W. E. B. Du Bois: Scholar, Activist, and Creator of the Black World

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W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), without question, was not only the most important Black scholar of the 20th century, but he was also one of the most important U. S. scholars and thinkers of his time. The first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Du Bois influenced Black intellectualism from the turn of the 20th century to the civil rights era, from the age of Social Darwinism to the Space Age. Du Bois evolved from liberal to socialist to communist and, with his second wife, Shirley Graham, a creative and intellectual in her own right, repatriated to Ghana, where he died. Acerbic, egotistic, brilliant, fluent in German, stunningly prolific, and an avowed “race man” Du Bois virtually invented new fields of Black writing and Black thought.