Editorial commentary
The 1900 Pan-African Conference in London was the first international gathering organized explicitly around the political claims of African-descended people. The audio essay engages the conference's institutional context, the address W.E.B. Du Bois drafted on behalf of the gathering, and the broader subsequent Pan-African organizing that the conference opened.
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 conference's institutional context was the post-Berlin Conference period of accelerated European imperial expansion in Africa. The conference was held in London because London was the administrative center of the largest empire on the planet.
Du Bois was thirty-two at the time of the conference. The address he drafted — the closing 'Address to the Nations of the World' — 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.' The 1900 conference produced no immediate institutional successor; the second Pan-African Congress would not convene until 1919, in Paris, organized by Du Bois as part of the broader Black advocacy effort around the Versailles Peace Conference.
Companion reading includes Imanuel Geiss's The Pan-African Movement (1974), the standard institutional history; Hakim Adi's Pan-Africanism: A History (2018); and the primary-source documents collected in the multiple volume editions of the Pan-African Congress proceedings.
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.
The excerpt above is reproduced under fair-use principles for archival and educational purposes. The full text is available via the canonical source linked in the provenance section. Where the work is in copyright, this archive does not reproduce more than is necessary for the analytical and pedagogical purpose at hand.
Fourteen minutes including a fully-voiced reading of the address. Recorded in a quiet library room.
[Full transcript available to subscribers.]
Backing track: Rest Now by Eugenio Mininni · Mixkit Stock Music Free License · mixkit.co
Editorial commentary
The 1900 Pan-African Conference in London was the first international gathering organized explicitly around the political claims of African-descended people. The audio essay engages the conference's institutional context, the address W.E.B. Du Bois drafted on behalf of the gathering, and the broader subsequent Pan-African organizing that the conference opened.
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 conference's institutional context was the post-Berlin Conference period of accelerated European imperial expansion in Africa. The conference was held in London because London was the administrative center of the largest empire on the planet.
Du Bois was thirty-two at the time of the conference. The address he drafted — the closing 'Address to the Nations of the World' — 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.' The 1900 conference produced no immediate institutional successor; the second Pan-African Congress would not convene until 1919, in Paris, organized by Du Bois as part of the broader Black advocacy effort around the Versailles Peace Conference.
Companion reading includes Imanuel Geiss's The Pan-African Movement (1974), the standard institutional history; Hakim Adi's Pan-Africanism: A History (2018); and the primary-source documents collected in the multiple volume editions of the Pan-African Congress proceedings.
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.
The excerpt above is reproduced under fair-use principles for archival and educational purposes. The full text is available via the canonical source linked in the provenance section. Where the work is in copyright, this archive does not reproduce more than is necessary for the analytical and pedagogical purpose at hand.