic, demographic and sociological data relating to the modern living conditions of Black Americans.

“This public exhibit shows this turn away from the purely academic and to take data that is usually to preserve for scholars and to make the property of the very people for whom it was collected by, making it accessible to them visually and to show the impacts of change over time,” Holmes said.

“We now take these things for granted, that this was new thought technology at this point in history and it’s important to not be overstated. This is just part of the theme of the first decade of the 20th century that it is all about making a coherent culture take form in some ways in this country among Black Americans, but also situating them at the heart of modernity which has become such a concern for so many white people at this point.”

“The project of Du Bois’ first year of the 20th century is to create a sort of canon of both data and literature to re-situate people of African descent in the world,” Holmes said.

“When you can compare this to Du Bois’s earlier writings, this is almost shocking in its lyricism and its willingness to embrace memoir, to embrace music, to include fiction, to tell the truth … when we talk about propaganda, we’re not using the term negatively,” Holmes said. “But propaganda is using a method, using skill techniques to convince people of something that you could convince them with data if they were so inclined.”

Du Bois continued to use his work in sociology and data-driven work to support civil rights and racial justice movements, including the Niagara Movement in 1905, the editing and publishing of The Crisis by the NAACP in 1910, the Harlem Renaissance focusing on promoting Black art in the mid-1920s, the publishing of his book on Black Reconstruction in 1935 (“a labor of love” according to Battle-Baptiste) and several other events.

“I think that part of Du Bois’ legacy is the example that his life gives of a kind of wholehearted dedication to a cause that one follows through literally a century,” Yates said. “He had different approaches at different moments of his life, but he never sort of let go of what was his goal of uplifting people of African descent.”

“We need to begin to know who represents us locally, where we live, how we can influence. That’s the work that is left to do,” Yates said. “… I think that Du Bois was very adamant about [how the] collective push and activism is not simply marching loudly or being upset or writing statements. It is about the action that you do locally, the action that you do with your colleagues, with your friends … I’m not saying convince them but at least have the conversation.”

Black American activism and voices are growing within the economic, entertainment and educational communities, creating safe spaces and artistic freedom, recognition and support for all, according to Battle-Baptiste.

“It’s a very exciting moment if you see the cues and understand that there are people that are doing activism every day that it doesn’t have to be labeled as activism,” Battle-Baptiste said.

Kalina Kornacki can be reached at [email protected] or followed on X (formerly Twitter) @KalinaKornacki.