Clark Atlanta University Pays Tribute by Creating DuBois Institute

ATLANTA
Clark Atlanta University (CAU) will launch the DuBois Institute research center this summer dedicated to the ideals of W.E.B. DuBois, who taught at Atlanta University and helped found the NAACP.        
DuBois advocated human rights, economic justice and the liberation of oppressed people, particularly Black Americans.
He organized AU's Sociology Department, edited an internationally respected journal and convened annual conferences targeting issues affecting Blacks. He also was co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and editor of its magazine, the Crisis. DuBois died at 95 in Accra, Ghana, in 1963.
Clark Atlanta president, Dr. Thomas W. Cole Jr., says the center will revive the research, publishing and conferences DuBois started during his tenure on AU's faculty, from 1897 to 1910, and from 1932 to 1944.
In July, the school will relaunch the quarterly Phylon, The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, which DuBois started in 1940. It ceased publication in 1987, shortly before the merger of Atlanta University and Clark College.
Cole says the think tank will delve "into the range of issues affecting the quality of life for African Americans.
"Recommendations on poverty, crime, drugs — all of these ills that disproportionately impact on our community," Cole says.
He says the institute's mission will differ from the DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, where DuBois received a doctorate in 1896.
CAU's School of Social Work and its Center for Environmental Justice will work under the DuBois Institute umbrella.