William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was a giant figure in the history of American intellectual thought and in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for African Americans. He was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University in 1896. Soon thereafter, he quickly established himself as a pioneer thinker in his studies of the role of race in American society. He was unsparing in his indictment of the "separate but equal" philosophy that predominated in mainstream American thought at the turn of the 20th century. His famous phrase, "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line," captured a new generation of African American activists who wanted to press for more fundamental changes in American society. While DuBois was ahead of his time in many respects, he helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the modern civil rights movement decades later

DuBois was comfortable writing as a social scientist, a novelist, or an essayist for popular audiences. Among his numerous and groundbreaking publications during his lifetime were The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) and The Souls of Black Folks (1903). From 1910-1934 he was the Director of Publicity and Research for the NAACP and the editor of its widely circulating magazine, The Crisis. Throughout many of his writings and speeches DuBois was an outspoken critic of race science and the use of IQ tests to justify the intellectual inferiority of African Americans. His critiques emboldened other African American and white scholars to begin to refute the popular racist theories of human potential that predominated in America throughout much of the first half of the 20th century.