W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African American to take a doctorate at Harvard, and he spent the following sixty-five years arguing that the problem of the twentieth century was the colour line. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, three years after the Civil War, studied at Fisk in Tennessee where he encountered the segregated South for the first time, and then at Harvard and Berlin. The Philadelphia Negro of 1899 was the first serious sociological study of a black community in the United States, done door to door. The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 set out double consciousness - the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others - and broke publicly with Booker T. Washington, whose bargain of accepting disenfranchisement in exchange for industrial training Du Bois regarded as surrender. He wanted the vote, civil rights, and higher education for the talented tenth, and he founded the Niagara Movement to say so. He was among the founders of the NAACP in 1909 and edited its magazine The Crisis for twenty-four years, which made him the most widely read black writer in America. He also wrote Black Reconstruction in 1935, which demolished the then-standard academic account of Reconstruction as a period of misrule by arguing that its real crime was the moment freed people governed competently. He organised Pan-African congresses from 1919 onwards, and his politics moved steadily left. In the McCarthy years he was indicted as an unregistered foreign agent, acquitted, and had his passport confiscated for eight years. He joined the Communist Party at ninety-three, moved to Ghana at Nkrumah's invitation, and died in Accra the night before the March on Washington. It was announced from the platform the next morning.

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