The sociologist, historian, and activist who coined the concept of double consciousness, wrote The Souls of Black Folk, helped found the NAACP, produced the most empirically rigorous account of Black life in America with The Philadelphia Negro, rewrote the history of Reconstruction in Black Reconstruction in America, and whose long career moved from civil-rights organizing to Pan-Africanism and ultimately to exile in Ghana at age ninety-three.
W.E.B. Du Bois was born three years after the end of the Civil War, and he died the day before the March on Washington in 1963. His life spanned nearly the entire history of the question he spent it answering: what does freedom actually mean for Black Americans when the law changes but the world does not? He was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He counted Black households in Philadelphia block by block. He wrote a book in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk, that gave the century a vocabulary — double consciousness, the color line, the Veil — it has never managed to put down. Then, when most thinkers peak and settle, he turned historian, rewrote Reconstruction, cofounded the NAACP, and kept moving. He died at ninety-five, a citizen of Ghana, a member of the Communist Party, still writing.