W.E.B. Du Bois’ Membership Card

Scholar, educator, activist, and freethinker W.E.B. Du Bois travelled from America to London in 1911 to attend the Universal Races Congress, an initiative of the Union of Ethical Societies (now Humanists UK). The first ever anti-racist congress, this was an opportunity for delegates from across the world to discuss race and nationality with a focus on science and empathy, and Du Bois would speak about it as a truly monumental occasion for the rest of his life. Although the onset of war meant that the First Universal Races Congress was also the last, it was a remarkable effort, which left an indelible impression on Du Bois. Believing it to be ‘the first time in the history of mankind when a world congress dared openly and explicitly to take its stand on the platform of human equality,’ he would later write that it ‘would have marked an epoch in the racial history of the world if it had not been for the World War’. The W.E.B. Du Bois papers, held by the University of Massachusetts, contain many other documents relating to the congress, as well as friendly correspondence with its principal organiser, Gustav Spiller, who afterwards sought to continue its work through a further venture: the ‘World Conferences for Promoting Concord Between All Divisions of Mankind’.