W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois became one of the most influential Black intellectuals in American history. He studied at Fisk University, Harvard, and in Germany, and went on to become the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. His early scholarship and public writing established him as a major thinker on race, education, and citizenship.

He is especially known for The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a landmark work that blended history, argument, and autobiography, and for later books including Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois also helped found the NAACP and served for years as editor of The Crisis, where he used journalism to challenge racism, lynching, and disenfranchisement.

Over a long life that stretched into the civil rights era, his politics continued to evolve, but his central concern remained the struggle for equality and human dignity. In 1961 he moved to Ghana, where he died in 1963, leaving behind a body of work that influenced historians, activists, and writers around the world.