W. E. B. Du Bois came of age during the nadir of race relations in the United States. African Americans had been given the opportunity to achieve political, economic, and social equality with the passing of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments after the Civil War. White southerners fought back against the trend, and eventually any Black achievements during Reconstruction were undone with the ending of military occupation of the southern states in 1877. Segregation became the standard across the country. Southern states denied Blacks the right to vote or participate in the political process. The nation was swept by an epidemic of racial violence, especially in the form of lynching. Du Bois himself, despite his superior education— he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard—could not obtain a faculty position at a “white” college or university. This was the reality that Du Bois confronted as he began his career as a professor and intellectual at Wilberforce University in Ohio.