“For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.”

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist, born in 1868 and died in 1963. He became a leading public intellectual of the 20th century and was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. He taught at Atlanta University and wrote many books and articles over the course of his life. His work focused on race, education, history, and Black political life, and in his later years he lived in Ghana before dying in Accra.