W. E. B. Du Bois in the year 1907

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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1869 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He was a bright student, and members of his church collected money toward his tuition for university. First he went to Fisk University in Tennessee, then to Harvard University, where he was the first black person to receive a Doctorate in the history of Harvard. Finally he crossed the atlantic and studied in University of Berlin.

Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an "assistant in sociology" in the summer of 1896. He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, going door-to-door interviewing hundreds of people, which formed the foundation for his landmark study “The Philadelphia Negro” published in 1899. It was the first case study of a black community in the United States and considered to be one of the earliest examples of sociology as a statistically based social science.

In 1900 he prepared an exhibition for the World Fair in Paris, to show the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation. The exhibit included a statuette of Frederick Douglass, four bound volumes of nearly 400 official patents by African Americans, an African-American bibliography by the Library of Congress containing 1,400 titles. Most memorably, the exhibit displayed photographs of African-American men and women, homes, churches, businesses and landscapes including photographs from Thomas E. Askew. Below are two out of nearly the nearly 500 photographs presented at the exhibition.

Four African American women seated on steps of building at Atlanta University, Georgia.

African American baseball players from Morris Brown College, Atlanta, Georgia.

Du Bois also displayed meticulously hand-drawn charts, maps and graphs showing the progress of African American culture at the time.

In 1909 Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - NAACP - and served as editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis.

Du Bois died on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95, one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington.

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