W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 and in 1895 became the first Black American to earn a Harvard PhD. His 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk introduced the idea of double consciousness. He helped launch the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the NAACP soon after, editing its magazine The Crisis from 1910 until he resigned in 1934. He organized a series of Pan-African congresses from 1919. In 1951 he was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent over his peace work; the case was dismissed. He moved to Ghana in 1961 and died in Accra in 1963.

Du Bois is honored as a founder of modern civil rights organizing, a pioneer of empirical sociology and a central figure in Pan-Africanism. Admirers credit The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction with reshaping how Americans understand race, slavery and democracy. Critics note that his Talented Tenth idea was elitist, that his 1918 Close Ranks editorial urged Black Americans to set aside grievances during World War I, and that he wrote favorably of Imperial Japan in the 1930s. His praise of Stalin in 1953 and his approving accounts of the Soviet Union and China after a 1958 to 1959 visit drew lasting criticism. The U.S. government withheld his passport for eight years in the 1950s.