TheLeadershipandLegacy

ofW.E.BDuBois
BiancaAugeri,GaelleGourdet,KassandraJulce,
AshleyMartorana,JanaiMatthews
SeniorGroupWebsite

When this project was first assigned to us, the people that came to mind who
best represented the leadership and legacy theme were Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson
Mandela, Rosa Parks and other mainstream icons. Our teacher encouraged us to find
someone less popular but still recent enough to find plenty of information on. We
decided to focus on the 20th century, the time period of the Civil Rights Movement.
Many leaders emerged from that era and when we came across W.E.B Du Bois, we
knew we had found our man. We were intrigued by his personality and his influential
role as cofounder of the NAACP. W.E.B DuBois was raised in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts and even graduated from Harvard University. We found that multiple
primary sources would be at our hands since he started his journey of demanding rights
for blacks in our own state.
The first thing we did when we started to conduct our research was visit our local
libraries and check out books on W.E.B. Du Bois. Next, we looked him up on the
internet and made sure to use websites with .org, .edu, and .gov in their urls as we
know they are more reliable than other options. We managed to find a W.E.B. Du Bois
online library via Umass Amherst. It provided us with a lot of primary works and pictures.
To find videos, we searched youtube for what we wanted and selected the most trusted
channels videos. We also used JStor, an online scholarly journal database, to find other
perspectives on Du Bois and archives of Du Boiss written works.
We have already created poster boards and written plenty of papers during our
careers as students so we wanted to try something different. Making a website is
something that not everyone is willing to put the time into doing and we wanted to
challenge ourselves by making one.We like the way Weebly is very hands on and easy

to use. It was a drag, drop, and insert process. Once we gathered our own information,
setting up the website became easier. We were able to place components wherever we
wanted. We were able to incorporate our ideas and format of how each page would be
displayed. Overall, the best part of designing the website was being able to see our
finished product.
W.E.B. Du Bois was born during a time period in which African Americans were
not subjected to certain unalienable rights that Americans once said all men should
have. Du Bois took it upon himself to establish a sense of identity in and among African
Americans because he did not just want them to succeed in America; he wanted them
to be a part of America. His efforts led to the foundation of the NAACP, an organization
created to support and protect the rights of African Americans, which still exists today.
His legacy may not be as well known as Martin Luther King Jr. but who knows, without
him, segregation may have still existed and African Americans would not have the same
rights as other races like they do today.