W.E.B. DuBois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At that time Great Barrington had perhaps 25, but not more than 50, Black people out of a population of about 5,000. In this regard, racism wasn't as bluntly obvious as it was in the South or other parts of the United States at the time. At the age of 15, Dubois became a correspondent for the New York globe and in this position he sought to publicize the needs of his race by lecturing and writing editorials about the needs of black people.

After high school, Dubois wanted to attend Harvard, but due to the like of funds he attended Fisk University(back then college) in Nashville,Tenn. At Fisk, he would get a first hand account of racism at its finest. He saw discrimination in ways he never dreamed of, and developed a determination to speed up the emancipation of his people. Consequently, he became a writer, editor, and an impassioned orator. And in the process acquired a confrontational attitude toward the color bar.

Also while at Fisk, DuBois spent two summers teaching at a county school in order to learn more about the South and his people. There he learned first hand of poverty, poor land, ignorance, and prejudice. But most importantly, he learned that his people had a deep desire for knowledge. After graduation from Fisk, DuBois entered Harvard (via scholarships) classified as a junior.

At Harvard, he studied philosophy and history. He then gradually began to turn toward economics and social problems. He received his bachelor's degree in 1890 and immediately began working toward his master's and doctor's degree. He recieved his master's degree in 1891. Later on, he recieved funds to study abroad and he chose the University of Berlin in Germany. He stayed there for two years , but had to return back to Harvard b/c his benefactors back home refused to grant him more funds. s His doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America, remains the authoritative work on that subject, and is the first volume in Harvard's Historical Series.

At the age of twenty-six, with twenty years of schooling behind him, DuBois felt that he was ready to begin his life's work. He accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce in Ohio at the going rate of $800.00 per year. The year 1896 was the dawn of a new era for DuBois. With his doctorate degree and two undistinguished years at Wilberforce behind him, he readily accepted a special fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a research project in Philadelphia's seventh ward slums. This responsibility afforded him the opportunity to study Blacks as a social system.

Dubois' research project which would later become know as the , The Philadelphia Negro. He set out to prove that the race problem was one of ignorance. And he was determined to unearth as much information as he could, thereby providing the "cure" for color prejudice. His relentless studies led into historical investigation, statistical and anthropological measurement, and sociological interpretation. "It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence." This was the first time such a scientific approach to studying social phenomena was undertaken, and as a consequence DuBois is acknowledged as the father of Social Science.

After the completion of the study, DuBois accepted a position at Atlanta University to further his teachings in sociology. For thirteen years there he wrote and studied Negro morality, urbanization, Negroes in business, college-bred Negroes, the Negro church, and Negro crime. He also repudiated the widely held view of Africa as a vast cultural cipher by presenting a historical version of complex, cultural development throughout Africa. His studies left no stone unturned in his efforts to encourage and help social reform.. It is said that because of his outpouring of information "there was no study made of the race problem in America which did not depend in some degree upon the investigations made at Atlanta University."

Around this time, a personal and ideological struggle occured between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. Booker T. confered more to the idea that the Negro should forget about political gains and concentrate on industrial education which suited White America just fine whereas W.E.B. Dubois was more for political and educational endeavors could help the black man more. At the time, Booker T. Washington was the most powerful black man in America any nominations or anything relating to black people that were of importance was passed to Booker T. for his approval/disapproval. The culmination of the conflict came in 1903 when DuBois published his now famous book, The Souls of Black Folks. The chapter entitled "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" contains an analytical discourse on the general philosophy of Washington. DuBois edited the chapter himself to keep the most controversial and bitter remarks out of it. Nevertheless, it still was more than enough to incur Washington's continued contempt for him.

In 1909 all members of the Niagara Movement except one merged with some white liberals and thus the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was born. DuBois was not altogether pleased with the group but agreed to stay on as Director of Publications and Research. The main artery for distributing NAACP policy and news concerning Blacks was the Crisis magazine, which DuBois autocratically governed as its editor-in-chief for some twenty-five years.

In between this time and his death, W.E.B. Dubois continued to be a leading figure and champion of the black race. He wrote two more books, Black Reconstruction and Dusk of Dawn which were literary masterpieces.Always antagonizing and making guilty groups feel extremely uncomfortable, he wrote in 1949:

"We want to rule Russia and cannot rule Alabama."

"Drunk with power, we (the U.S.) are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery, which once ruined us, to a third world war, which will ruin the world."

On August 27,1963, on the eve of the March On Washington, the antagonist ,DuBois, died in Accra, Ghana.