Du Bois championed the beauty of an African Culture and History that had been lost, alongside the pride of a black nation.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born 23rd February, 1868 to Mary Silvina Burghardt, a house maid who never left her hometown of Great Barrington and Alfred Du Bois a rebellious traveller, whose grandfather and father both championed the rights of black people. Du Bois' father left when he was very young and he was raised primarily by his mother.

Du Bois was brought up in a town where there were fifty black men and women out of a population of five thousand. In his accounts of his childhood he claims to not have experienced any overt racism. His mother installed a good work ethic by drumming into him that there was no such thing as discrimination and that all judgements were based upon hard work and ability.

Dubois was clever and had the privilege of an education. His uncle had been an unpaid life long servant for the Kellog family, his lack of wages had in turn prevented their poverty. When one of the Kellog daughters married in to a wealthy family the debt was repaid in the form of funding part of Du Bois' education.

Du Bois went on to achieve a Bachelor of Arts from Fisk College, a Masters from Harvard and a PhD, of which the doctorate written, The Suppression of the Slave Trade in America is still a classic. He also had the opportunity to study in Germany, funded by ex president Ruther B. Hayes.

In his early years he lectured and conducted research into 'blacks as a social system,' he excelled in this field and became known as the 'father of social science.'

Dubois went on to write a succession of essays and books including the Souls of Black Folk and The World and Africa. In the former novel he sought to teach the 'White' man that 'Black' people had a soul. He explored the idea that identity was of paramount importance when seeking to build the confidence and assertion of the 'black race.'

Du Bois was mindful of the fact that one mans identity was made up of fifty percent of how he viewed himself and fifty percent of how he saw himself through another mans eyes. He felt as a consequence that Black men constantly lived behind a 'veil' because they went unnoticed by the white men. The concept of the 'veil,' established by Du Bois, meant that the black men were no longer 'shadows' because they had been freed from slavery, but their existence was still denied which in turn left them covered.

Although Du Bois openly declared himself as a 'Negro', in the book he claims that he has experienced both sides, of the 'veil.' Du Bois explores the idea of Double Consciousness, which he explains as the balancing of two identities. In his case being both American and African. He deals with the notion of finding a balance between the two in order to establish a whole
identity.

In The World and Africa he had a different approach he realised that he no longer had to seek the approval of the white man by justifying the black mans existence. Du Bois championed the beauty of an African Culture and History that had been lost alongside the pride of a black nation. The provision of knowledge sought to restore that pride for those in the Diaspora and Africa.

Du Bois was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP - the largest and oldest civil rights organization in America).

Du Bois continued to write in self imposed exile in Ghana whilst promoting the Pan Africanist cause. By the time he died, in 1963, he had written 17 books, edited four journals and played a key role in reshaping black-white relations in America.