William Edward Burghardt Du Bois entered the world on February 23, 1868. This was less than three years after slavery was outlawed. However, his family had been out of slavery for several generations. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small village with only a handful of black families. His teachers quickly made him a favorite, and most of his playmates were white. At the age of fifteen he became a local correspondent for the New York Globe. Du Bois moved to Nashville, Tennessee where he received a scholarship and attended Fisk University. This was the first time that he discovered that being black was a big part of his identity. He spent his summers in Tennessee teaching in rural schools. It was there that he met "the real seat of slavery." He had never seen such poverty in his entire life. "I touched intimately the lives of the commonest of mankind--people who ranged from barefooted dwellers on dirt floors, with patched rags for clothes, to rough hard-working farmers, with plain clean plenty." (Ha

It is easy to see that all throughout Du Bois' life he was dealing with the struggles of racial discrimination. Just before he was born the Civil War was taking place. At the start of the American Civil War most white Americans in the North were not willing to fight to end Southern slavery. They fought instead to preserve the Union and prevent slavery from spreading into the Western territories. Many opposed expanding slave territory because they believed that slaves were unfair competition to free labor. African Americans hoped the Civil War would bring about the abolition of slavery. In anticipation, they formed military units in many northern cities in the 1850s. War finally came in the spring of 1861, and eleven Southern states seceded from the Union and formed their own nation, the Confederate States of America. The black military units offered their service to the United States, but the federal government initially refused to accept African American troops. Lincoln feared that doing so would encourage the slaveholding Border States to join the Confederacy. Eventually, black troops were allowed to fight in the army. In the beginning of the war, some northern commanders returned slaves to their masters, and others forced escapees to work for the U.S. Army. Then, Lincoln turned U.S. war aims toward slavery's destruction by issuing his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves held by those Southerners still in rebellion. During the war, African American soldiers who served in the Union Army were paid less than white soldiers and suffered racist treatment. Confederates said that they would not treat the captured black soldiers and their white officers as legitimate prisoners of war. By the end of the war, the Union defeated the Confederacy, and slavery came to an end. Even before the war ended though, the government had begun discussing how to deal with the aftermath of the war. In March 1865 the U.S. War Department established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen's Bureau. But when the war ended, the national government had not yet determined how best to reunite the country. Views on how to treat the defeated Confederacy varied. Some people felt that the South could be reconciled with the Union by simply acknowledging the abolition of slavery, while others were convinced that the region's social, economic, and political systems would have to be thoroughly reconstructed. In March 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act which was strengthened by three supplemental acts later the same year and in 1868. In 1870 the states ratified the 15th Amendment. This amendment prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race. Finally, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade racial discrimination in "inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of amusement." The erosion of the South had a big part to do with this time period. It consisted of emigration from the South, the Jim Crow laws, sharecropping  reconstruction failure, and increased disfranchisement. There were also responses by the African Americans such as rise of populism, and racial accommodation which was brought on by Booker T. Washington. The great migration was another event that took place. This was in the early twentieth century where growing unemployment and increasing racial violence caused blacks to move out of the South. The Harlem Renaissance also took place and it was followed by the Great Depression. During the 1930s, the NAACP led a vigorous legal battle against discrimination, concentrating on ways to end legal segregation, especially in education. In the late 30's and early 40's WWII was going on. In the early 50's the struggle for equal rights was going on, and in 1955 Rosa Park's was arrested for her stand. Toward the end of Du Bois' life, was the start of rights for blacks. With lot's of non-violent protests and the black power party'

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