Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (1868–1963)

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts three years after the abolition of slavery in the USA. He died on August 27, 1963 in Accra, Ghana, one day before the historic March on Washington and less than one year before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The chronological trajectory of his life corresponded with the long civil rights era in US history. His political and intellectual work is a testament to the intimate relationship between his personal biography and the social setting within which his life took place. Du Bois self-consciously wrote as an African American about a society whose fundamental political organization rested on the systematic exclusion of a people identified as racially different.