William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is remembered as one of twentieth-century America's foremost black leaders, intellectuals, and spokesmen. Multi-talented, in a long life he wrote as a sociologist, historian, poet, short story writer, novelist, autobiographer, and editor—and in all of these roles he was a crusading champion of racial justice. Though his ideological outlook changed many times during his life, through phases of Darwinism, elitism, socialism, Pan-Africanism, voluntary self-segregation, and ultimately official communism, Du Bois consistently reiterated the view that the major problem of the twentieth century was "the problem of the color-line." As historian Eric Sundquist has noted, Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 1868, the same year as the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted, and spent his life attempting to make the principles, promises, and protections of this landmark political article a...