W. E. B. DuBois was the first African American to graduated from Harvard, and as such education was a matter he took very seriously. Throughout his career, he had the late 19th/early 20th century equivalent of beef with Booker T. Washington. Booker believed that blacks should go to trade school and take jobs where they would always be subservient to whites and thus easy to control. Contrarily, DuBois believed in what he called the Talented Tenth. Essentially, DuBois felt that if the ten percent of African Americans with the most talent and potential worked as hard as they could and went as far as they could in life, they would pull the rest of the race up with them. They would be able to own their own businesses and have MBAs and PhDs rather than just having gone to trade school. I think DuBois had the right idea.
Although he wrote many important books during a career as one of the world's most pre-eminent sociologists, W. E. B. DuBois reputation still rests upon The Souls of Black Folk, the book in which he articulated his theory of double consciousness. The book, a gorgeous blend of memoir, anthopology and theory, suggests that for Black Americans there are two consciousnesses. They are always conscious of themselves as individuals, and also conscious of the ways in which some whites will view them, and thus in life they have to always figure out a way to manuever among these consciousnesses. DuBois' hoped for a future where the two selves would be fused into a better self, and I hope he'd agree that in the 105 years that have passed since the publication of Souls we are quite a bit closer to being there. But I don't think we are yet.
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