W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and writer — the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited its journal The Crisis for twenty-four years. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) introduced the concept of "double-consciousness" and remains a foundational text of African-American intellectual life. In his final years he joined the Communist Party and moved to Ghana, where he died at ninety-five, the day before the March on Washington.