W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, and writer. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, he studied at Fisk University, the University of Berlin, and Harvard, where in 1895 he became the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. His works include The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the empirical study The Philadelphia Negro (1899). He taught at Atlanta University and helped found the NAACP in 1909, editing its magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934. He organized several Pan-African Congresses. In 1961 he moved to Ghana, becoming a citizen in 1963, and died in Accra that year.