“It is a atypical sensation, this double-consciousness, this experience of all the time one’s self during the eyes of others, of measuring
one’s soul by way of the tape of a global that appears on in amused contempt and
pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring beliefs in one darkish
body, whose dogged energy alone maintains it from being torn asunder.The historical past of the American Negro is the historical past of this strife —
this longing to obtain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self
into a much better and more true self. In this merging he desires neither of the
older selves to be misplaced.”
-W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903).
Happy birthday to historian, sociologist, activist, and too-many-ways-to-count genius W.E.B. DuBois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963). DuBois was the primary African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and probably the most co-founders of the NAACP. He did box analysis on black neighborhoods in Philadelphia in 1896-97 whereas he was on the University of Pennsylvania and posted The Philadelphia Negro, a foundational textual content in sociology and the first prolonged case analyze of a black neighborhood within the U.s.. He edited the NAACP journal The Disaster from 1910 to 1933 and penned The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folks (1903), John Brown: A Biography (1909), Black Reconstruction in The US (1935), and The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1946), among others.