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 undergraduate degree at Fisk in 1888, a second undergraduate at Harvard in 1890, a master's there in 1891, and a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1895 — the first African American to earn a Harvard PhD.

His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870, opened the Harvard Historical Studies series. His subsequent works founded the modern social-scientific study of Black America: The Philadelphia Negro (1899) — the first urban ethnography of a Black community by any scholar in any country — and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the essay collection that gave American letters its most consequential phrase: "the problem of the color line."

In 1909 he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served as editor of its journal The Crisis for twenty-four years. He convened the First Pan-African Congress at Paris in 1919 — alongside the Versailles peace conference — and was the principal organizer of each subsequent Pan-African Congress through 1945. The 1945 Manchester Congress, his last as principal organizer, was attended by Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and the political generation that would govern Africa within a decade and a half.

He became a citizen of Ghana in 1961 at Nkrumah's personal invitation. He was working on the Encyclopaedia Africana at his death in Accra on the twenty-seventh of August 1963 — the day before Martin Luther King's March on Washington in the United States. He was ninety-five.

He is honored here as the founder of modern Black sociology and the convening intelligence of Pan-Africanism.