Legacy of Du Bois Symposium: Opening Lecture and Reception

“A Curious Custom of Saving: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Archives in Black History” is the opening lecture for the Legacy of Du Bois Symposium on Knowledge, Arts, and Activism Beyond the Academy. The lecture presents a history of Du Bois’s archives: his decision as a teenager to start saving his personal papers, and the circumstances surrounding why his manuscripts ended up at different libraries in places like Tennessee and Massachusetts. It explains how his preservational mindset of documenting Black history for the future informs how we study Du Bois today. Phillip L. Sinitiere is Senior Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a professor of U.S. history, world history, and humanities at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominantly African American school located in Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District.