W.E.B. Du Bois's Intellectual Ancestors

Wednesday, November 9   7 p.m., University Center Ballroom

W.E.B. DuBois Lecture

W.E.B. Du Bois's Intellectual Ancestors: Reassessing the Works of Alexander Crummell and James McCune Smith

Carla L. Peterson, University of Maryland College Park

To this day the debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington has dominated post-Reconstruction African American intellectual history.  Often obscured however has been the influence of two forefathers, Alexander Crummell (1819-1898) and James McCune Smith (1813-1865). Carla Peterson’s reassessment of their works clarifies these antecedents that allowed both Washington and Du Bois to reach their respective positions on education, and Du Bois to shape his thinking on race and culture.

Carla L. Peterson completed her Ph.D. at Yale in 1976. Her expertise includes nineteenth-century African American women writers and speakers in the northern US, African American novelists, and gender and culture in historical literature.

Peterson is the author of Black Gotham: African American Family and Community in Nineteenth-Century New York. This book is about nineteenth-century black New Yorkers, viewed from the perspective of family histories.

Sponsors: Department of Africana Studies and Dresher Center for the Humanities