W.E.B. Du Bois was the first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard, co-founded the NAACP, and wrote The Souls of Black Folk — one of the most influential works in African American intellectual history. Then he kept going left. By his nineties, he had joined the Communist Party, renounced his American citizenship, and moved to Ghana, where he died on the eve of the March on Washington. The arc of his radicalization spans the entire twentieth century.
This episode traces Du Bois from his Massachusetts childhood through the Talented Tenth philosophy, the rivalry with Booker T. Washington, the founding of the NAACP, and the late-life turn to communism and Pan-Africanism that made him an exile from the country he had spent decades trying to improve.
Du Bois's New England upbringing, his Harvard PhD, and The Souls of Black Folk
The rivalry with Booker T. Washington and the founding of the NAACP
The steady leftward radicalization through the Depression, McCarthyism, and the Cold War
Joining the Communist Party at ninety-three, renouncing citizenship, and dying in Ghana the day before the March on Washington
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