William Edward Burghardt Du Bois grew up in rural Tennessee, where the terrible social and economic conditions in which blacks lived inspired him to devote himself to improving the status of blacks. He believed that higher education was the best means to overcome racial oppression. W. E. B. Du Bois received his bachelor's degree from Fisk University and a second bachelor's in philosophy and a Ph.D in history and social sciences from Harvard University. Du Bois wrote his doctoral dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade. He also received a fellowship to study at the University of Berlin, where he wrote another thesis on agricultural economics in the American South. In 1895 he became the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Ambitions.

On the night before his twenty-fifth birthday Du Bois described himself in his journal as "either a genius or...