W.E.B. Du Bois

His name came up during a class report yesterday on the "Boondocks" comic, where apparently (and inexplicably, to this white boy) it was grafted to an "Uncle Tom." But I don't know of anything servile or deferential about him. He was a student and friend of William James.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868–1963), essayist, novelist, journalist, critic, and perhaps the preeminent African American scholar-intellectual. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. He was born into a small community of blacks who had settled in the region since at least the Revolutionary War, in which an ancestor had fought. In 1885 he left Great Barrington for Nashville, Tennessee, to enter Fisk University. The racism of the South appalled him: “No one but a Negro going into the South without previous experience of color caste can have any conception of its barbarism.” Nevertheless he enjoyed life at Fisk, from which he was graduated in 1888. He then enrolled at Harvard, where he completed another bachelor's degree in 1890 before going on to graduate school there in history. At Harvard his professors included William James, George Santayana, and the historian A. B. Hart. He then spent two years at the University of Berlin studying history and sociology and coming close to earning a second doctorate. Du Bois enjoyed his stay in Europe, which greatly expanded his notions about the possibilities of culture and civilization. Then, in 1894, he dropped back, as he himself put it, into “nigger-hating America"... answers.com