W.E.B. DuBois was born in Massachusetts in 1868. An excellent student, he enrolled on scholarship at Fisk University in Nashville in 1885. He received a B.A. from Fisk in 1888, and then received a B.A. (1890) and an M.A. (1891) from Harvard. He became the first African-American to receive a Ph.D from Harvard in 1895. Taking a teaching position at Atlanta University in 1897, DuBois explored and confronted the South in person and in the studies of he directed of Southern society. Although he stayed in Atlanta until 1910, DuBois and his wife never became comfortable there. The selection here from his greatest work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), tells of the death of his young son in Atlanta; in that piece, DuBois expresses the rage, sadness, and frustration that he submerged in his less personal writing. DuBois went on to become the leading black intellectual of the twentieth-century United States. In 1905, DuBois founded the Niagara Movement, which became the NAACP, in opposition to the conservative approach to issues concerning African-Americans taken by Booker T. Washington, as well as to the perceived machine-style tactics used by Washington to stifle opposition. DuBois edited The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP, from 1910-1934. He organized the first four Pan-African Congresses (1919-1927), and presided over the fifth. A prolific writer capable of expressing himself in many disciplines, DuBois, among other works, wrote a sociological study of blacks in Philadelphia (1899), historical books on abolitionist John Brown (1909) and on Reconstruction (1935), and fictional novels such as Quest of the Silver Fleece, (1911). In 1961 DuBois joined the United States Communist Party and in 1963 he expatriated to Ghana, where he died that same year.
from: http://www.virginia.edu/history/courses/fall.97/hius323/dubois.html