The Last Message of W.E.B. Du Bois
by The Urban News
TITLE: The Last Message of W.E.B. Du Bois
AUTHOR: staff of The Urban News and the Wilma Dykeman Legacy
PERMISSION granted by the publisher of The Urban News
During the middle years of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were this country’s most eloquent spokesmen for Black civil rights. In the early decades of the 20th century, reeling from Jim Crow discrimination, Blacks in America looked to W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington for leadership.
Du Bois, the first Black person to earn a PhD at Harvard, taught history and economics at Atlanta University and was a co-founder of both the Niagara Movement and the NAACP. He argued constantly against lynching and white riots against Blacks. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), galvanized readers and stands as a masterwork of American literature. In his short opening section of the book entitled “The Forethought,” Du Bois writes, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Du Bois’ history Black Reconstruction (1935), partially funded by the Rosenwald Fund, argued against conventional wisdom and revealed the white supremacist heart of Reconstruction. In his opening note to the reader, Du Bois states flatly that “I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.” More than 700 pages later, in his final chapter called “The Propaganda of History,” Du Bois writes about “How the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.”
Du Bois died in Ghana while working on the Encyclopedia Africana, an encyclopedia of the African diaspora.
On April 20, 2026, the Asheville-based newspaper The Urban News published the following tribute to William Edward Burghardt DuBois:
A final request from a man who refused to surrender his belief in life
When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote his final message in 1957 at the age of 89, he intended it to be opened only after his death. What emerged six years later was not a farewell steeped in nostalgia, but a directive; clear, urgent, and startlingly contemporary. Today, as Black communities confront renewed battles over history, democracy, and dignity, Du Bois’s last words read less like a relic and more like a roadmap.
In the letter, Du Bois reflects on a lifetime of scholarship, struggle, and global advocacy. He writes of rest not as resignation but as transition, trusting that the unfinished work of justice would be carried forward by others.
“What I have done well will live long,” he wrote, “and what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others…while I rest." It is a reminder that the long arc of Black freedom has always depended on collective effort, not individual heroism.
At the heart of his message is a single charge: “Live and believe in life.” For Du Bois, belief was not sentimental. It was a discipline—a refusal to surrender to despair even when progress moved at a glacial pace. He warned that the only true death was losing faith in humanity’s capacity to grow “simply because this greater end comes slowly—just because time is long.”
That warning resonates sharply today. Across the country, Black history is being challenged in classrooms, voting rights are under pressure, and public narratives about race are being reshaped in ways that threaten to obscure hard‑won truths. Yet Du Bois’s directive insists that the measure of the moment is not the speed of progress but the persistence of those who continue the work.
To honor his message now is to defend the integrity of historical memory, to protect democratic participation, and to build institutions that safeguard Black life. It is to practice joy and creativity as acts of resistance. It is to recognize that each generation inherits both the burdens and the possibilities left by the last.
Du Bois did not write his final words as a closing chapter. He wrote as though he was passing us the baton. Nearly seven decades later, the baton remains in motion. His last message calls on Black people not only to endure, but to believe—actively, stubbornly, and together—in a future that is “greater, broader and fuller” than the present.
Time is long, he reminded us. But so is the work. And so is our capacity to continue it.
Du Bois’s Last Words, June 1957
“It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say the last good-bye to one’s loved ones and friends and to all the familiar things of this life.
“I am going to take a long, deep, and endless sleep. This is not punishment, but a privilege to which I have looked forward for years.
“I have loved my work. I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will livelong and justify my life; that what I have done ill or never finished, can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.
“And that peace will be my applause.
“One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always, human beings will live and progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
“The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.
“Good-bye.”