W. E. B. Du Bois

The first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, a founder of the NAACP, and the author of the most important American book of its century. The Souls of Black Folk named double consciousness, the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that despises you, and declared that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. He was scholar, organizer, and prophet across a life that spanned from Reconstruction to the eve of the civil rights acts.