ABSTRACT

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His parents, Mary Burghardt and Alfred Du Bois, were of French Huguenot, Dutch, and West African ancestry. At the ceremony Du Bois gave a speech on Wendell Phillips, the New England abolitionist. He graduated Cum Laude from Fisk in 1888, in a class of six other students. At the graduation exercises Du Bois was once again called upon to deliver a commencement speech. In July 1892, Du Bois received the Slater Fund scholarship and headed for Germany, and in October he enrolled in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Berlin. In 1896 he married Nina Gomer, and weeks later received a telegram from the University of Pennsylvania offering him a temporary one year investigator appointment. This position called for the preparation of a sociological study of the Philadelphia African American population.