W.E.B. (WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT) DU BOIS

DuBois (1868-1963) was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and received his B.A. in 1890 from Harvard University, being one of six commencement speakers. After a couple years studying at the University of Berlin, he served for two years as professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University in Ohio. His Harvard doctoral dissertation (1895) was published as the first volume in the Harvard Historical Series. After this, he became assistant instructor in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1905, he founded and became general secretary of the Niagara movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals, then helped to found the NAACP, serving as director of publicity and research, a member of the board of directors, and editor of its monthly magazine from 1910 to 1934. From 1934 to 1944 Du Bois was chairman of the department of sociology at Atlanta University, during which time he wrote Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935), his significant historical work that details the role of African Americans in Reconstruction America using Marxist concepts. Du Bois was a member of the Socialist party from 1910 to 1912 and always considered himself a Socialist, though in 1961 he joined the Communist party of the United States and took up residence in Ghana, Africa as a gesture of Pan-Africanism. Du Bois's most enduring contribution is his writing. As poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, sociologist, historian, and journalist, he wrote 21 books, edited 15 more, and published over 100 essays and articles.

JESSIE REDMON FAUSET

Fauset (1882-1961) was born in Camden, New Jersey, and grew up in cultured but economically depressed circumstances in Philadelphia. She graduated from Cornell in 1905 and was the first African American woman in the country elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She taught French at the Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., for fourteen years. She received her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1929, and her certificate from the Sorbonne, Paris, France after six months of study there in 1925-26. In the 1920s she had taken over much of W.E.B. Du Bois’s work on the NAACP’s Crisis, submitting short stories, poems, and articles. Her range of writing reveals she was aware of the American social and literary scene, and she reviewed English and French works, too. Her essays are excellent and sensitive, and she is best known for her fiction, having been the most published novelist of the Harlem Renaissance period. Her first novel, written in 1924 and reissued in a second edition in 1928, meant to address the inaccurate depiction of black life in fiction. Her second novel, said to be her best, studied the fortunes of a family whose members could pass themselves off as white.

ANGELINA WELD GRIMKÉ

Grimke (1880-1958) was born into a distinguished biracial family and had a place of prominence in Boston society. However, her white mother was forced to leave her father, and Angelina was after a time released to her father, never to see her mother again. She graduated Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1902 and began teaching English in Washington, D.C., eventually at Dunbar High School starting in 1916. She produced most of her better-known writings in Washington, and retired from teaching in 1926 due to ill-health from a back injury. Much of her work shows a deep unhappiness from thwarted longings that reveal the inner turmoil of her lesbianism. She spent time after her retirement nursing her ailing father and being a recluse. Only a few of her writings were published during her lifetime, the most famous being her play Rachel, first staged in 1916, about a black family demeaned and almost destroyed by prejudice.