W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was the first Black American to take a Harvard doctorate, a founder of the NAACP and editor of its magazine for a quarter century, a sociologist, historian, novelist and, at the end, a citizen of Ghana and a Communist. The Souls of Black Folk of 1903 gave the century the colour line and double consciousness, and answered Booker T. Washington’s accommodation; The Souls of White Folk turned the analysis on whiteness itself. He died in Accra the day before the March on Washington, at ninety-five, and the lists read him as the founder of the Black intellectual tradition.