The US Department of Education suffered an embarrassment on Sunday, when a tweet published to its official account misspelled the surname of the African American author and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois.

“Education must not simply teach work,” the tweet said, “it must teach life. W.E.B. DeBois.”

The error, coming during Black History Month, did not go unnoticed. Chelsea Clinton, daughter of beaten presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, asked: “Is it funny sad or sad funny that our Dept of Education misspelled the name of the great W. E. B. Du Bois?”

The department later issued an apology: “Post updated,” read a tweet followed by a corrected version of the “DeBois” tweet. “Our deepest apologizes [sic] for the earlier typo.”

The apology was subsequently corrected, and the first apology tweet deleted. The first tweet about Du Bois was not immediately deleted.

The Department of Education’s first tweet about WEB Du Bois. Photograph: Twitter

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who died in 1963, was the author of influential works including The Souls of Black Folk, a seminal 1903 consideration of the lives of black Americans after the civil war and the end of slavery.

The misspelled name was the latest Black History Month embarrassments for the Trump administration. At a White House “listening session” with African American community leaders on 1 February, Donald Trump appeared not to be aware that Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century champion of emancipation, was dead.

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,” he said.

Trump also used his remarks at the event to take a swipe at the media over stories, proved incorrect, that he had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr from the Oval Office.

Vice-President Mike Pence, meanwhile, met with criticism when he issued a tweet in which he paid tribute to a white historical figure.

The Republican tweet. Photograph: Screengrab

“As #BlackHistoryMonth begins,” he wrote, “we remember when Pres[ident] Lincoln submitted the 13th Amendment, ending slavery, to the states #NationalFreedomDay.”

Lincoln was being tweeted about by Republicans again on Sunday, the 208th anniversary of his birth. The Twitter account of the Republican party posted a quote that it falsely attributed to the 16th president.

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count,” wrote @GOP. “It’s the life in your years.”

There is no evidence that Lincoln said this. The quote has been traced only as far back as 1952 speeches by former Illinois governor and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and to advertisements from the 1940s, rather than to Lincoln’s lifetime in the mid-19th century.

The Department of Education, meanwhile, is under political pressure over the appointment as education secretary of Betsy DeVos, a major Republican donor whose Senate confirmation had to be sealed by the tie-breaking vote of Pence, the first time that has happened for a cabinet post.



Two Republican senators voted against DeVos after a widely derided confirmation hearing last month, producing the 50-50 tie.

On Friday, protesters briefly prevented DeVos, a champion of controversial charter schools, from entering a public school in Washington DC.

In a statement, DeVos said: “I respect peaceful protest and I will not be deterred in executing the vital mission of the Department of Education. No school door in America will be blocked from those seeking to help our nation’s school children.”

On Sunday the Minnesota senator Al Franken told CNN’s State of the Union DeVos should have been allowed to walk into the DC building, joking that “it would have been her first time ever in a public school”.

“She should be able to do her job,” he said. “I thought she was the least qualified nominee I’ve ever seen. The hearing was embarrassing. But she’s the secretary now and I’m eager to work with her.”