William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and raised by his mother. In spite of the poverty of his childhood, Du Bois excelled in school and achieved one of the most impressive educations of his generation. He received bachelor degrees from Fisk University and Harvard University, pursued graduate work at Harvard and Germany’s University of Berlin, and earned his PhD in history from Harvard in 1895. He received a faculty appointment at Wilberforce University in 1894, worked for the University of Pennsylvania on a study of blacks in Philadelphia in 1896, and joined the faculty of Atlanta University in 1897. In 1910 he left Atlanta and took a paid position as the director of publishing and research for the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He served in that position and also as the founding editor of the NAACP journal, the Crisis, subtitled A Record of the Darker Races, until 1934, when he resigned over a policy dispute.