Speech

By: W.E.B. Du Bois

Date: 1910

Source: Du Bois, W.E.B. "The College-bred Community,"1910. In Aptheker, Herbert, ed. The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques 1906–1960 by W.E.B. Du Bois. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1973, 31–40.

About the Author: William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) a prolific writer, educator, and African American activist, earned undergraduate degrees from Fisk and Harvard, and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. He was a professor at Atlanta University. He founded the Niagara Movement in 1905 (which later developed into the NAACP) in opposition to the conservative position of Booker T. Washington. He was editor of Crisis magazine, a publication of the NAACP, from 1910 to 1934.

Introduction

The reconstruction years following the Civil War...