Throughout our nation’s history there have been individuals who changed or helped change the way we as a society think, and behave. Their contributions in social science were instrumental in shaping the society we live in today. W.E.B. Du Bois is one of those important trail blazers because not only was he the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, but he was also a co-founder of the NAACP. His work and plight in the name of racial equality for African Americans laid the foundation for many other activists that would come after.
W.E.B. Du Bois was old fashioned and stately in his ways and with his words -- an approach that made him as many enemies as friends. By the time he wrote a letter to several middle-class African American professionals asking them to meet him in Niagara Falls in 1905 to start a new organization to attack racism, W.E.B. Du Bois had already built himself a reputation as an “agitator-prophet.” For further proof, you do not have to look very far. His own organization, the NAACP, relieved him of his duties twice. In the biography, “W.E.B. Du Bois Founder of The NAACP”, written by Kimberly Hayes Taylor, it is written as…show more content… In the biography, “PART TWO: Historical Biographies: W.E.B. Du Bois”, it says that he strongly supported the women’s suffrage movement and said that no one with even one drop of African blood should oppose the suffragists working to give white women the right to vote. He conceded, however, that there was “not the slightest reason for supposing that white American women … are going to be any more intellectual, liberal, or humane toward the black, the poor, and unfortunate than white men are.” Du Bois felt that any form of white support, male or female, was beneficial to the fight for racial equality but was not so naive to believe that they would be any better than their male