W. E. B. Du Bois

V

International Activities

Throughout his adult life, Du Bois maintained a keen cultural and political interest in Africa. He attended meetings with Africans in London in 1900 and 1911, and beginning in 1919 he helped to organize Pan-African congresses to nurture worldwide unity among people of African descent. He attended Pan-African congresses in 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945, by which time international leaders opposed to colonialism were calling him the “father of Pan-Africanism.” Du Bois returned to the NAACP in 1944 to head its research efforts, but was dismissed in 1948 after a dispute with the NAACP’s executive director, in which Du Bois accused the director of selling out the cause of black civil rights for his own political advancement.

VI

Peace Activist

After World War II (1939-1945), Du Bois became increasingly involved in promoting world peace and nuclear disarmament. In 1950 he became chairman of the Peace Information Center in New York City, a group whose stated objective was to gather signatures in the United States for a global petition to ban the use of nuclear weapons. In July of that year, after the organization had gathered more than one million U.S. signatures, the Peace Center was labeled a Communist-front organization by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

In August 1950, the U.S. Justice Department requested that the Peace Center register as the agent of a foreign government. The centers’ board members refused, and in January 1951 Du Bois was charged as an agent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Du Bois had joined the Socialist Party for a short time in 1911 and had supported many of its positions over the years, but he was not a member of either the Socialist Party or the Communist Party at the time. He was acquitted after a highly publicized trial, but the experience left him embittered and did not end his battles with the U.S. government. After the trial, Du Bois was repeatedly denied passports to travel outside the United States and was harassed for much of the decade by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the police, and a variety of government agencies.

In 1958 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the State Department could not demand the signing of loyalty oaths as a basis for issuing passports, and Du Bois was granted a passport. He then traveled in the USSR, where he met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and visited Communist China, a country that was on the State Department’s banned list. Immediately upon his return to the United States in 1959, Du Bois’s passport was revoked. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize that same year.

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VII

Later Years

In 1961 Du Bois moved to the newly independent West African nation of Ghana. In an act of defiance just before his departure, he joined the American Communist Party. Once in Ghana, he began work on the Encyclopedia Africana, a reference work on Africans and people of African descent throughout the world. When his passport expired in 1963 he applied to have it renewed, but it was denied by the U.S. government because he was a registered Communist. He renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of Ghana in February of that year, shortly before his 95th birthday. Ghanian President Kwame Nkrumah welcomed Du Bois’s decision and deemed him “the first citizen of Africa.” Du Bois died a few months later.

Du Bois wrote some 20 books during his lifetime. In addition to the previously mentioned titles, he wrote Africa—Its Place in Modern History (1930); Black Reconstruction in the South (1935); Black Folk Then and Now (1939); a trilogy, called Black Flame, which included The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds of Color (1961); and, published posthumously, his third and last autobiography, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (1968).

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