William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. Unlike most black Americans, his family had not just emerged from slavery. His great-grandfather had fought in the American Revolution, and the Burghardt's had been an accepted part of the community for generations. Du Bois is a descendant of African American, French, and Dutch ancestors. After he was born his father left. He was raised by his mother, who taught him the sense of a special destiny. She encouraged his studies and his devotion to the Victorian virtues and characteristic of rural New England in the 19th century. Du Bois in turn gravely accepted a sense of duty toward his mother that transcended all other loyalties.

Du Bois excelled at school and outshined his white contemporaries. While in high school he worked as a correspondent for New York newspapers and became something of a prodigy in the eyes of the communit

By that time, Du Bois had begun his research into the historical and sociological conditions of black Americans that would make him the most influential black intellectual of his time. His doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was published in 1896 as the initial volume in the Harvard Historical Studies Series. After teaching for several years at Wilberforce University in Ohio, Du Bois conducted an exhaustive study of the social and economic conditions of urban blacks in Philadelphia in 1896 and 1897. The results were published in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first sociological text on a black community published in the United States. After he became a professor of economics and history at Atlanta University in 1897, he initiated a series of studies as head of the school's "Negro Problem" program. These works had a profound impact on the study of the history and sociology of blacks living in the United States.

After World War II (1939-1945), Du Bois became increasingly involved in promoting world peace and nuclear disarmament. In 1950 he became chairman of the Peace Information Center in New York City, a group whose stated objective was to gather signatures in the United States for a global petition to ban the use of nuclear weapons. In July of that year, after the organization had gathered more than one million U.S. signatures, the Peace Center was labeled a Communist-front organization by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Du Bois resigned from the NAACP staff in 1934 because he was unwilling to advocate racial integration in all aspects of life, a position adopted by the NAACP. Du Bois had argued that blacks should join together, apart from whites, to start businesses and industries that would allow blacks to advance themselves economically. He returned to Atlanta University, where he taught, wrote books, and founded a new journal, called Phylon. During these years he published two important books, Black Reconstruction (1935), and a Marxist interpretation of the post-Civil War era in the South; and Dusk of Dawn (1940), an autobiography. Following extended conflicts with university officials, he was forced to retire from Atlanta University in 1944.

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