THE CRISIS

Dubois Demands Social Equality

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression,” stated William Edward Bughardt Dubois, social activist. He has been fighting for black equality for many years, although not all his enemies were white men.

Booker T. Washington, known businessman and black activist, became Dubois’s rival soon after Dubois had started with racial equality and civil rights. Although he had graduated Harvard, became the first black to receive a Ph.D., and then became a professor at Atlanta University, Washing ton already had a steady Civil Rights career going, and was well known to the public. He had many followers.

Dubois was born in a Massachusetts community with five thousand whites and roughly fifty blacks in it. After high school, he realized he wanted to stop social injustice. He soon founded the NAACP, and became the editor for the organization’s magazine, Crisis. What made him a nuisance to Booker T. was that Dubois believed in the ‘Talented Tenth’, a process that made the top ten percent of the most educated blacks in America. Booker believed in finding your own individual skill, then promising blacks economic freedom, but still promising whites to keep blacks “down on the farm”.

The people who wee involved started calling it “The Great Debate”, and the government soon classified this outburst of politics “Radical”. They then started to harass Dubois by reading his mail and giving him threats, but he pursued his dream. In 1948, he was fired by the organization he started: The NAACP. Soon before his “impeachment” he was elected secretary. He was eighty before fired, and he only lived to ninety-nine. Soon after his pink slip, he was arrested for believed support of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Once he was let out, he decided he had had enough of the United States. He moved to Africa to make a book: Encyclopedia Africana. He died in Africa, 1963, while writing it. He is dead now, but his social achievements live on. He is still

remembered as a scholar, a writer of many books and poems, and most of all, a social uplifter.