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In 1909 Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He served as editor of the NAACP's monthly magazine, which he named The Crisis. The organization was dedicated to advocating and working for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities for African-Americans. In 1911 he wrote a well-read editorial which led to a nation-wide campaign for Federal legislation to outlaw lynching.
As an advocate for his cause, Du Bois became active in politics. He personally supported the principles of the Socialist Party and was a member of the party from 1910 to 1912. But he found that some of the Socialist Party leaders to be be supportive of racism and he left the party. In that era many African-Americans supported the Republican Party, recalling it to be the "party of Lincoln". But Du Bois became frustrated by Republican President William Howard Taft's failure to address the problem of widespread lynching.
In the election of 1912, Du Bois endorsed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson. He did so in exchange for Wilson's promise to support black causes. He did not see Theodore Roosevelt as any better than Taft, and viewed Roosevelt as the least of three poor choices, because of how Roosevelt had dealt with African-American soldiers in an incident in Brownsville, Texas, in which Du Bois believed that Roosevelt had dealt with the men unjustly. Wilson would end up disappointing Du Bois, but when Wilson was elected, Du Bois expressed some optimism that Wilson would keep his promise. In March of 1913, following Wilson's inauguration, he wrote a long open letter to Wilson which read in part as follows:
Sir: Your inauguration to the Presidency of the United States is to the colored people, to the white South and to the nation a momentous people, to the white South and to the nation a momentous occasion. For the first time since the emancipation of slaves the government of this nation — the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives — passes on the 4th of March into the hands of the party which a half century ago fought desperately to keep black men as real estate in the eyes of the law.
Your elevation to the chief magistracy of the nation at this time shows not simply a splendid national faith in the perpetuity of free government in this land, but even more, a personal faith in you.
We black men by our votes helped to put you in your high position. It is true that in your overwhelming triumph at the polls that you might have succeeded without our aid, but the fact remains that our votes helped elect you this time, and that the time may easily come in the near future when without our 500,000 ballots neither you nor your party can control the government.
True as this is, we would not be misunderstood. We do not ask or expect special consideration or treatment in return for our franchises. We did not vote for you and your party because you represented our best judgment. It was not because we loved Democrats more, but Republicans less and Roosevelt least, that led to our action.
He concluded by telling Wilson:
But it is not the offices at your disposal, President Woodrow Wilson, that is the burden of our great cry to you. We want to be treated as men. We want to vote. We want our children educated. We want lynching stopped. We want no longer to be herded as cattle on street cars and railroads. We want the right to earn a living, to own our own property and to spend our income unhindered and uncursed. Your power is limited? We know that, but the power of the American people is unlimited. Today you embody that power, you typify its ideals. In the name then of that common country for which your fathers and ours have bled and toiled, be not untrue, President Wilson, to the highest ideals of American Democracy.
But six months later, Du Bois understood that his faith in Wilson had been misplaced. He wrote Wilson that September and said:
Sir, you have now been President of the United States for six months and what is the result? It is no exaggeration to say that every enemy of the Negro race is greatly encouraged; that every man who dreams of making the Negro race a group of menials and pariahs is alert and hopeful. Vardaman, Tillman, Hoke Smith, Cole Blease, and Burleson are evidently assuming that their theory of the place and destiny of the Negro race is the theory of your administration, They and others are assuming this because not a single act and not a single word of yours since election has given anyone reason to infer that you have the slightest interest in the colored people or desire to alleviate their intolerable position, A dozen worthy Negro officials have been removed from office, and you have nominated but one black man for office, and he such a contemptible cur, that his very nomination was an insult to every Negro in the land.
To this negative appearance of indifference has been added positive action on the part of your advisers, with or without your knowledge, which constitutes the gravest attack on the liberties of our people since emancipation, Public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government.
History has viewed Wilson's record on civil rights as regressive. In Wilson's first month in office, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson called for segregated workplaces and urged the president to establish this poilcy across the government, in restrooms, cafeterias and work spaces.By the end of 1913 many departments, including the Navy, had workspaces segregated by screens, and restrooms, cafeterias were segregated. Wilson supported this policy and defended his administration's segregation policy. In a July 1913 letter to Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the New York Evening Post and a founding member of the NAACP, Wilson said that segregation removed "friction" between the races. His change in federal practices was protested in letters from a number of groups, and was the subject of public meetings, newspaper campaigns and official statements by both African-American and white church groups. Du Bois and other African-American supporters who had crossed party lines to vote for Wilson were bitterly disappointed. This was all to no avail as Wilson continued to defend his policy. During Wilson's presidency, the government began requiring photographs of all applicants for federal jobs.
In response to the demand for industrial labor, the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South began in 1917. This migration led to race riots in some cities, including the East St. Louis riots of 1917. Following the end of the war, another series of race riots occurred in Chicago, Omaha, and two dozen other major cities in the North.
During the war, Wilson's War Department had drafted hundreds of thousands of African-Americans into the army. These men received equal pay, but were kept in all-black units commanded by white officers. Most were kept out of combat. When a delegation of African-Americans protested the discriminatory actions, Wilson told them: "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." He also said "My question would be this: If you think that you gentlemen, as an organization, and all other Negro citizens of this country, that you are being humiliated, you will believe it. If you take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over the country, why the consequence will be very serious."
In 1918, Du Bois was offered an Army commission in charge of dealing with race relations. DuBois accepted, but he failed his Army physical and did not serve. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice in the United States military. Despite his disappointment with Wilson, he remained active politically and based his politics on pragmatism. Although Du Bois generally believed in socialist principles, in 1929, Du Bois endorsed Democrat Jimmy Walker for mayor of New York, rather than the socialist Norman Thomas, believing that Walker could do more immediate good for his cause. Throughout the 1920s, Du Bois and the NAACP shifted support back and forth between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, induced by promises from the candidates to fight lynchings, improve working conditions, or support voting rights in the South.
In 1931, the a rivalry developed between the NAACP and the Communist Party. It concerned a case known as "the Scottsboro Boys", nine African-American youth arrested in 1931 in Alabama for rape. Du Bois and the NAACP felt that the case would not be beneficial to their cause. The Communist Party organized the defense efforts for the nine. The Communists were able to raise a vast amount of publicity and funds for the defense effort. Du Bois believed that the Communists were attempting to present their party to African Americans as a better solution than the NAACP. Responding to criticisms of the NAACP from the Communist Party, Du Bois wrote articles condemning the party, claiming that it unfairly attacked the NAACP, and that it failed to fully appreciate racism in the United States. In response, communist leaders accused Du Bois of being a "class enemy", and claimed that the NAACP leadership was an isolated elite, disconnected from the working-class blacks they ostensibly fought for.
Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934 and went to teach in Atlanta. He became a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains essays on sociology, politics and history. He took a trip around the world in 1936, which included visits to Nazi Germany, China and Japan. He said that, while in Germany, he was treated with warmth and respect. But after his return to the United States, he expressed his shock at the treatment of the Jewish people by the Germans.
In 1943, at the age of 76, Du Bois was abruptly fired from his position at Atlanta University. He re-joined the NAACP as director of the Department of Special Research. Du Bois was a member of the three-person delegation from the NAACP that attended the 1945 conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established. The NAACP delegation wanted the United Nations to endorse racial equality. The NAACP proposal received support from China, Russia and India, but it was ignored by the other major powers, and the NAACP proposals were not included in the United Nations charter. He helped to submit petitions to the UN concerning discrimination against African Americans, the most famous of which was the NAACP's "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress".
When the Cold War began in the mid-1940s, the NAACP distanced itself from Communists. In 1947 Life magazine published an article by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. claiming that the NAACP was heavily influenced by Communists. Du Bois's association with prominent communists made him a liability for the NAACP, especially since the FBI was starting to aggressively investigate communist sympathizers. By mutual agreement he resigned from the NAACP for the second time in late 1948. In 1950 Du Bois became chairman of the newly created Peace Information Center (PIC), which worked to publicize the Stockholm Peace Appeal in the United States. The purpose of the appeal was to gather signatures on a petition, asking governments around the world to ban all nuclear weapons. The U.S. Justice department alleged that the PIC was acting as an agent of a foreign state, and thus required the PIC to register with the federal government. Du Bois and other PIC leaders refused, and they were indicted for failure to register. He was tried in 1951 represented by civil rights attorney Vito Marcantonio. The case was dismissed before the jury rendered a verdict. Du Bois was bitterly disappointed that many of his colleagues in the NAACP did not support him during his trial.
After the trial, Du Bois lived in Manhattan, where he continued to advocate for world peace, and criticized military actions, such as the Korean War. In 1950, at the age of 82, Du Bois ran for U.S. Senator from New York on the American Labor Party ticket and received about 200,000 votes, or 4% of the statewide total. In 1958, Du Bois regained his passport, and with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, he traveled around the world, visiting Russia and China. He became outraged when, in 1961 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1950 McCarran Act, a key piece of McCarthyism legislation which required communists to register with the government. He joined the Communist Party in October 1961, at the age of 93.
Du Bois returned to Africa in late 1960 to attend the inauguration of Nnamdi Azikiwe as the first African governor of Nigeria. In October 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to take up residence there. When the United States refused to renew his passport in 1963, he became a citizen of Ghana. Later that year, on August 27, 1963, he died at the capital of Accra at the age of 95. Du Bois was buried in Accra near his home, which is now the Du Bois Memorial Centre. A day after his death, at the March on Washington, speaker Roy Wilkins asked the hundreds of thousands of marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence.The Civil Rights Act of 1964, embodying many of the reforms Du Bois had campaigned for his entire life, was enacted almost a year after his death.