Short answers, pulled from the story.
W. E. B. Du Bois was born on the 23rd of February 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois. He grew up in a relatively integrated community and graduated from Great Barrington High School with honors in 1884.
Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, established in 1910. He suggested the word "colored" be used in the organization's name to include dark-skinned people worldwide. He served as Director of Publicity and Research and edited the NAACP's monthly journal, The Crisis, whose circulation reached 100,000 by 1920.
The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is a collection of 14 essays that introduced the concept of double consciousness, the experience of being simultaneously American and Black. Its introduction proclaimed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." James Weldon Johnson said its effect on African Americans was comparable to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Published in 1935, Black Reconstruction in America argued that Black people were central figures in the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and that Reconstruction governments established public education and social welfare programs across the South. Du Bois rejected the Dunning School's mainstream view that Reconstruction failed because of Black incompetence, attributing the failure instead to the federal government's inadequate management of the Freedmen's Bureau. The book was largely ignored by white historians until the 1960s, after which it became regarded as "the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography".
Du Bois opposed the Atlanta Compromise because it asked Southern Black people to accept discrimination, segregation, and disenfranchisement in exchange for limited economic opportunity and basic education. Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and political representation rather than accommodation. The lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, which deeply affected Du Bois personally, deepened his resolve that activism rather than acquiescence was the only viable response to racial violence.
Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, on the 27th of August 1963, at the age of 95. He had moved to Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, the country's first president, whom he had met at the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. Before his death, Du Bois renounced his American citizenship, a decision shaped in part by decades of FBI surveillance, a federal indictment in the early 1950s, and his conclusion that capitalism was a primary cause of racism.