W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 -1963) Du Bois was a giant of American letters, culture and politics for most of the modern era of U.S. history. He was the first African American to be granted a PhD from Harvard University (1895) and one of the founders of the N.A.A.C.P. He was, by turns, a sociologist, an activist, an essayist, an editor, a novelist, a nationalist, and a prophet of post-colonialism. His early tour de force, The Souls of Black Folk was published hard on the heels of the Supreme Court case, "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896), that signaled the absolute demise of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the inauguration of America's "modern" period of race relations - - apartheid in the South and segregationism in the North. Du Bois joined the Communist Party in 1961, two years before his death in the newly created African nation of Ghana.

For Tuesday, read Chapter 1, "Of Our Spritual Strivings," from The Souls of Black Folk (in the Heath anthology).