W.E.B. Du Bois Moves to Ghana
For W.E.B. Du Bois, Africa was never simply somewhere else. It was part of a global Black story.
By the time William Edward Burghardt Du Bois reached his nineties, he had already lived one of the most consequential intellectual lives in American history.
Born in Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois became a scholar, sociologist, historian, writer and civil rights activist. He was the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, helped establish the Niagara Movement, became a co-founder of the NAACP, and spent decades challenging segregation and documenting the realities of Black life in the United States.
But Du Bois's vision extended far beyond America.
Throughout his life, he became one of the most important voices in the international Pan-African movement, helping organize Pan-African congresses and arguing that the struggles of Black people in the United States were connected to colonialism and the experiences of African-descended people around the world.
Then, in 1961, at 93 years old, Du Bois made one final extraordinary journey.
At the invitation of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, he moved to Ghana to work on an ambitious project called the Encyclopedia Africana, an effort intended to document African history and knowledge from perspectives that colonial scholarship had long marginalized.
Du Bois would never again live in the United States.
He died in Accra on August 27, 1963, just one day before hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
His final journey raises a powerful question:
What does “home” mean when your identity, your struggle, and your sense of belonging stretch across an entire diaspora?
Du Bois Was Thinking Globally Long Before Ghana
W.E.B. Du Bois did not suddenly discover Africa in old age.
Decades before he moved to Ghana, Du Bois had already developed a worldview that connected the lives of Black Americans with the struggles of African people and people of African descent throughout the world. For him, racism in the United States, European colonialism in Africa, and the treatment of Black people across the diaspora were interconnected parts of what he famously described as the global “color line.”
Travel played an important role in developing that perspective.
Du Bois studied in Germany in the 1890s and traveled extensively throughout his life. He encountered scholars, political leaders, activists, and Black communities outside the United States, experiences that helped reinforce his belief that the struggle for Black freedom could not be understood solely within America's borders.
That belief became especially visible through his involvement with Pan-Africanism, a movement built around ideas of solidarity, self-determination, and cooperation among African people and the African diaspora.
Du Bois participated in the 1900 Pan-African Conference in London. After World War I, he helped organize the 1919 Pan-African Congress in Paris, which brought together 57 delegates representing 15 countries. He subsequently helped organize additional Pan-African Congresses in 1921, 1923, and 1927.
These gatherings asked questions that would become increasingly important as the twentieth century unfolded:
Who should govern Africa?
What would freedom from European colonial rule actually look like?
And what responsibility did Black people throughout the diaspora have to one another?
By 1945, Du Bois was again helping lead the Pan-African movement at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England. Among the younger generation associated with that movement was Kwame Nkrumah, who would later lead Ghana to independence and become the country's first prime minister and president. The connection matters.
When Nkrumah eventually invited an elderly Du Bois to Ghana, he wasn't simply inviting a famous Black American intellectual to retire in Africa.
He was welcoming one of the thinkers whose work had helped shape the international movement of which independent Ghana had become a powerful symbol.
Long before Du Bois made Africa his home, Africa had already occupied a central place in how he understood Black freedom.
Ghana Becomes a Symbol of Black Possibility
When Ghana gained independence on March 6, 1957, the moment resonated far beyond the borders of the new nation.
Formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast, Ghana became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from a European colonial power. Kwame Nkrumah, who had led the independence movement, became its first prime minister and later its first president.
For Nkrumah, Ghanaian independence was connected to a much larger project. His vision was deeply Pan-African. Ghana would not simply become an independent country; he wanted it to participate in the liberation and development of Africa and to strengthen connections between the continent and its global diaspora.
That made Ghana especially significant for Black people abroad.
During the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans including activists, writers, professionals, and intellectuals traveled to or settled in Ghana. Some were attracted by the opportunity to participate in building a newly independent African nation. Others saw Ghana as evidence that Black political self-determination was not merely an idea. It was happening.
Du Bois had spent decades advocating Pan-African ideas. Now, in his late eighties and early nineties, he was watching African independence unfold during his own lifetime.
And Ghana represented something especially powerful:
A Black-led nation emerging from colonial rule and deliberately imagining its own future.
Nkrumah and Du Bois were connected intellectually through the Pan-African movement. Nkrumah understood the importance of Du Bois's scholarship and his decades of work connecting Africa with its diaspora.
Eventually, Ghana called Du Bois directly.
In 1961, President Nkrumah invited the 93-year-old scholar to move to Ghana and work on the Encyclopedia Africana, an enormous project intended to document African history, culture, and knowledge. Du Bois envisioned the encyclopedia as something capable of connecting Africa and the broader African diaspora. He accepted.
At an age when most people's greatest journeys are behind them, W.E.B. Du Bois packed his life and crossed the Atlantic again.
This time, he wasn't simply visiting Africa.
He was going to live there.
At 93 years old, Du Bois proved that there is no expiration date on discovering a new chapter of your life.
At 93, Du Bois Moves to Africa
In October 1961, W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife, writer and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, left the United States for Ghana. He was 93 years old.
President Kwame Nkrumah had invited Du Bois to direct the development of the Encyclopedia Africana, a project intended to document the history, cultures, achievements, and experiences of African people and the African diaspora. The idea was remarkably consistent with the work Du Bois had already spent much of his life pursuing: challenging histories of Africa and Black people that had been written through colonial and racist assumptions.
Accra now became home.
For Du Bois, the move represented much more than retirement in a warm climate. He continued working. Even in his nineties, he was developing plans for the encyclopedia and thinking about how scholars throughout Africa and the diaspora could contribute to it. The project was enormous, and Du Bois would not live long enough to complete it.
But there was another layer to his departure from America.
Du Bois's politics had moved increasingly leftward during the later decades of his life. His peace activism and opposition to nuclear weapons brought intense scrutiny from the U.S. government during the Cold War. He had been prosecuted in 1951 on allegations that he had failed to register as an agent of a foreign principal and was ultimately acquitted. For years during the 1950s, the U.S. government also prevented him from traveling internationally by withholding his passport.
Then, in 1961, the same year he moved to Ghana, Du Bois formally joined the Communist Party. That context makes his final move particularly complicated.
Du Bois was not simply an elderly American deciding that Ghana looked like a nice place to spend his remaining years. By the time he departed, his relationship with the United States had been shaped by nearly a century of racial discrimination, political struggle, government surveillance, international travel, scholarship, activism, and increasing disillusionment with American society.
Yet Ghana offered him something different.
Here was an independent African nation led by a president who respected his work and invited him to participate in an intellectual project devoted to Africa and its diaspora. The symbolism was enormous.
A man born only three years after the end of the American Civil War was now living long enough to work in an independent African republic.
Du Bois had spent his life imagining a global future for Black people. At 93, he crossed the Atlantic to participate in building one.
America, His Passport, and the Question of Returning Home
W.E.B. Du Bois's final years in Ghana are sometimes summarized by saying that he renounced America and chose Africa as his permanent home.
The historical record is more complicated.
Du Bois had already experienced direct restrictions on his freedom to travel. During the 1950s, the U.S. government withheld his passport amid Cold War scrutiny of his political activities. That restriction even prevented him from accepting Kwame Nkrumah's invitation to attend Ghana's independence celebrations in 1957. His ability to travel internationally was eventually restored.
But the passport issue returned after Du Bois moved to Ghana.
In 1963, the United States refused to renew Du Bois's passport. PBS's American Masters documents the refusal and the Ghanaian citizenship that followed. Historian David Levering Lewis likewise describes Du Bois's final period in Ghana as one in which the American embassy stopped renewal of his U.S. passport.
Du Bois subsequently became a citizen of Ghana.
This is where an important distinction gets lost in many retellings. Becoming Ghanaian did not necessarily mean that Du Bois had legally ceased being an American. Sources disagree in how they characterize his citizenship, and some accounts say he intended to relinquish his American citizenship. But the evidence does not support casually stating that he formally renounced his U.S. citizenship before his death.
And what about the claim that Du Bois desperately wanted to return to America before he died but was forbidden to come home?
We could not substantiate that specific claim.
There is strong evidence that the United States refused to renew his passport. There is strong evidence that Du Bois and his wife approached the U.S. embassy in Accra about their passports. There is strong evidence that the refusal contributed to his decision to accept Ghanaian citizenship.
But those facts are not the same as evidence that an ailing Du Bois attempted to permanently return to the United States and was denied entry. In fact, one reason this story may have become confused involves Shirley Graham Du Bois. After her husband's death, records show that she intended to travel back to the United States in 1964 for a memorial honoring him, and accounts based on FBI records say she was subsequently denied a visa. That later episode can easily become blended with W.E.B. Du Bois's own passport dispute when the story is retold.
So the documented story is already striking enough without embellishment:
A man born in Massachusetts, who had spent nearly a century fighting for the rights of Black Americans, lived his final years in Ghana while the government of his birth country refused to renew his passport.
And yet reducing his final years to simple rejection by America would also miss something essential.
Du Bois had spent decades developing a Pan-African worldview. Ghana was not merely somewhere he ended up because America had rejected him. He had deliberately moved there at Nkrumah's invitation to undertake work he considered deeply important.
Both realities can exist together.
Du Bois chose Ghana. America also made his relationship with home extraordinarily complicated. His final years belong to both parts of that story.
One Day Before the March on Washington
W.E.B. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, on August 27, 1963. He was 95 years old.
The timing was extraordinary.
The following day, approximately 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, demanding action on employment discrimination, civil rights, voting rights, and racial inequality.
Du Bois was thousands of miles away. But his presence was still felt.
During the rally, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins announced Du Bois's death to the crowd. The Library of Congress records the announcement as part of the official history of the March.
There was something almost poetic about the timing.
Du Bois had been born in 1868, only a few years after the Civil War. He had lived through Reconstruction's aftermath, Jim Crow, lynching, two world wars, colonialism, the emergence of independent African nations, and the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
He had helped found the NAACP more than half a century before the March.
He had spent decades writing about the global color line.
And now, one day after his death in an independent African nation, hundreds of thousands of people were gathering in the capital of his birth country to demand many of the rights he had spent his life fighting for.
Du Bois would never see Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the words that became the most famous speech of the March.
But the movement standing before the Lincoln Memorial carried forward a struggle Du Bois had helped shape generations earlier.
W.E.B. Du Bois died in Africa. The next day, America continued a fight he had spent nearly a century helping to define.
What Does Home Mean?
Du Bois's final journey resists an easy interpretation.
He was American. He was Ghanaian. He was a Pan-Africanist who spent decades insisting that Black life could not be understood solely through national borders.
He deliberately chose to move to Ghana at 93. At the same time, his relationship with the United States had been profoundly shaped by racism, political surveillance, prosecution, and restrictions on his ability to travel. That complexity is precisely what makes his story so relevant to the history of Black travel.
Travel does not always mean vacation. Sometimes it means education. Sometimes it means political awakening. Sometimes it means discovering another place where your ideas, identity, or ambitions can exist differently.
And sometimes it forces a much harder question:
Where is home?
For Du Bois, the answer ultimately stretched across the Atlantic.
His childhood home remained in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the property associated with his family is now recognized as a National Historic Landmark.
But his final home was Accra.
Africa had occupied his scholarship and political imagination for decades. In the final chapter of his life, it became the place where he lived, worked, became a citizen, died, and was laid to rest.
Travel Is Your Birthright
There is something especially powerful about W.E.B. Du Bois beginning an entirely new chapter at 93 years old.
Most narratives about travel are built around youth.
Travel while you're young. See the world before you settle down. Have adventures before “real life” begins. Du Bois's life offers another possibility. There is no age at which the world stops being available to you.
At 93, he crossed an ocean. He entered a newly independent country. He accepted an enormous intellectual assignment. And he continued pursuing ideas that had occupied him for decades. Du Bois's journey also reminds us that Black history has never existed within the borders of the United States.
It stretches from Massachusetts to Ghana. From Washington to Accra. From the African continent to communities scattered throughout its diaspora. Understanding that history sometimes requires us to cross those borders too.
The world doesn't stop belonging to you because you've reached a certain age, lived in one place for decades, or already written most of your story.
There may still be another chapter waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.
Travel is Your Birthright.
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Sources & Further Reading
Library of Congress
NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom — Prelude to the Modern Civil Rights Movement
Covers Du Bois's Pan-African work, political activities, move to Ghana, and work on the Encyclopedia Africana.
Library of Congress
NAACP: Founding and Early Years
Useful for Du Bois's role in the NAACP and his organization of the Pan-African Congresses.
Library of Congress
The Civil Rights Era
Documents the 1963 March on Washington and Roy Wilkins's announcement of Du Bois's death to those gathered at the Lincoln Memorial.
National Museum of African American History & Culture
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices
Smithsonian material exploring Du Bois's scholarship, activism, Pan-Africanism, and intellectual legacy.
PBS American Masters
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography and Career Timeline
Especially useful for the chronology of Du Bois's later life, including Ghana and the U.S. passport dispute.
National Park Service
W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite
Background on Du Bois's Massachusetts roots and the Great Barrington property associated with his family.
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