Canceled project

In 1932, Du Bois was selected by several philanthropies – including the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the General Education Board – to be the managing editor for a proposed Encyclopedia of the Negro, a work Du Bois had been contemplating for 30 years. After several years of planning and organizing, the philanthropies canceled the project in 1938, because some board members believed that Du Bois was too biased to produce an objective encyclopedia.