W. E. B. Du Bois , a sociologist, historian, writer, and civil rights activist, is recognized as one of the foremost intellectual leaders of the twentieth century. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He attended Fisk University, Humboldt University, and was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University, in 1895. He was a foundational member of the international Pan-Africanist movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. From 1910 to 1934 he edited The Crisis , the NAACP's flagship journal.

In his later years, he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, traveled around the globe supporting anticolonial, antimilitarist, and communist struggles. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, on August 27, 1963. The Souls of Black Folk , a collection of essays published in 1903, is his best-known work.