American Masters

(gentle music) - I very early got the idea.

- That I was going to prove to the world that Negroes... - Were just like other people.

(upbeat music) - W.E.B.

Du Bois is arguably the greatest Black intellectual scholar activist in American history.

(dramatic music) - [Viola] The first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard.

- He's one of the most educated men in the country.

Not Black men.

- One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.

- Du Bois understood how important it was for Black people to have control of the narratives that were being written.

- It's a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.

- [Karida] He built organizations and institutions that had not existed before.

- [Speaker 1] He founded "The Crisis" magazine.

- It was the umbilical cord between the Black masses.

- [Viola] His advocacy for women's rights was unusually expansive for a man of his generation.

- The statement that woman is weaker than man is sheer rot.

My main life work was out in the world and not at home.

- Du Bois and our father, Kwame Nkrumah, they were working on changing our colonized minds.

- We know why Italy has been promised Ethiopia's territory by our department of state lynching and disfranchisement go merrily on.

- Du Bois was thought to be an enemy of the United States.

He was arrested, he was handcuffed, he would not compromise his principles.

He dies on the eve of the March on Washington.

- His was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.

(dramatic music)