Imagine preparing for your PhD’s final oral exam and organizing a conference on the subject for the very next day. That is what Kwesi Thomas successfully did in June 2026 as scholars of W. E. B. Du Bois gathered from around North America to discuss the storied Black American sociologist, author, historian, and civil rights activist.
“Du Bois is probably the most important Black thinker in the 20th century,” says Thomas. “He kind of sets the stage for the last two centuries of Black thought.”
As the first Black PhD student to graduate in the department of philosophy in many years, Thomas was strongly advised by his supervisor Arthur Ripstein to take advantage of the external examiners Ripstein had arranged to fly in for the thesis defense. The half-day conference was in honour of the first Black PhD in philosophy at U of T in 1937, M. Marion Moreland, and focused on Du Bois’s work on philosophy in the early and mid-20th century.
It turned out that the exam and the conference were a full circle moment albeit dizzying. When Thomas was an incoming PhD student during the Black Lives Movement in 2021, he was uncertain about what to do with his interest in the philosophy of race and Black thought. He came across an article on Black philosophy in Canada by University of Dalhousie professor Chike Jeffers, one of his future examiners, and contacted him.
Jeffers, who just happened to be a Du Bois scholar, gave him simple advice: Read all of the major works by Du Bois. And Thomas did.
Du Bois is most known as one of the founders of the field of sociology; however, his work influenced many fields from political science to philosophy. He helped found the NAACP (National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People) in the early 20th century and would later promote Pan-Africanism. In The Souls of Black Folk, he introduced his understanding of double consciousness – a French term Thomas argues was introduced to Du Bois by William James at Harvard University – which Du Bois reimagined as Black Americans holding two identities: Black and American.
It was what led to that 1903 work that interested Thomas. He describes his PhD dissertation, The Philosophical Formation of W. E. B. Du Bois, as “the most comprehensive account yet given of the philosophical development of the early W. E. B. Du Bois.” In his thesis, Thomas examines the Du Bois’s philosophical relationships with European and American thinkers that the future sociologist encountered at Harvard University and at the University of Berlin at the end of the 19th century.
In his thesis, Thomas is careful to present Du Bois not just as a passive recipient of European wisdom, but as someone who is critically dialoguing with it in order to reshape it.
“How is he altering these resources for his project?” asks Thomas. “Can we consider these alterations retroactively as criticism of the dominant view?
For Thomas, one of the concerns of working on Black thought at U of T (and Canada) was his relative isolation from other young Black scholars (although he wasn’t the only Black graduate student in the department and assistant professor William Paris joined the department at the same time as Thomas). So two years ago, he started an online reading group.
“Whenever I met a Black philosopher at a philosophy conference, I would add them to this big Zoom group, and we would meet biweekly and read Black thought together.”
The premise of the group, made up mostly of graduate students, was for the works to be global – covering Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean as well as North America and Europe. And now that he has finished at U of T, he has passed it on to an incoming PhD student.
In the past, the philosophy department of U of T may not have had many Black PhD students, but among its graduates included Charles W. Mills, who was the John Eans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, before joining the Graduate Centre at the City University of New York (CUNY) as a distinguished professor. He has been described as having had “a foundational role in establishing critical race theory and introducing the philosophy of race and racism into North American academia” by CBC News.
Thomas is now assistant professor at Simon Fraser University where he is working with poet, playwright and U of T professor George Elliott Clarke to co-edit a historical anthology of African-Canadian Philosophy. He is also writing a book tentatively entitled The Radicalization of W. E. B. Du Bois, examining how this seminal figure in Black thought began to move away from a Eurocentric worldview.
“Getting a clear understanding of how Du Bois came to take the position that he takes is also important for understanding how all Black thinkers in the 20th century came to take the positions they take,” says Thomas. “The historical task is the task of trying to understand ourselves.”