William Edward Burghardt Du Bois wrote this essay for The Atlantic Monthly just two years after becoming the first black man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. He was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to a free black woman of Dutch and African ancestry. When his father deserted the family, individuals rallied to help the gifted boy get the education that was to propel him to the forefront of the American civil-rights movement. An author, historian, sociologist, and civil-rights activist, Du Bois taught history and economics at Atlanta University, helped found the NAACP, wrote or edited 36 books and published more than 100 articles, and engaged in numerous controversies. This essay was written three decades after the end of the Civil War, at a time when Du Bois was working on a sociological treatise titled “The Study of the Negro Problems,” in which he proposed that rising black crime was a result of the strain of the new freedom, coupled with a lack of jobs and education. When he died, at age 95, Du Bois was celebrated by the African American community for his lifelong search for solutions to racism. The author begins this essay with what he calls “the unasked question” he continually “How does it feel to be a problem?” how does it feel to be black in America after the end of the Civil War? He describes his unique personal history growing up in a small New England community, then attempts to explain, to the largely white, educated readers of The Atlantic Monthly, how it feels to be a victim of “that vast despair” called prejudice. As a black American, he says, one is “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.” Du Bois dares to describe the corroding influence of racial hatred on white Americans, as well as black. The “Negro problem is a test of the great republic,” he writes. He spent his long life searching for solutions to America’s racial dilemma. In this essay, written at the beginning of a career that would witness Brown v. Board of Education and end on the day before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, Du Bois begins to ponder those solutions.
