Above Photo: Photo of 82-year-old Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 – 1963), co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), taken on Jan. 1, 1950. Keystone / Getty Images.
The renowned historian and biographer of Du Bois joins Chris Hedges to discuss the prolific work and principled life of one of the 20th Century’s intellectual giants.
Decades after his death, W.E.B Du Bois stands as one of the great intellectual giants of the 20th Century. Born in Massachussetts after the Civil War, Du Bois became the first Black man to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, and was one of the founders of the NAACP and the Niagara Movement. He authored works such as The Souls of Black Folk, The Philadelphia Negro, and Black Reconstruction in America, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of American sociology. Du Bois’s brilliance extended beyond the academy to the world of politics. He denounced accommodationists such as Booker T. Washington, thundered against Jim and Jane Crow and the reign of terror in the South with its segregation, race laws, and lynch mobs, along with the evils of imperialism and colonialism and the inherent cruelty and injustices of capitalism. A supporter of the Russian Revolution and a socialist, he would be swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, becoming an outlaw in his own country, hauled into court at the age of 83 and barely escaping imprisonment. He left the United States in 1960 for Ghana to die in exile. The Chris Hedges Report examines some of Du Bois’s fundamental ideas with his biographer Dr. Gerald Horne, who holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at The University of Houston.
Dr. Gerald Horne is an acclaimed historian and professor at The University of Houston. He is the author of dozens of books, including his most recent works The Counter Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism, and The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism int he Long Sixteenth Century.