Name-dropping:
W. E. B. Du Bois (pronunciation: due-BOYZ—don’t feel bad if you couldn’t pronounce his name; it was so common a problem that Du Bois sent a letter to a newspaper explaining how to pronounce it correctly) (1868–1963):
Cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and author of the classic The Souls of Black Folk.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Whether you’re chatting with an exchange student from Ghana about her homeland, a board member from the NAACP about the organization’s history, or a ditzy sociology major you’re about to make out with on account of your breadth of knowledge and wisdom, Du Bois can carry you through. He’s versatile like that.

The Basics
In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to get a PhD from Harvard. His degree was in history, but his passion was sociology, and he was soon famous in academic circles for his brilliant sociological studies, particularly the book The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

Du Bois might have stayed a scholar—he had a plum gig teaching at Atlanta University and was widely respected—but his life in the South led him to believe that writing sociological treatises for a narrow audience wasn’t going to end Jim Crow. In 1903, he published The Souls of Black Folk. Perhaps no book since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin so ignited passion and conflict about the place of African Americans in society. Unlike his contemporary Booker T. Washington, Du Bois believed that voting and other rights were more important to African Americans than working within the segregation system. The Souls of Black Folk is the rare book that’s considered a classic by English professors, sociologists, and political scientists alike.

Du Bois was also the first writer to apprehend the “double-consciousness” of African Americans—the idea that being black and American led to “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” The book established him as a rival to Booker T. Washington for the title of Most Important Black Leader in America.

In 1909, Du Bois cofounded the NAACP, and he edited its flagship magazine, The Crisis, for 25 years. But he eventually fell out with NAACP leadership. In his later years, Du Bois came to embrace the radical egalitarianism of Communism. He visited Communist China, called Stalin “a great man,” and generally irked the FBI, which eventually indicted him on a trumped-up charge that he’d become a “foreign agent.” The case never came to trial, and Du Bois eventually solved his legal troubles and his personal “double-consciousness” problem at the age of 92—by ceasing to be an American. Invited to live in Ghana by its president, Du Bois—who’d always favored pan-African unity—left the U.S. and renounced his citizenship. Although he died a Ghanaian, no American in the first half of the 20th century did more to influence the civil rights movement of the second half.

Communism: It Wasn’t Just for Idiots and Meanies
The attraction of Communism, which offered revolutionary change and equality for the working class, was profound indeed. Many African American intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century expressed Communist sympathies, including Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes. And though you don’t read about it in schoolbooks, another American icon who stood for the rights of the disenfranchised, Helen Keller, was a member of the Socialist Party in the U.S. Not technically Communist, but close.

A NOVEL APPROACH
Du Bois is remembered almost exclusively for his nonfiction writing, but he was a novelist as well—albeit not a very good one. If you think Moby Dick features a lot of information about whales and whaling, check out how Du Bois nitpicks cotton to death in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

Conversation Starters
◆ W. E. B. Du Bois was a frat boy. But what a frat! During his days at Fisk University, Du Bois was one of the most prominent early members of the historically black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. Among his brothers: Jesse Owens, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

◆ Like a lot of great men, Du Bois had a weakness when it came to infidelity. He lived with his wife, Nina, for 53 years, but Du Bois himself acknowledged, “It was not an absolutely ideal union.” For one thing, it was nonideal in the sense that Du Bois had periodic affairs, including some that scholars refer to as “parallel marriages.”

◆ Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People clearly stated its mission right in its title, Du Bois was—get this—the only African American on the NAACP’s first board of directors.

◆ Du Bois died in Ghana just one day before the epochal March on Washington began. Martin Luther King Jr. eulogized Du Bois the following morning at the start of the march, a sort of preparation for his brilliant “I Have a Dream” speech.