In 1899, a young Harvard-trained sociologist walked past an Atlanta storefront displaying the burned knuckles of a lynching victim and realized that data alone would never cure American racism. This episode traces the 95-year life of W.E.B. Du Bois, from his supportive childhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, through his shocking first encounter with Jim Crow at Fisk University, his studies in Berlin under Max Weber, and his history-making 1895 Harvard PhD. We explore how his block-by-block study of Philadelphia invented the modern sociological case study and proved that Black poverty was an enforced geographic trap rather than an inherited trait.

From there we follow his collision with Booker T. Washington over the Atlanta Compromise, his Talented Tenth counter-vision, the founding of the Niagara Movement, and The Souls of Black Folk, ...