Editorial commentary
The 1900 Pan-African Conference in London was the first international gathering organized explicitly around the political claims of African-descended people. Du Bois, at thirty-two, drafted the closing 'Address to the Nations of the World' on behalf of the gathering. The address contains the first published instance of what would become his central analytical claim, that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.'
W.E.B. Du Bois lived from 1868 to 1963 — across the lifetime of the Reconstruction settlement and its complete reversal, the rise and consolidation of the segregation regime, two world wars, the early phase of African decolonization, and the first years of the civil-rights movement in the United States. He trained as a sociologist at Harvard and Berlin, published the first empirical sociological study of an American urban Black population (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899), co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter-century, organized or attended every Pan-African Conference from 1900 to 1945, and spent the final two years of his life in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. Reading any single Du Bois text in isolation is reading one cross-section of a sustained intellectual project; the project is more legible when the texts are read in sequence across his lifetime.
The conference was convened by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams and attended by delegates from the United States, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Britain. The institutional context was the post-Berlin Conference period of accelerated European imperial expansion in Africa: the Berlin Conference partition had been signed fifteen years earlier, the South African War was in its second year, the United States had just acquired the Philippines from Spain.
The address is short — under fifteen hundred words — but it does specific political work. It addresses itself not to a domestic American audience but to the governments of the imperial powers then partitioning Africa. It frames the political claims of African-descended people as a single transnational claim rather than a series of separate national claims. It makes three specific demands: respect for African political integrity, full citizenship for Black subjects of the British Crown, and abandonment of the 'practical disfranchisement' of Black American citizens. None of the demands were met.
The framing would shape subsequent Pan-African organizing from the second conference in 1919 through the Manchester conference of 1945 — the conference that brought Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Padmore, and the future leaders of the independence-era African states into political contact. The address shows Du Bois's international political horizon present from the start of his career rather than as a late-career development. The standard institutional history is Imanuel Geiss's The Pan-African Movement (1974); the more recent Hakim Adi's Pan-Africanism: A History (2018) is the standard contemporary reference.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Editorial commentary
The 1900 Pan-African Conference in London was the first international gathering organized explicitly around the political claims of African-descended people. Du Bois, at thirty-two, drafted the closing 'Address to the Nations of the World' on behalf of the gathering. The address contains the first published instance of what would become his central analytical claim, that 'the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.'
W.E.B. Du Bois lived from 1868 to 1963 — across the lifetime of the Reconstruction settlement and its complete reversal, the rise and consolidation of the segregation regime, two world wars, the early phase of African decolonization, and the first years of the civil-rights movement in the United States. He trained as a sociologist at Harvard and Berlin, published the first empirical sociological study of an American urban Black population (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899), co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter-century, organized or attended every Pan-African Conference from 1900 to 1945, and spent the final two years of his life in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. Reading any single Du Bois text in isolation is reading one cross-section of a sustained intellectual project; the project is more legible when the texts are read in sequence across his lifetime.
The conference was convened by the Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams and attended by delegates from the United States, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Britain. The institutional context was the post-Berlin Conference period of accelerated European imperial expansion in Africa: the Berlin Conference partition had been signed fifteen years earlier, the South African War was in its second year, the United States had just acquired the Philippines from Spain.
The address is short — under fifteen hundred words — but it does specific political work. It addresses itself not to a domestic American audience but to the governments of the imperial powers then partitioning Africa. It frames the political claims of African-descended people as a single transnational claim rather than a series of separate national claims. It makes three specific demands: respect for African political integrity, full citizenship for Black subjects of the British Crown, and abandonment of the 'practical disfranchisement' of Black American citizens. None of the demands were met.
The framing would shape subsequent Pan-African organizing from the second conference in 1919 through the Manchester conference of 1945 — the conference that brought Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Padmore, and the future leaders of the independence-era African states into political contact. The address shows Du Bois's international political horizon present from the start of his career rather than as a late-career development. The standard institutional history is Imanuel Geiss's The Pan-African Movement (1974); the more recent Hakim Adi's Pan-Africanism: A History (2018) is the standard contemporary reference.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.