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 Duboiss 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
organizations 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.