Title
Honoring the life and achievements of the scholar, scientist, and fighter for world peace William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, and declaring 2018 as the Year of W.E.B. Du Bois in the City of Philadelphia
Body
WHEREAS, W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist, scientist, historian, editor, educator, and fighter for world peace made substantial contributions to the foundations of civil rights activism, Pan-Africanist thought, peace, and the fight against white supremacy and colonialism; and
WHEREAS, Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, Du Bois attended Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville, Tennessee, where, as he said, he "touched the very shadow of slavery", and began analyzing the impacts of the entrenchment of American racism on the African American Community and on the nation; and
WHEREAS, Du Bois, after graduating from Fisk University, was admitted to Harvard University, becoming the first Black American to earn a doctorate from the institution in 1895; and
WHEREAS, After teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio, Du Bois was invited by prominent women connected to the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a study of the Black Community in Philadelphia. Living in the Seventh Ward at the College Settlement Association at 617 Carver Street (now Rodman Street) he studied the sociopolitical factors that contributed to high rates of poverty and crime in Black Communities; and
WHEREAS, In his groundbreaking sociological text, The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois applied the scientific method in his argument that conditions of economic deprivation were the result of structural racism and the unwillingness of white employers and City officials to hire African Americans who had migrated to Philadelphia from the South after the Civil War. Du Bois additionally noticed that, in spite of a 1880 Pennsylvania law banning educational segregation, Philadelphia's schools remained segregated. Du Bois' portrait of political ...
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