Sociologist, civil rights campaigner, historian, Harvard graduate, anti-war activist, academic, essayist, novelist, communist and, of course, poet, W.E.B. DuBois was passionately committed to fighting prejudice and racism in America throughout his long life.

The co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and of the Pan-African movement, Dubois spent much of his academic career at the University of Atlanta. He wrote over twenty books, edited fifteen more and published over a hundred articles and essays in a tireless effort to gain equal treatment for black people in a world dominated by whites and to refute the myths of racial inferiority.

In his nineties, he became a citizen of Ghana, which is where he died in 1963, and was given a state funeral. In America, fifty years after his death, he is remembered and revered as the outstanding African-American intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century.