Born: February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, MA

Education: Fisk University, B.A., 1888; Harvard University, B. A. cum laude, second place Boylston orator, 1890, M.A., 1891, Ph.D., 1895

Died: August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana

Du Bois was one of the foremost black leaders ca. 1890–1950s. Despite his critics’ labels (elitist, nationalist, separatist, communist), he emerged as African Americans’ premier public intellectual. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” he declared in The Souls of Black Folk (1903, p. 32).

Du Bois became an uncompromising critic of Booker T. Washington and his program of industrial education. He said that Washington “apologizes for injustice ... and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds” (DuBois, 2007, p. 44). Liberal arts colleges were indispensable for the training of a “Talented Tenth,” he argued, whose leadership not only promised to create a “superior” culture “within the Veil” but also help educate and advance the masses of “the Race.” A free people must value dignity, learning, and progress.

Du Bois left the NAACP in 1934, as his call for blacks’ separate development undercut its interracialism. He returned to research, teaching, and civil and human rights struggles. The government prosecuted him unsuccessfully as a Communist Party agent in 1951 but revoked his passport until 1959. He departed the next year to live and die in Ghana, West Africa.