W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) Du Bois

Du Bois, W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) (1868–1963), African American educator and author. He was a proponent of equality for blacks, and later for Pan-Africanism, a movement to coordinate the struggle for equal rights of all people of African descent around the world. Professor of economics and history at Atlanta University (1897–1910), and head of its sociology department (1934–44), his many works include The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Black Reconstruction (1935). He also edited The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP until 1932. Increasingly alienated from the United States, he joined the Communist Party in 1961 and moved to Ghana, where he died in self-imposed exile.

See also: African Americans.