W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Enfranchisement

 

 

W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Enfranchisement, 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.
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.

 

 

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 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 Immediately upon his return to the United States in 1959, Du Bois’s passport was revoked.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.
Summary: W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), black American historian and sociologist, who conducted the initial research on the black experience in the United States. His work paved the way for the civil rights, Pan-African, and Black Power movements in the United States.