ABSTRACT
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His mother, Mary Burghardt, was descended from a West African slave. His father, Alfred Du Bois, came from a long line of French Huguenots. As W.E.B. Du Bois himself later put it, he was born “with a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but thank God! no Anglo-Saxon.” The town of Great Barrington had a small African American population and a rather informal color line. The only people explicitly oppressed on the basis of race were Irish immigrants. But, as Du Bois explains in our reading, there was also a deeper, more implicit, kind of racism. Du Bois came to see himself as part of a “problem”: the “problem of the Negro.” He understood that he was different from others in school and that he was “shut out from their world by a vast veil”.
