W.E.B. Du Bois

Upon graduation from Fisk and with financial assistance from his family and supporters as well as Harvard, Du Bois headed to Cambridge in 1888 with the goal of earning a Ph.D. in philosophy.⁠

He famously reflected that he was “in Harvard but not of it.”

Unable to afford to live on campus, Du Bois sought private lodging and found a room that suited both his taste and his budget in a house owned by a “colored woman from Nova Scotia” located a mile from campus at 20 Flagg Street. “My room is, for a college man’s abode very ordinary, indeed,” he later recalled writing at the time, but it was “pleasantly situated” on the second floor with a bay window and enough room to start a library. “In this commonplace den I am quite content,” Du Bois said of what would be his home for four years.⁠

Du Bois was deliberate in his choice not to pursue close relationships with many of his white fellow students, whom he believed had little desire to befriend him. As he noted in a graduate school paper titled “Harvard and the South,” the “Northern student of Southern affairs . . . wavers between calling the whites rascals, or the Negroes idiots.” He sought to challenge his classmates’ stereotypes, arguing: “I respectfully submit that he need do neither.”

Had he matriculated at Harvard immediately after graduating from his integrated high school in Great Barrington, and not experienced racial segregation during his years at Fisk, he wrote, he would have sought friendships with white students “and been disappointed and embittered by a discovery of social limitations to which I had not been used.” Instead, he largely made friends with Black students at Harvard and other local institutions and with the “colored folk of Boston and surrounding towns.”

This approach was “self-protective coloration, with perhaps an inferiority complex, but with belief in the ability and future of black folk.” And while Du Bois’s fellow Black students tended to be firmly on the side of integration, Du Bois was steadfast in his “dream of a self-sufficient Negro culture, even in America.”

Du Bois did not completely isolate himself within Harvard, however. He joined the Philosophical Club and the Foxcroft dining club, the latter providing a place where students who lived off campus could study during the day and get inexpensive meals. A singer, he tried out for the glee club but was denied a place. The club members reasoned that it would be too difficult to tour nationally, at a time when public accommodations in the South were segregated, with a Black member.

Du Bois excelled academically and got along well with his professors, some of whom, such as the historian Albert Bushnell Hart and philosopher and psychologist William James, befriended him and invited him into their homes. While always aware of the power dynamics between white professor and Black student, Du Bois observed, “they were on the whole glad to receive a serious student, to whom extracurricular activities were not of paramount importance, and one who in a general way knew what he wanted.”

To support himself during his studies, Du Bois participated in oratory competitions. In his first year at Harvard, he won second place in the competition for the Boylston Prize in Elocution. First prize went to Clement G. Morgan, another Black student who, because of this victory — and despite what Du Bois described as the outrage of whites across the nation — was selected to be class orator.

According to Du Bois, Morgan’s success inspired several other colleges to confer similar honors on their Black students. The following year, it was Du Bois who took first place in the Boylston competition. He was also one of five seniors chosen to speak at Commencement. Morgan was also initially selected, but after a faculty member moved to consult the Harvard Corporation as to whether it was appropriate to bestow such an honor on multiple Black students, the Corporation limited the number of Black speakers to one. Du Bois delivered a bold address on Jefferson Davis “with the deliberate intent of facing Harvard and the nation with a discussion of slavery as illustrated in the person of the president of the Confederate States of America.”

Bishop Henry C. Potter wrote in the Boston Herald after hearing Du Bois’s address, “Here is what an historic race can do if they have a clear field, a high purpose, and a resolute will.” Potter was not alone. The audience’s reaction was so positive that Du Bois later wrote that he “walked home on pink clouds of glory.”

What Du Bois wanted above all was to become a philosopher. And he believed that studying at a German university was a prerequisite for achieving that lofty goal and gaining recognition in the rarefied field.

It was in Berlin, DuBois wrote, “where I first met white folk who treated me as a human being.”

He wrote letter after letter, and his persistence paid off. The following year, the Slater Fund awarded him a $750 fellowship (half gift, half loan) for a year of study at the University of Berlin. Du Bois later wrote that, after he received word that he could study abroad: “I remember rushing down to New York and talking with ex-President Hayes in the old Astor House and emerging on air. I saw an especially delectable shirt in a shop window. I went in and asked about it. It cost three dollars, which was about four times as much as I had ever paid for a shirt in my life, but I bought it.”

In 1895, Du Bois famously became the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. (in history, rather than philosophy) from Harvard. He would go on to become one of the most influential figures in American history, producing seminal scholarship on Black history and the Black experience in the United States, co-founding the Niagara Movement and its successor the NAACP and serving as a leading voice in the fight for equality until his death in 1963.