![]() ![]() ![]() In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. He also was made acutely aware of “the color line” in the South, and realized it would take far more than the higher education of African Americans to overcome this barrier. Here he could feel what it was to engage with educated minds, with no race considerations to affect the exchange. While Du Bois had long believed that education and a sense of purpose were all that blacks needed to gain a place as Americans after having been freed from slavery in 1865, his education at Fisk was twofold. Although he had deeply desired to go to Harvard, it was the town’s stipulation that this scholarship was to be used at Fisk University, founded for the children of emancipated slaves. ![]() He was born into a community of free blacks in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, and after his mother’s death, he was given a scholarship by the primarily white town. The poem is understood as “an affirmation of black pride,” but Du Bois’s ultimate acceptance of the need to call for black pride was the culmination of a difficult process. Du Bois was 39 years old when “The Song of the Smoke” was published in the February 1907 issue of Horizon, a magazine which he himself edited. ![]()
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