W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was a scholar, writer, and civil rights activist of international significance and renown. The first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, he was also a cofounder of the NAACP. A prolific writer and tireless advocate, he authored many works of scholarship, helped to shape the field of sociology, and wrote the early and prophetic history, Black Reconstruction in America. He also wrote novels, poems, and plays. Shawn Leigh Alexander is director of the Langston Hughes Center and associate professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas. He earned a PhD from the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he is the author of An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights Before the NAACP and a brief biography of Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist.
