W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on the twenty-third of February 1868. He took his first undergraduate degree at Fisk University in 1888, a second bachelor's at Harvard in 1890, and in 1895 became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. His years of study in Berlin sharpened a lifelong conviction that the condition of Black people could be understood through disciplined, empirical inquiry.

That conviction bore its first great fruit in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), among the earliest scientific case studies of a Black community in America. In 1903 The Souls of Black Folk gave the world the language of "double consciousness" and his enduring judgment that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. His scholarship refused the counsel of accommodation, and set him against the compromises of his age.

Turning from study to struggle, he helped found the Niagara Movement in 1905 and, in 1909–1910, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As founding editor of its magazine, The Crisis, he shaped Black political thought for a quarter century. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935) he overturned the received history of that era, restoring the agency of the freedpeople.

He was, above all, the convening intelligence of Pan-Africanism, organizing congresses that summoned a continent toward independence. In his final years he settled in Ghana and there took citizenship, dying in Accra on the twenty-seventh of August 1963. May the color line he named a century ago be honored as the measure of his lifelong labor to erase it.