What is the importance of Wilberforce University in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race?

Wilberforce University, just south of Dayton Ohio, started out as a beautiful, woodsy resort, where white slave owners would go to vacation with their black slave lovers and their mulatto children. Ohio abolitionists worked hard to get the land sold off to others and to put the resort out of business. Eventually, Methodist Bishop William Wilberforce turned the area into a university. Tricky legislation was enacted that resulted in taxpayers funding the religious college. When Du Bois accepted a job on campus, he was disgusted by the school's low educational standards and hated that the classrooms were often half empty whenever a revival meeting came to town.