W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at Friedrich Wilhelm University (in Berlin, Germany) and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a history, sociology, and economics professor at Atlanta University. 

Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Earlier, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington that provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. 

Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift. He believed that African Americans needed the chance for advanced education to develop their leadership.

Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemic, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. 

Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa, and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of black American soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice and racism in the United States military. Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. 

Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized using the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens The Souls of Black Folk with the central thesis of much of his life's work: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."

His 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn is regarded in part as one of the first scientific treatises in American sociology. He published two other life stories containing sociology, politics, and history essays. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism and was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. 

He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death.