He was a mulatto, of Huguenot Calvinist and Bantu African slave descent.

William Edward Burghardt du Bois (he insisted on the pronunciation 'Du Boyce') was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, a small, Republican New England town set among the rivers and hills of south-west Massachusetts. The biblical echoes and cadences of the black church in the book's language made it for later generations, as critic Arnold Rampersad has said, itself 'a kind of sacred book'. Despite his own agnosticism, the vernacular 'sorrow songs' became the privileged vehicle for expressing 'the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart' - the soul ofblack experience. His chapter, 'The Sorrow Songs', expands on the significance of the bars of music from famous Negro spirituals which, alongside verses of English poetry - the two representing the Negro's divided inheritance - are threaded through as epigraphs to each chapter. It also included fiction, poetry and musical scores. It was an electrifying manifesto, moblising people for bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history.' It combined life portraits of characteristic individuals, based on Du Bois's travels in the south, with descriptions of the social and economic conditions of the rural poor, a deeply historical understanding of American race relations, and reflections on leadership and the role of education. sound and light, enlivening the inert and despairing. The book was, as Du Bois's biographer David Levering Lewis describes it, 'like a firework going off in a cemetery.

In his book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois set out to paint a vivid portrait of black people in the decades after emancipation in 1862 - how they lived and who they really were: and thus to enlighten white America - still profoundly attached to the myths of black inferiority - as to the true meaning of being black in post-civil war America.

Remembered for his single-minded commitment to racial justice and his capacity to shape black consciousness, Du Bois used language and ideas to hammer out a strategy for political equality and to sound the depths of the black experience in the aftermath of slavery. Its author was WEB du Bois, the greatest of the early civil-rights leaders, a figure of towering significance in American politics and letters, whose life and work are - alas - little known on this side of the Atlantic. This prophecy may have seemed far-fetched when first published in 1903, but it was to prove more and more compelling as the century advanced. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader for the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line'. 'Herein lie buried many things which, if read with patience, may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the 20th century.

The souls of black folk author