William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to a family with deep roots in the town's small Black community. He became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, authored the landmark sociological and literary work 'The Souls of Black Folk,' and helped found the NAACP in 1909, becoming one of the most influential Black intellectuals and activists of the 20th century.
Du Bois grew up largely insulated from the harshest forms of racism common in the post-Reconstruction South, attending an integrated high school in Great Barrington before heading to Fisk University in Nashville, where he encountered Jim Crow segregation directly for the first time. He later earned degrees from Harvard, including a PhD in 1895.
His 1903 book 'The Souls of Black Folk' introduced the concept of "double consciousness"—the psychological toll of being both Black and American in a society that denied Black humanity—and directly challenged Booker T. Washington's more accommodationist approach to racial progress, arguing instead for full civil and political rights immediately.
Du Bois co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited its magazine, The Crisis, for a quarter century, turning it into a vital forum for Black literature and political thought during the Harlem Renaissance. His views grew more radical over his long life; he eventually embraced socialism and pan-Africanism, moved to Ghana in 1961 at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, renounced his American citizenship, and died there in 1963, the day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.