W.E.B Du Bois can be described as a man of many faces. During his own lifetime he is what would be described as a Renaissance Man, playing the many roles of the Scholar/Academic, the Writer, the Activist, the Historian, the Sociologist, the Educator, the Social Critic; the list is seemingly boundless with the things he was able to accomplish in his ninety-five years of life. Additionally, Du Bois, is in his own right, a monumental figure in American history and is indispensable in how we understand the history of race in the United States today. Through his extensive writing, speeches, and theories accompanying the subject there can be many ways that Du Bois can be interpreted by the modern population of the twenty-first century; many viewing him today in a less than flattering light due to the theory that seems to have made the most impact in the public eye even after
his overarching career and I believe more substantial later works: his theory of the Talented Tenth. As one of the most popular and accessible of his wordy texts, it is the theory that has had the honor of branding Du Bois as an elitist, something that I believe is partially false. If solely looking at his earlier works, then yes Du BOis could be wholeheartedly identified as an elitist, but as I will be making an argument for in my paper, I believe this to be totally false. I will do this by tracking through DuBoiss life (in the years he was active in the public eye) through the historical contexts that helped to shape and change in beliefs as well as most prominent, in my opinion, books and essays during those critical time periods that display his starting thought processes and their seemingly gradual change due to his foray into Marxist theory and socialist thought.