W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B Du Bois made his name as an esteemed author, academic, and civil rights activist in the generation before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois was one of the founders of the NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was (and still is) one of the premier organizations for African American rights and activism. Du Bois wrote a collection of essays that exposed the hypocrisy of the Reconstruction era (the time immediately following the Civil War) and defended African Americans as victims of white racism, instead of the other way around.