[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Web du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He married Nina Gomer in 1896 and they had two children: a son, Burghardt (who died at age three), and a daughter, Yolande. A year after Nina's death in 1950, he married his second wife, Shirley Graham. He received his B.A. in 1888 from Fisk University, a second B.A. from Harvard in 1890, and an M.A. from Harvard in 1892. After two years of study at the University of Berlin, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. He studied under such notables as Max Weber, George Santayana, and William James. He was Professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University from 1894-1896, Assistant Instructor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1896-1897, and at Atlanta University he was Professor of Economics and History from 1897-1910 and chair of the Sociology Department there from 1934-1944. He wrote over twenty books and hundreds of essays and articles through out his life, and edited more than a few main magazines, as well as The Crisis, from 1910-1934. He was a primary founder of the Niagara Movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; a world leader of the Pan-African movement; and a leader of a lot of consequent Pan-African Congresses.
Du Bois's religious individuality urbanized from that of a realistic Christian to a cynical disbeliever. Despite the fact that religion permeated his early writings and infused the first third of his life; from his college days onward he was critical of organized religion and skeptical of traditional religious doctrines. Du Bois provides a rich social history of African American religious development, and his analysis is essentially one of syncretism: how the enslaved Africans fused their traditional spirituality and practice with the Protestant Christianity of the South....
