William Edward Burghardt Du Bois entered the world on February 23, 1868. This was less than three years after slavery was outlawed. However, his family had been out of slavery for several generations. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small village with only a handful of black families. His teachers quickly made him a favorite, and most of his playmates were white. At the age of fifteen he became a local correspondent for the New York Globe. Du Bois moved to Nashville, Tennessee where he received a scholarship and attended Fisk University. This was the first time that he discovered that being black was a big part of his identity. He spent his summers in Tennessee teaching in rural schools. It was there that he met "the real seat of slavery." He had never seen such poverty in his entire life. "I touched intimately the lives of the commonest of mankind--people who ranged from barefooted dwellers on dirt floors, with patched rags for clothes, to rough har!

d-working farmers, with plain clean plenty." (Hamilton, Her Stories). Unlike Massachusetts,

5. KJV, Holy Bible, Isaiah 25:7. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Publishers. 1976

4. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Soul of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Co. 1903.

Nashville was a southern town that exposed Du Bois to the everyday bigotry he had escaped growing up. While he was there he came in contact with some people that did not think of him as a normal human being. There is a story of one woman that called him a nigger after she accidentally bumped into her. By the end of his college years Du Bois had begun to take pride in his heritage. Du Bois graduated from Fisk and entered Harvard where he received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He was the first African-American to receive a doctorate from that university. He also spent two years studying at the University of Berlin, which was at the time the world's most distinguished center for advanced research in history. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the efforts to suppress the African slave trade. He accepted a position teaching at Wilberforce University, a college for black stud!

rld. He does not claim that transcending the veil will lead to a better understanding of the lord but like Saint Paul he finds that only through transcending "the veil" can people achieve liberty and gain self-consciousness. The veil metaphor is symbolic of the invisibility of blacks in America. Du Bois says that Blacks in America are a forgotten people, "after the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil."(Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk). The invisibility of Black existence in America is one of the reasons why Du Bois writes The Souls of Black Folk in order to elucidate the "invisible" history and strivings of Black Americans. Du Bois in each of the his chapters tries to manifest the strivings of Black existence from that of the reconstruction period to the black spirituals and the stories of rural black children that he tried to educate. Du Bois "emphasize the predictive power of sociology !

8. Odom, Maida, Philadelphia Story. Philadelphia Newspaper Inc. 1999

protests and the black power party's, things were looking up for the African Americans.

4, the Brown decision [Brown v. Board of Education] required racial desegregation in schools and other public places. The Brown decision led to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, soon supplemented by the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. This was the beginning of public awareness to the racial discrimination issue. Many blacks today still feel the effects of racial discrimination. Affirmative action was created to give blacks equal educational and employment opportunities. It has helped many black people attend institutions of higher education and obtain better job opportunities, but it has failed to reach the goal of alleviating racial discrimination. Racial discrimination is prevalent in the hiring practices used by businesses in America. Today, the best qualified applicant applying for a job will not necessarily be the applicant that is hired. All public, private or non-profit businesses with more than 15 employees must comply with the Equal Employment Opport!

au of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen's Bureau. But when the war ended, the national government had not yet determined how best to reunite the country. Views on how to treat the defeated Confederacy varied. Some people felt that the South could be reconciled with the Union by simply acknowledging the abolition of slavery, while others were convinced that the region's social, economic, and political systems would have to be thoroughly reconstructed. In March 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act which was strengthened by three supplemental acts later the same year and in 1868. In 1870 the states ratified the 15th Amendment. This amendment prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race. Finally, Congress passed the C

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