W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois was the foremost Black intellectual of the twentieth century's first half, a sociologist, historian, and activist whose ideas shaped how America and the world understood race. Born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he became in 1895 the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, with a dissertation on the slave trade. His landmark 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk introduced the concept of "double consciousness" — the sense of twoness felt by Black Americans navigating a white-dominated society — and remains essential reading in American intellectual life. Du Bois was a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909 and edited its magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, using it as a platform to document racial violence, celebrate Black achievement, and demand full citizenship rights. Where Booker T. Washington counseled accommodation, Du Bois insisted on nothing less than complete equality. His prolific scholarship also produced the Pittsburgh Survey and the monumental history Black Reconstruction in America (1935). In his final years he moved to Ghana, becoming a citizen there shortly before his death on August 27, 1963 — the eve of the March on Washington.