White workers accepted low wages, he argued, because racism paid them a psychological wage instead.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. He earned a bachelor's degree from Fisk University, then became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard in 1895.1 His 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro was among the earliest works of empirical sociology in the United States.
In 1903, Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, in which he introduced the concept of double consciousness, the experience of seeing oneself through the lens of a society that treats you as a problem.2 He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited its journal, The Crisis, for more than two decades.
His most significant contribution to the history of work appeared in 1935. Black Reconstruction in America reinterpreted the post-Civil War era through the lens of labor and class. Du Bois argued that enslaved people had freed themselves through a mass withdrawal of their work, which he called a general strike of four million people.3
The book's most lasting concept was the "public and psychological wage" of whiteness. Du Bois observed that white workers in the postwar South accepted low wages and poor conditions because the racial hierarchy gave them a sense of status that substituted for material well-being.4 The concept anticipated later scholarship on how identity can function as a substitute for economic security.
At the time of its publication, Black Reconstruction challenged the dominant academic narrative, known as the Dunning School, which portrayed Reconstruction as a disaster caused by Black political incompetence. Du Bois named the historians responsible and accused the profession of producing propaganda rather than scholarship.5
Du Bois lived to the age of ninety-five, dying in Accra, Ghana, on August 27, 1963, one day before the March on Washington.6 The Black Reconstruction he wrote during the Great Depression sat neglected on library shelves for decades. Historians rediscovered it in the 1960s, and by the twenty-first century it was recognized as one of the most important works of American historical scholarship ever produced.