Martin Jakob

Martin Wilhelm Jakob IV (May 9, 1877 – October 12, 1966) was a German American factory worker, historian, civil rights activist, labor activist, author, and a renowned socialist. Born in Kelheim, Bavaria, Martin grew up in the newly formed German Empire. His father was a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War. He grew up in immense poverty and his family faced discrimination for being Catholic. In 1888, in Ingolstadt, Jakob met Marta Anderson and married her a year later. He moved in with her family in Ingolstadt, not being able to afford land.

In 1896, after working as a farmer on the Anderson farm for six years, the farm went bankrupt. Jakob and his wife's family all moved to Berlin to work in the factories. Facing immense religious discrimination in Protestant Prussia, Jakob elected to move to the United States. Jakob's wife Marta and her brother, Gerhard, agreed to go with him. In 1899, following the end of the Spanish-American War, Jakob, Marta, and Gerhard boarded a ship in Amsterdam bound for New York.

In March of 1900, Jakob and his wife and her brother completed the immigration process at Ellis Island and moved to Detroit for work. The conditions were harsh, but the religious discrimination was less so than in Berlin. However, after a year, he was still not able to provide for his wife, even with the help of his brother-in-law. In 1902, the three moved to Evansville, Indiana, a city they knew as having a large German immigrant community since the 1840's, to work at a refrigeration factory. There, he encountered more intense anti-German and anti-Catholic discrimination, especially from an elder neighbor, named Eugene Baxter.

Jakob's wife, Marta, started getting mired in the local labor and progressive movements, pushing most notably for women's suffrage. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published three autobiographies, each of which contains essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.