William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, historian, author, and editor. Historian David Levering Lewis wrote, "In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism— scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity."

The first African-American graduate of Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D in History, Du Bois later became a professor of history and economics at Atlanta University. He became the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910, becoming founder and editor of the NAACP's journal The Crisis. Du Bois rose to national attention in his opposition of Booker T. Washington's ideas of social integration between whites and blacks, campaigning instead for increased political representation for blacks in order to guarantee civil rights, and the formation of a Black elite that would work for the progress of the African American race.

Writings
Du Bois wrote many books, including three major autobiographies. Among his most significant works are The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), Black Reconstruction (1935), and Black Folk, Then and Now (1939). His book The Negro (1915) influenced the work of several pioneer Africanist scholars, such as Drusilla Dunjee Houston[8] and William Leo Hansberry.

In the New York Times review of The Souls of Black Folk, the anonymous book reviewer wrote, "For it is the Jim Crow car, and the fact that he may not smoke a cigar and drink a cup of tea with the white man in the South, that most galls William E. Burghardt Du Bois of the Atlanta College for Negroes."

[I]t is the thought of a negro of Northern education who has lived long among his brethren of the South yet who can not fully feel the meaning of some things which these brethren know by instinct — and which the Southern-bred white knows by a similar instinct: certain things which are by both accepted as facts — not theories — fundamental attitudes of race to race which are the product of conditions extending over centuries, as are the somewhat parallel attitudes of the gentry to the peasantry in other countries.

While prominent white scholars denied African-American cultural, political and social relevance to American history and civic life, in his epic work Black Reconstruction, Du Bois documented how black people were central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and also showed how they made alliances with white politicians. He provided evidence to disprove the Dunning School theories of Reconstruction, showing the coalition governments established public education in the South, as well as many needed social service programs. He demonstrated the ways in which Black emancipation — the crux of Reconstruction — promoted a radical restructuring of United States society, as well as how and why the country failed to continue support for civil rights for blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction.This theme was taken up later and expanded by Eric Foner and Leon F. Litwack, the two leading late twentieth century scholars of the Reconstruction era.

In 1940, at Atlanta University, Du Bois founded Phylon magazine. In 1946, he wrote The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part That Africa Has Played in World History. In 1945, he helped organize the historic Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester, Great Britain. In total, Du Bois wrote 22 books, including five novels. He helped establish four academic journals.

Criminology
Du Bois began writing about the sociology of crime in 1897, shortly after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard (Zuckerman, 2004, p. 2). His first work involving crime, A Program of Social Reform, was shortly followed by a second, The Study of the Negro Problems (Du Bois, 1897; Du Bois, 1898). The first work that involved in-depth criminological study and theorizing was The Philadelphia Negro, in which a large section of the sociological study was devoted to analysis of the black criminal population in Philadelphia (Du Bois, 1899).

Du Bois (1899) set forth three significant parts to his criminology theory. The first was that Negro crime was caused by the strain of the "social revolution" experienced by black Americans as they began to adapt to their new-found freedom and position in the nation. This theory was similar to Durkheim's (1893) Anomie theory, but it applied specifically to the newly freed Negro. Du Bois (1900a, p. 3) credited Emancipation with causing the boom in crime in the black population. He explained, "[T]he appearance of crime among the southern Negroes is a symptom of wrong social conditions

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