W.E.B. Du Bois's Move to Ghana and Final Years

W.E.B. Du Bois, the American sociologist, historian, and NAACP co-founder often credited as the father of modern Pan-Africanism for organizing the international Pan-African Congresses beginning in 1919, spent the final two years of his life in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African nation to win independence from colonial rule.

In May 1961, Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the Ghana Academy of Sciences invited the 93-year-old Du Bois to move to Accra and direct the compilation of an Encyclopedia Africana, a comprehensive reference work on the history and achievements of people of African descent that Du Bois had first conceived of decades earlier, in 1908. Before leaving the United States, Du Bois formally joined the Communist Party USA on October 1, 1961, declaring in his application letter that he had come to see communism as the clearest path toward Black liberation and global peace, a position that reflected his lifelong leftward political drift and his disillusionment with American racism. He left for Ghana on October 7, 1961, and settled in Accra to begin work on the encyclopedia project.

His relationship with his home country deteriorated further from there. The United States government declined to renew his passport after 1961, leaving him effectively stateless while abroad. In 1963, Du Bois accepted Ghanaian citizenship, a step that required formally renouncing his American citizenship, a striking end for a man who had spent six decades fighting for Black Americans’ full citizenship rights at home. He continued directing the Encyclopedia Africana project from Accra, though he did not live to see it completed.

Du Bois died in Accra on August 27, 1963, at age 95. His death fell on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the massive civil rights demonstration in the United States at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech the following day; word of Du Bois’s death reached the crowd gathered on the National Mall, and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins asked the assembled marchers to observe a moment of silence in his honor. Du Bois was given a state funeral in Ghana and buried in Accra, where his former residence has since become the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture. His decision to spend his final years building African institutions rather than continuing the American civil rights fight from within the United States remains one of the most striking personal statements of Pan-Africanist commitment made by any major twentieth-century Black American intellectual.