Martin Luther King, the famed civil rights leader, said of the man who inspired him “history cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois because history has to reflect truth and Dr. DuBois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths.” King grounded his campaign for equality in the research and teachings of DuBois, the first one to take a sociological, scientific account of the state of African-Americans in the United States. Where men like Booker T. Washington, a contemporary of DuBois, advocated a process of limited and slow integration of African-Americans into mainstream society, DuBois called for nothing less than full participation. As his teachings began to take hold, DuBois earned numerous accolades.

On this day, December 22, in 1943, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, at the time the head of Atlanta University Department of Sociology, became the first African-American admitted to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

DuBois published many essays on the subject of African-Americans in society – his best-known work The Souls of Black Folk outlining the problem of the “color-line,” a prescient statement in light of the six decades of struggle for integration to come. Several years after that groundbreaking treatise, DuBois along with many other prominent civic leaders both black and white founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.