1868-1963
Author, Editor, Activist

Student.

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 and educated until the age of sixteen in a small local school of some twenty-five students and two teachers. They were humble origins for a man who would not only become a major voice for the advancement of blacks in the decade of the 1900s but would become an international figure of the twentieth century, active until his death in 1963 in Accra, Ghana. Du Bois's father left home when Du Bois was just a year old. He was raised by his mother, Mary Du Bois, until his 1885 departure for Fisk University, an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee. While at Fisk he founded the Fisk Herald, the college newspaper, but more importantly observed for the first time life in the American South, where the great majority of...