Biography
W.E.B Du Bois was an African American poet, writer, civil rights activist, sociologist, historian and educator who grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University, DuBois, a prolific author, helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1909. He targeted racism in his works, writing novels, nonfiction, plays, and verse. His well-known poems include “A Litany of Atlanta,” “The Song of the Smoke,” “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” and from his later years, “Ghana Calls.” Du Bois supported younger writers such as Langston Hughes and inspired Dudley Randall’s well-known 1952 poem “Booker T. and W. E. B.” His influence still endures today: Du Bois’s ideas were translated into hip hop culture by rapper Timothy Welbeck in No City for Young Men, and in 2018’s Broad Sympathies in a Narrow World, literary scholar Sandra Staton-Taiwo reimagines his life in verse.