W.E.B. Du Bois House

Accra, Ghana

Site History and Significance

The Final Home of a Leading Black Intellectual

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most prominent Black writers and philosophers in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, he dedicated his life to advocating for racial equality and was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Many African leaders of the mid-twentieth century admired him for his anti-colonial activism and his participation in the founding of the Pan-African Congresses of the early 1900s.

In 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois accepted Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah's invitation to move to Accra, where he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, received a comfortable seven-room government home on an acre of property. While there, Du Bois worked on the Encyclopedia Africana project, left unfinished at the time of his death just two years after the couple’s arrival. Today, the W.E.B. Du Bois House represents an important piece of the shared history of Africa and its diaspora and is an enduring symbol of Black American kinship with the people of Ghana.

Our Involvement

An Expansive Museum and Memorial Complex

The home is a bungalow constructed from dressed stone, timber, and corrugated tin sheeting, with a mix of linoleum and carpet floors. It is open to visitors and houses both Du Bois’s personal library and his collected publications. However, the roof is in poor condition and has not been properly maintained, allowing for water ingress into the building. World Monuments Fund (WMF) is advising on the conservation of this structure as part of a broader plan to convert the last home and final resting place of Du Bois into a museum and memorial complex.