James Lee Dickey: An Analysis of One African-American's Leadership in Jim Crow Texas

Du Bois' Youth

Though Du Bois originally hailed Booker T. Washington's speech at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, he was the person that named it the Atlanta Compromise speech. By 1900, Du Bois became one of Washington's most outspoken critic. W.E.B. Du Bois was born to mulatto parents in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868. His family had been free for over a century and his youth was rarely marred severe prejudice. He attended white schools in Massachusetts and his superior test scores should have admitted him to the best universities. Unfortunately, most were barred to him because of his race. He experienced Jim Crow for perhaps the first time when he arrived at Fisk University, an hbcu, in Nashville, Tennessee in 1885. While there, he taught school at a primitive Appalachian school where he was shocked at the dire poverty African Americans suffered. He became obsessed with the race problem in America. He continued graduate studies at Harvard, joined a study-abroad program at the University of Berlin, finally returning to Boston in 1895 to receive a PhD from Harvard, the first African American to do so. When white universities shunned his applications despite his stellar credentials, he accepted a professorship at Atlanta University teaching sociology and directing Publications, the school journal of Negro life.
 

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