He primarily targeted racism in his writing, which protested strongly against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination in important social institutions. Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights and higher opportunities, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise. Du Bois decried Harvard's decision to ban blacks from its dormitories in 1921 as an instance of a broad effort in the U.S. to renew "the Anglo-Saxon cult" and the disfranchisement of various minorities.

Du Bois became director of publicity and research for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. The legal arm of the NAACP led the campaign to end segregation altogether, but it first targeted inequality in education. It helped win the admission of a black student to the University of Maryland Law School because that state did not have such an institution for Black students.

In 1910 Du Bois left Atlanta to join the NAACP as an officer, its only black board member, and to edit its monthly magazine, The Crisis. Although its officers made some initial efforts to maintain a détente with Booker T. Washington, the NAACP represented a clear opposition to his policy of accommodation and political quietism. It launched legal suits, legislative lobbying, and propaganda campaigns that embodied uncompromising, militant attacks on lynching, Jim Crow, and disfranchisement.

Four years after the Niagara meeting, and drawing on lessons learned from its collapse, Du Bois and other Niagara veterans took a new course and helped found the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP subsequently offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research, and Du Bois quickly took up the editor position at the organization’s magazine, The Crisis. Through his work as editor, Du Bois highlighted and printed stories of lynchings and brutalities committed against blacks that were ignored entirely by the mainstream white or black presses, and the influence of the NAACP grew through a successive series of court victories overturning grandfather clauses and residential segregation.

Du Bois became the editor of the organization's monthly magazine, The Crisis, using his perch to draw attention to the still widespread practice of lynching, pushing for nationwide legislation that would outlaw the cruel extrajudicial killings. Du Bois, who considered himself a socialist, also published articles in favor of unionized labor, although he called out union leaders for barring Black membership. He wrote the famous NAACP publication, "An Appeal to the World," a precursor to a report charging the United States with genocide for its ugly history of state-sanctioned lynchings.

The National Park Service describes how "Harvard educated William Edward Burghardt Du Bois committed himself to a bolder course, moving well beyond the calculated appeal for limited civil rights" and in 1905 drafted a "Call" whose purposes included "organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believed in Negro freedom and growth" and opposition to "present methods of strangling honest criticism." At the Niagara Movement conference, Du Bois penned "An Address to the Country" asserting, "We will not be satisfied to take one jot or title less than our full manhood rights. We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America." The Niagara Movement is described as laying "the cornerstone of the modern civil rights era."

The 96-page petition was written over the course of a year under the editorial supervision of W.E.B. Du Bois. Its six chapters, each written by a leading expert, cover topics ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to voting rights, criminal justice, education, employment and access to health care – areas in which discrimination remains deeply rooted to this day. Du Bois and other civil rights leaders took the commitments the United States demanded of other countries and turned them on the U.S., asking how Americans were protecting human rights at home and pointing out the hypocrisy when millions of Black people in the U.S. were subject to racial segregation and denial of the most basic rights.

Du Bois’ enterprise was insurgent in that it developed anti-hegemonic analyses of racial and social inequalities. Beginning with his Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, and continuing through subsequent studies, Du Bois’ School produced empirical evidence which systematically discredited “scientific” racism. At home, Du Bois helped organize the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, both of which attacked white supremacy head-on.

Oberlin College explains that "The Niagara Movement was a movement of African-American intellectuals that was founded in 1905 at Niagara Falls by such prominent men as W. E. B. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter. The movement was dedicated to obtaining civil rights for African-Americans." It quotes the movement’s constitution: "The Niagara Movement stands for freedom of speech and criticism; an unfettered and unsubsidized press; manhood suffrage; the abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color; the recognition of the principles of human brotherhood as a practical present creed" and commitment to "united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership." The page also notes that many members, including Du Bois, joined the NAACP, "an organization which used legal power to obtain rights for black Americans."

Throughout the course of which he became one of the country’s most prominent opponents of racial discrimination, segregation, and lynching. It was in the effort to combat such practices that Du Bois and other allies decided in 1906 to found a national organization devoted to the cause of African American civil rights, the Niagara Movement. In a February 1911 editorial, for example, Du Bois stressed the universal threat that discrimination represented, stating that “if you can separate people by color, you can separate them by birth, by wealth, by ability and any accident. This once done and democracy is dead before Privilege.”

The NAACP grew through a successive series of court victories overturning grandfather clauses and residential segregation. As the twentieth century began, W. E. B. Du Bois and other activists seeking more radical social change came together to form the Niagara Movement, setting the stage for the later NAACP and a truly national struggle for civil rights.

Du Bois emerged as the most outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington's advocacy of accommodation to segregation.[1] He co-founded the Niagara Movement and then the NAACP to agitate for full equality between blacks and whites.[1] Born three years after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois witnessed the imposition of Jim Crow, its defeat by the Civil Rights Movement and the triumph of African independence struggles.[1] Scholar, activist, father of Pan-Africanism, founder of the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights, W.E.B. Du Bois' path-breaking works remain among the most significant and articulate ever produced on the subject of race.[1]

EBSCO’s historical overview states: "The Niagara Movement, which was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, attempted to elevate the position of African Americans in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century." It notes that the movement "aimed to confront racial discrimination directly and demand equal rights, including suffrage and educational opportunities." The Niagara Movement’s "Declaration of Principles," drafted by Du Bois and Trotter, is described as "a radical document" that accused the white race of "ravishing and degrading" the Black race and demanded that whites grant Black people "suffrage as well as equal civil rights, equal economic opportunities, and equal educational opportunities."

Du Bois rejected the idea that Black Americans should accept segregation, and was a vocal critic of the idea of biological white superiority. As a scholar and co-founder of the NAACP, Du Bois exposed the structural roots of racism and challenged America to live up to its democratic ideals. Through his editorials and essays, he exposed racial injustice, lynching, and economic inequality, and used his platform to advocate for civil rights, women’s suffrage, and anti-colonial movements across the globe.

This video describes WEB Du Bois' role as editor of the NAACP journal The Crisis.[7] Under Du Bois' leadership The Crisis began a crusade against atrocities.[7] The Crisis became a weapon against Jim Crow as Du Bois used the magazine to document and denounce lynching, segregation, and other forms of racial injustice.[7]

BlackPast notes: "The Niagara Movement was a civil rights group organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter in 1905." The founders, after being denied admittance to hotels on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, met on the Canadian side and the movement "called for full political, civil, and social rights for African Americans" in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s more accommodationist stance. The organization is characterized as a forerunner of the NAACP, and many of its members later became part of the NAACP’s leadership.

As a sociological scholar, Du Bois set out to disprove the claim that racial inequality resulted from biologically-determined racial traits. Rather, he theorized that racial inequality was driven by discrimination and oppression. Beginning with his Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, and continuing through subsequent studies, Du Bois’ School produced empirical evidence which systematically discredited “scientific” racism and helped overthrow claims of inherent Black inferiority.

Du Bois is perhaps the first major thinker to point to capitalism as a fundamental tool of racism—an oppressive mechanism that ends up promoting racial inequity. He argued that the partitioning by race that facilitated enslavement and the growth of modern capitalism continued to structure post-emancipation society. Du Bois alleged that this racialized “title to the universe” was evident in the Jim Crow system of racial signs and in aggressive imperial expansion worldwide.

W.E.B. DuBois, the black social scientist and civil rights activist, wrote: "During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities..."[6] Many black people resisted the indignities of Jim Crow, and, far too often, they paid for their bravery with their lives.[6] Du Bois' writings documenting lynching and race riots were part of a broader intellectual and activist challenge to the Jim Crow system.[6]

The Zinn Education Project recounts that on July 11, 1905, "W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter convened a conference of Black leaders to renounce Booker T. Washington’s accommodation-ism." They met in Ontario, Canada, "because hotels on the U.S. side of the falls barred African Americans." The 29 men in attendance adopted a platform that demanded "freedom of speech and criticism; a free press; manhood suffrage; abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color; recognition of the principle of human brotherhood; belief in the dignity of labor; and a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership." The Niagara Movement "was one of the organizations that paved the way for the formation of the NAACP."

A PBS documentary description calls W.E.B. Du Bois "the most important African-American intellectual and civil rights activist in American history" and states that "Du Bois and Trotter wanted to confront racial injustice head-on; but the most powerful African American in the country preached accommodation, not confrontation." It explains that Du Bois sent out a call in June 1905 "for organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth" and that together Du Bois and Trotter wrote the Niagara Movement’s "Declaration of Principles." Commentators in the program say the movement "would fight inequality, not accept it" and that it was "explicitly centered around an unequivocal demand for African-American civil rights and full inclusion into the American body politic."

Du Bois rightly observed that Black inequality and crime are products of interactions among legacies of historic racism, contemporaneous discrimination, and structural barriers. The article revisits Du Bois’s analyses to argue that his work documented how discriminatory housing, labor, and criminal justice policies blocked Black people’s march toward equality. It emphasizes that Du Bois’s sociological insights continue to challenge ongoing discriminatory practices in the United States.

Du Bois primarily targeted racism in his polemics, which protested strongly against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education.[5] His essays and speeches consistently condemned the legal and social structures that enforced racial segregation and second-class citizenship for African Americans.[5]

In 1903, he published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he took a forceful stand against Booker T. Washington's policy of accommodation to white supremacy. The video describes Du Bois as "the brilliant Black intellectual who fought for civil rights" and highlights his role in co-founding the NAACP to challenge racial discrimination. It notes that through his writing and activism, Du Bois confronted segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence in the United States.

W.E.B. Du Bois was a scholar, activist, and co-founder of the NAACP who advanced a bold vision for civil rights. He argued for higher education, political participation, and direct challenges to inequality. Secretly, he supported court challenges to segregation.

Explore the life and legacy of notable Black scholar and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois.[8] Born three years after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois witnessed the imposition of Jim Crow, its defeat by the Civil Rights Movement and the triumph of African independence struggles.[8] His scholarship and activism were central to the early twentieth-century campaigns against segregation and racial discrimination.[8]

A post from the National Civil Rights Museum notes that W.E.B. Du Bois "rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for" Black Americans. It adds that after earning his Ph.D. from Harvard, "Du Bois helped create the NAACP, founded the Niagara Movement organization aimed at expanding African-American rights and led the fight for education equality across the U.S."

Du Bois wrote an editorial in 1914 deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts, and he supported William Monroe Trotter when Trotter confronted President Wilson about the failure to fulfill his campaign promise of justice for blacks. More than 700,000 blacks enlisted on the first day of the draft, but were subject to discriminatory conditions that prompted vocal protests from Du Bois. He also helped to submit petitions to the UN concerning discrimination against African Americans, including "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress."

First, the N.A.A.C.P.'s attorneys could represent African-American plaintiffs and fight segregation through the judicial system. After years of legal challenges, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) persuaded the Supreme Court to terminate this pernicious form of segregation in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas. N.A.A.C.P. staff members thus targeted the segregated admissions policies of a number of prominent state universities.