W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He studied at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and then at Harvard University and the University of Berlin. In 1895 he became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He taught at Wilberforce University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he carried out a pioneering study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), and then for many years at Atlanta University. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he described the 'double consciousness' of Black Americans and challenged Booker T. Washington's view that Black people should accept segregation for the time being and concentrate on vocational training. In 1905 he helped start the Niagara Movement, which demanded full civil rights, and in 1909 he was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He edited its magazine, The Crisis. He also wrote histories, including Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and novels, and he supported the Pan-African movement. Late in life he moved to Ghana, where he died in 1963, the day before the March on Washington.

W. E. B. Du Bois is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Attended a Congregational church as a child; as an adult he called himself agnostic and a freethinker. Source: Wikipedia