W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 — three years after the end of the Civil War. He grew up in a small New England town where Black residents were few and where his race was more a curiosity than an immediate source of discrimination. He was an exceptional student and, through the support of his community and a church scholarship, attended Fisk University in Nashville, then Harvard, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1890 and his doctorate in history in 1895 — the first Black person to do so. He studied in Berlin for two years on a fellowship and returned to teach at Wilberforce University and then Atlanta University.

His early academic work was careful, rigorous, and deliberately addressed to a white intellectual audience he hoped to persuade through evidence. The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, was the first sociological study of an American urban Black community and remains a landmark of American social science. But Du Bois was working in an America that was retreating from Reconstruction, that was allowing the systematic re-enslavement of Black Americans through convict leasing and sharecropping, and that was codifying white supremacy into law through Jim Crow legislation upheld by the Supreme Court. The evidence accumulated; the persuasion failed to follow.

He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited its journal The Crisis for twenty-four years. He spent his life in intellectual combat with Booker T. Washington over strategy — Washington advocating economic self-development within the system, Du Bois insisting on full political and civil rights immediately. He lived to see the Civil Rights Act of 1964, having emigrated to Ghana in 1961 at ninety-three and died there in 1963, the day before the March on Washington.