du bois is on the shattered-mirror shelf because he gave the feeling of not knowing who you are one of its most precise descriptions ever written — and because the description came from his own life, starting in a schoolroom.
in the souls of black folk (1903) he tells the scene himself: he was a boy in great barrington, massachusetts, and the class was exchanging visiting cards for a game. a newcomer girl refused his card — 'peremptorily, with a glance'. in that instant he felt, for the first time, 'shut out from their world by a vast veil'. the point wasn't the girl. the point was what the veil did next: it handed him an image of himself seen from outside, and made him live inside it.
he named the condition in an 1897 atlantic monthly essay, then carved it into permanence in souls. the core of it, exact: 'this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others' — of measuring one's soul, he continues, by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. and then the line that carries the whole weight: 'one ever feels his twoness,—an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.'
he had studied psychology at harvard under william james, who wrote about divided selves — du bois took that vocabulary and pointed it at the specific, lived experience of being seen as a problem before being seen as a person. the term wasn't invented from nothing; the application was his, and it stuck.
and his own identity never stopped moving. first african american phd from harvard, 1895. pioneering empirical sociologist at atlanta university — the philadelphia negro (1899). then a deliberate public turn from scholar to organizer: the niagara movement in 1905, the naacp in 1909–1910, and 24 years editing its magazine the crisis. each a new public self, built and then partly set down as his thinking changed.
the last remaking was the starkest. in 1951, at 83, the u.s. government seized his passport over his peace activism — he was tried and acquitted, but couldn't travel again until 1958. in 1961, at 93, ghana's president kwame nkrumah invited him to accra to direct the encyclopedia africana. he went, and — the u.s. having in effect refused to renew his passport — accepted ghanaian citizenship. he died in accra on august 27, 1963, at 95, one day before the march on washington. his death was announced to the marchers from the stage. the man who spent a lifetime insisting that the self others hand you is never the whole truth of you had, at the very end, chosen his own final version.