KemetLeads
W. E. B. Du Bois
The scholar who named the color line and helped found the modern civil-rights struggle.
The rise
The first African American to earn a Harvard PhD, Du Bois pioneered the sociological study of Black American life and rejected accommodation with segregation.
What they did
He co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited its influential magazine The Crisis, wrote The Souls of Black Folk, and organized Pan-African Congresses linking the freedom struggles of Africa and its diaspora.
The full picture
His long journey took him toward socialism and communism and, disillusioned with America, into citizenship in Ghana, where he died — a path that drew both admiration and Cold War suspicion.
Why it matters
Du Bois set the intellectual foundations of civil rights and Pan-Africanism, insisting that Black liberation was a global project.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”