W. E. B. Dubois Major Accomplishments

If you've never heard of W.E.B. DuBois before, not much stands out about him besides the strangeness of his name. But if you assume his accomplishments and character are just as obscure, you'd be quite wrong. While he may not be as famous as other prolific figures in American history, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Harriet Tubman, or Frederick Douglass, he is very similar to all three. In his lifetime, DuBois became known as one of the most notable figures in twentieth-century America in the same way those three previously stated had. He devoted his life to activism and working for the progress and development of the civil rights movement in as many ways as he possibly could.

As previously stated, DuBois was a prominent figure in the civil

But how exactly did he become so famous? Unsurprisingly, DuBois has a hefty list of accomplishments that helped him become the towering figure he is in history today. At his core, DuBois was a writer of all kinds of mediums, such as poetry, essays, and even editing a magazine DuBois created called The Crisis. However, outside of writing, he was just as important. The magazine DuBois edited was a product of something he helped co-found called the NAACP, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. An organization whose mission was to "ensure the political, educational, and equality of minority citizens of States and eliminate race prejudice." One of DuBois' famous pieces displayed in The Crisis is one by the name of "Returning Soldiers." Written and published in 1919, the essay focuses on the return of black soldiers from Europe at the end of World War I, the deadliest event in human history up to that time. World War I was a massive war stemming from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, causing an uproar and conflict between

DuBois states that if you must be a citizen to get drafted, then you must be protected as a citizen under the Constitutional Amendment. While this doesn't sound that outlandish, understanding the situation of American "citizenship" for most African Americans helps us understand what DuBois means. Under the Constitution and its amendments (specifically the Fourteenth), nowhere in the United States can a citizen be deprived of their life, liberty, or property, and cannot be prohibited from being given privileges or immunities a citizen already has. While it sounds like a sound law, the only problem was that certain states, communities, and at its most basic level, people, were trying to find loopholes around this amendment or just break it altogether. While most of it was centralized in the Southern states, all across the United States, there were many forms of racial discrimination and segregation, usually "legal" under laws that became known as "Jim Crow" laws. These laws, or lack of care for law by the public, allowed terrible crimes to be committed against thousands of African Americans. They were stolen from in several ways and were most terribly subjected to horrific lynchings. This is what W.E.B DuBois sought to remove or fight against with his work and pieces such as "Returning Soldiers." DuBois believed that if African American soldiers could be drafted and