The Founding Fathers Of Civil Rights

Though their views frequently clashed, WEB Du Bois and Marcus Garvey pioneered the Civil Rights Movement at the dawn of the 20th Century

- Dominic Green

The campaigns for civil rights that began in 1954 and led to the legislative victories of the 1960s produced two images of leadership. Martin Luther King Jr advocated the assertion of equal rights in law, voting and education for black Americans. Malcolm X saw the struggle for black American rights as a global one, and advocated separatism, the creation of a separate black economy and sovereignty. Both of these strategies had roots in 19th- and early 20th-century history, in the rivalry between William Edward Burghardt (WEB) du Bois and Marcus Garvey.

The Northern states won the Civil War but the end of slavery did not lead to the end of discrimination. In the Southern states, ‘Jim Crow’ laws segregated blacks from whites. In the Northern states, including the cities to which Southern blacks migrated in search of jobs and equality, discrimination continued through informal racism.

Du Bois was born in 1868 to a family who had been ‘free blacks’ during the era of slavery. He grew up in the farming town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and attended a racially mixed school. When he left, he was granted the honour of delivering the valedictorian, or farewell, speech on behalf of his entire grade. Du Bois then moved south to attend the predominantly black Fisk University in Tennessee. There, he began to see the extent of the Jim Crow laws, and the open racism and violence that accompanied them. The experience shocked him, and he returned to Massachusetts to devote himself to the struggle for equal rights.