W.E.B. DuBois and Professor Ulrich B. Phillips once met? That is astonishing to me. You will recall Ulrich Phillips wrote several volumes on slavery, which were favorable to slave-owning individuals, to say the least.
Here is The Crisis, September 1933: Swarthmore Conference An Institute on Race Relations held at Swarthmore College under the auspices of the Committee of Race Relations of the Society of Friends, brought together during July, leaders and the foremost thinkers of both races in America. The conference which met to consider the social factors involved in the Negro-white relations in the United States, was attended by Dr. Will W. Alexander of Atlanta, president of Dillard University; Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, editor of the Crisis; Professor Ulrich B. Phillips of Yale University; Professor Melville Herskovits of Northwestern University; Donald Young of the Social Science Research Council, James Weldon Johnson, Broadus Mitchel, and Mabel Carney.
Also Melville Herskovits, of Northwestern, who founded the first U.S. program of African Studies in 1948. He later founded and served as first president of the African Studies Association.
The Herskovits Library is still the largest Africana collection in the world.
He died in 1963, three years before I arrived as an undergrad.
You are right to mention this, among many other accomplishments and undertakings on behalf of Africans and African Americans. Sad to note also: the African Studies Association, In its considered wisdom, removed his name from the Melville J. Herskovits prize for the best book of each year In African Studies.
The librarian who created that Africana collection at Northwestern U. was Dr. Hans Panofsky.