William E. B. DuBois (1868-1963), born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was the first African-American to receive the Ph.D. degree from Harvard (1895). His thesis was on the African Slave Trade. DuBois was influenced by Boston's fiery and 'radical' civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter in the early 1900s and was a founder of the NAACP in 1910.
