William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the only child of Mary Silvina Burghardt and Alfred Du Bois, and thereby a mixture of French Huguenot, Dutch, and African ancestries. By his graduation from Great Barrington High School in 1884, he had set his sights on a college education at Harvard College, but had neither the funds nor the academic qualifications to be admitted. With the encouragement of his high school principal and assisted by a scholarship, Du Bois was persuaded to go south to study at Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee).
For the first time in his life, he lived in a social environment (at Fisk as well as in the surrounding city and rural worlds, the latter of which Du Bois explored while teaching during summers), where people of African descent were in the majority and where cultural life was significantly shaped by their presence and traditions. It was at Fisk that Du Bois began to cultivate an explicit awareness of himself as a...
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Outlaw, L. (2021). Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. In: Mudimbe, V.Y., Kavwahirehi, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2068-5_110
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