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More than any other scholar, political activist or professor of his day, W.E.B. Du Bois established the intellectual and curricular groundwork for what would become the field of Black Studies in higher education in the United States. The Great Depression, Du Bois believed, had exacerbated racial consciousness. He planned to remedy the situation of worsened race relations with a serious program of Black Studies. His plan was presented to the Annual Conference of the Presidents of Negro Land-Grant Colleges in 1941, but it would be more than twenty-five years before the first Black Studies program would appear in American higher education and it would not be at a black institution. This book examines in depth Du Bois’s contributions as well as chronicles the turbulent journey of Black Studies in the academy.