A founder of the NCAAP, father of Pan-Africanism, and one of the most accomplished scholars and authors in American history, Willam Edward Burghardt Du Bois is a towering figure in American intellectual history. His extraordinary life of 98 years stretched from the Jim Crow era to Martin Luther King, Jr's March on Washington, yet it was a life filled with controversy—over his socialist beliefs, sympathies for Stalin, membership in the American Communist Party, and ultimately, self-imposed exile in Ghana.

This revealing biography captures the full life of W.E.B. Du Bois—historian, sociologist, author, editor—a leader in the fight to bring African Americans more fully into the American landscape as well as forceful proponent of them leaving America altogether and returning to Africa.
Drawing on extensive research, Gerald Horne, a leading authority on Du Bois and a versatile and prolific scholar in his own right, offers a fully rounded portrait of this accomplished and controversial figure, including the often overlooked final decades without which no portrait of Du Bois could be complete. The book also highlights Du Bois's relationships with and influence upon other leading civil rights activists both during, and subsequent to, his extraordinarily long life, including Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson.