Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

At about this time, Spelman’s President Read finally triumphed in her ten-year guerrilla war against the chairman of the Atlanta University sociology department, Dr. Du Bois. Although she was neither a scholar nor an educator, her informal position as the Rockefeller representative gave her an overriding strength at all the schools, since she was also a Morehouse board member and the treasurer of Atlanta University, signing all its checks. Grumbling Negro faculty members nicknamed her Rockefeller’s white “overseer.” Her coup de grâce on Du Bois was simple and quiet: his name failed to appear on the faculty payroll list for the fall of 1944. The seventy-six-year-old Du Bois, who had written three books and dozens of scholarly articles since his noisy departure from the NAACP in 1934, came rudely to the end of yet another career. Nearly twenty years of writing and political turmoil still lay ahead of him when Atlanta University set him adrift without notice or ceremony.