W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, writer and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. His book The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was the first systematic case study of a Black American community and helped found empirical sociology in the United States, and his collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) introduced the concept of double consciousness and the claim that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. He taught at Atlanta University from 1897, became the first Director of Publicity and Research for the newly founded NAACP in 1910, and edited its magazine The Crisis until 1934; his later history Black Reconstruction in America (1935) challenged the prevailing historical narrative of the Reconstruction era. He became a citizen of Ghana in 1961 and died in Accra in 1963.