Literary Birthdays for February 23rd

W.E. B. Dubois [W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt) DuBois] was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, MA; immigrated to Ghana, 1960; became a naturalized Ghanaian citizen in 1963; and died on August 26, 1963 in Accra, Ghana. DuBois grew up in Massachusetts and did not begin to comprehend the problems of racial prejuduce until he attended Fisk University in Tennessee. By 1903 he had learned enough to state in The Souls of Black Folk that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," and he spent the remainder of his long life trying to break down racial barriers.

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