William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. After graduation from Fisk University, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, studied in Berlin, and became pioneering historian and sociologist and the founding editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His major works include The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, and The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade. His final years were marked by disillusionment with his native land, renunciation of his citizenship, and final self-exile in Ghana, where he died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five.