W. E. B. Du Bois 1868 – 1963

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, philosopher, historian, and civil rights leader. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he produced pioneering empirical studies of Black life in the United States and articulated, in The Souls of Black Folk, the experience of double consciousness that would shape Black thought and Black studies for a century. He was a co-founder of the NAACP and an organizer of the Pan-African Congresses, and his later work turned to a global analysis of race, colonialism, and capitalism. He died in Ghana in 1963.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He took his bachelor's degree at Fisk University in Nashville, returned north for a second bachelor's at Harvard, studied for two years at the University of Berlin under Schmoller, Wagner, and Treitschke, and in 1895 became the first African American to receive a Harvard PhD with a dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade.

His major works include The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the essays of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), Dusk of Dawn (1940), and the African trilogy of historical novels of his last years. He helped found the NAACP in 1909 and edited its magazine The Crisis until 1934, convened the early Pan-African Congresses, and broke publicly with Booker T. Washington over accommodation to Jim Crow.

Du Bois introduced the lasting concepts of double consciousness, the color line, and the talented tenth, and laid the empirical and theoretical foundations of African American sociology and Black radical political thought. Disillusioned with American politics, he joined the Communist Party in 1961, emigrated to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, and died in Accra in 1963 on the eve of the March on Washington.