Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt) is born in Great Barrington.

W.E.B. Du Bois arrives in Boston in 1888 to attend Harvard College after already graduating from Fisk University in Atlanta. He becomes the first African-American student to present a commencement address at Harvard College in 1890 and the first to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895, but later remarks, “I was in Harvard, but not wholly of it.” Du Bois goes on to become a professor of history and one of the leaders of the early civil rights movement. He dies in Ghana on August 27, 1963.