American sociologist, historian, civil-rights organizer, and man of letters whose career ran from Reconstruction's memory through the Civil Rights Movement. The first African American to earn a Harvard Ph.D., Du Bois effectively founded empirical American sociology with The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a block-by-block study of Black urban life that predated the Chicago School's methods. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909 and edited The Crisis for a quarter century.
The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is his central book — fourteen essays mixing sociology, memoir, history, and lyric meditation, and the source of his most influential formulations: the color line ("the problem of the twentieth century"); double consciousness — "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others"; and the essay on "the sorrow songs" that read the spirituals as America's only indigenous serious art. The chapter quarreling with Booker T. Washington over accommodation set the terms of Black political argument for two generations.
Black Reconstruction in America (1935) is his great revisionist history — an eight-hundred-page demolition of the then-reigning Dunning School account of Reconstruction as a tragic mistake, recasting it instead as an interracial democratic experiment destroyed by terror and Northern retreat. The book's argument that Atlantic capitalism rested on slavery, and that the emancipated freedpeople attempted a "general strike" against that system, prefigures what later scholars would call racial capitalism. He turned toward Pan-Africanism, joined the Communist Party at ninety-three, and died in Accra, Ghana, the day before the March on Washington.