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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced “Due-Boyss”) was born five years after the Emancipation Proclamation on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In his lifetime, Great Barrington was a tiny mill town in the Berkshire Mountains, about 140 miles west of Boston. The few African Americans in the area worked as domestics in homes or servants at summer resorts, while the Irish, German, and Czech folk worked in the town’s factories. Du Bois was raised solely by his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, who he described as “a dark shining bronze, with smooth skin and lovely eyes.”⁶ His debonair but delinquent absentee father, Alfred Du Bois, a “Franco-Haitian” “light mulatto” war veteran of “indeterminate color,” went missing before his toddling son turned 2 years old.⁷ Mary Silvina was a domestic worker and washerwoman, and supported her precocious son through other odd jobs and outright charity from the well-to-do white town residents. Du Bois’s father’s absence greatly affected him, although perhaps not as much as his mother’s paralytic stroke, which, his biographer David Levering Lewis reported, “impaired her left leg or arm, or both.”⁸

Du Bois’s early life, Lewis lamented, was “a milieu circumscribed by immiseration, dementia, and deformity.”⁹ As with so many African American children born within the shameful shadow of American slavery, Du Bois grew up very poor and, consequently, developed a consciousness of his lower-class status before he was aware of his race and American racism, even though he was the only black child in his all-white school. It was not long, however, before race and racism unforgivingly crept into his life, and from his first unforgettable and life-altering experience of anti-black racism he defiantly decided to “prove to the world that Negroes were just like other people.”¹⁰

After his mother’s untimely death on March 23, 1885, when he was only 16 years old, a forlorn Du Bois was determined to make something of himself, solemnly keeping a promise he made to his beloved mother.¹¹ Hence, after high school, an orphaned Du Bois sought every scholarship he could find to fund his studies at Fisk University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin (where he came into contact with Max Weber) before returning to Harvard to become the first African American to be conferred a Ph.D. from that eminent institution in 1895.¹² Tellingly, his doctoral dissertation, entitled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was the first social scientific engagement of African American enslavement, according to Lewis.¹³ Duly recognizing Du Bois’s monumental achievement, Harvard quickly published the dissertation as the first volume of its Harvard Historical Studies series in 1896.¹⁴ Africa and anti-colonialism, obviously, factored into Du Bois’s thought early in his intellectual and political life, and it is here, during the most formative phase of his life and career, that we find the real roots of his Pan-Africanism – his belief in and commitment to the unification, decolonization, and liberation of continental and diasporan Africa. Indeed, it could be said that Du Bois’s intellectual and political life both begins and ends with explorations of Africa, the African diaspora, slavery, Reconstruction, racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism.¹⁵

Bearing all of this in mind, throughout this book Du Bois’s evolving thought is examined as an early form of intersectionality – a framework that emphasizes that race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other socio-political categories, are interconnected and frequently combine to create intersecting systems of oppression. Loosely situated within this framework, Du Bois’s discourse can be explored as a kind of embryonic intersectionality – meaning an inchoate, not fully formed variant of intersectionality that, because of its prefigurative nature, is at times conceptually connected, and, at other times, intellectually awkward and discursively disjointed. Nevertheless, when taken together and ample attention is given to his contributions to the critique of racism and sexism and capitalism and colonialism, Du Bois’s corpus registers as both an undeniable and unprecedented contribution to the origins and evolution of what scholars currently call intersectionality.¹⁶

Without question, an eclectic but consistently intersectional combination of ideas and interests unfolds across the landscape of Du Bois’s life and work. In fact, each of the subsequent chapters of this book loosely corresponds with a major intersectional category (except for sexuality) and exposes readers to his incipient intersectionality. For example – and as will be discussed in chapter 1, “The Philadelphia Negro: Early Work and the Inauguration of American Sociology” – Du Bois was one of the very first empirical social scientists in the US, and The Philadelphia Negro provides both a history and sociology of the interconnections between race and class (i.e., the racialization of class) in black life and culture. Additionally, the chapter details the pitfalls of Du Bois’s early efforts to use social science in the interest of social reform. Chapters 2 and 3 reveal Du Bois to be one of the most critical, contradictory, and controversial race theorists of the twentieth century. More specifically, the second chapter, “The Souls of Black Folk: Critique of Racism and Contributions to Critical Race Studies,” analyzes Du Bois’s 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, for its contribution to the study and critique of race, anti-black racism, and critical race studies. Chapter 3, “‘The Souls of White Folk’: Critique of White Supremacy and Contributions to Critical White Studies,” essentially inverts the framework from the previous chapter and provides a survey of Du Bois’s work on whiteness, critique of white supremacy, and contributions to what is currently called critical white studies. Chapter 4, “‘The Damnation of Women’: Critique of Patriarchy, Contributions to Black Feminism, and Early Intersectionality,” treats Du Bois’s critique of patriarchy (i.e., male supremacy) and contributions to black feminism and early intersectionality. Finally, chapter 5, “Black Reconstruction: Critique of Capitalism, Contributions to Black Marxism, and Discourse on Democratic Socialism,” explores Du Bois’s Marxist thought and developing democratic socialism via several of his key essays that synthesize elements of black economic nationalism with Marxism. The centerpiece of chapter 5 is Du Bois’s black Marxist magnum opus Black Reconstruction, which was arguably the first application of Marxian concepts to African American enslavement and blacks’ pivotal roles in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Along with his contributions to the origins and evolution of intersectionality, this book explores Du Bois’s contributions to interdisciplinarity – the practice of bringing the scholarship of two or more academic disciplines together to answer a research question or provide solutions to a problem. Du Bois’s collective coursework at Fisk University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin was incredibly interdisciplinary, and resulted in a BA in classics from Fisk in 1888; a BA in philosophy from Harvard in 1890; an MA in history from Harvard in 1891; doctoral studies in history, economics, politics, and political economy at the University of Berlin between 1892 and 1894; and, ultimately, a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1895.¹⁷ After earning his doctorate, Du Bois began his teaching career as a professor of classics, teaching Latin, Greek, German, and English, from 1894 to 1896 at Wilberforce University, an African Methodist Episcopal institution in Ohio. He unsuccessfully attempted to add sociology to the curriculum at Wilberforce in 1894, and left the school in frustration for the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, where he was hired as an “Assistant Instructor” to research and write a study on the African Americans of Philadelphia, the previously mentioned The Philadelphia Negro.¹⁸ At the University of Pennsylvania, however, Du Bois was still not free from frustration, writing in his autobiography, “I ignored my pitiful stipend” and “it goes without saying that I did no instructing, save once to pilot a pack of idiots through the Negro slums.”¹⁹ After his brief stay at the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois accepted a position at Atlanta University, where he established one of the first sociology departments in the United States and edited 16 innovative interdisciplinary volumes known as the “Atlanta University Studies,” which were published by Atlanta University Press consecutively between 1898 and 1914.²⁰