Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, a town with few black citizens. Thus Du Bois, whose family was the only black one in the local Congregational Church, knew only muted prejudice growing up. Only when he ventured into the world as a teenager and a student at Fisk University in Tennessee did he fully encounter what he called "the whole gorgeous gamut of the American Negro." His faith shifted slowly from Christianity to a belief in the genius and cultural power of the black race. The sixth black man admitted to Harvard, he earned his degree in European philosophy and graduated with honors. He was no longer "Willie" but the fiercely proud W.E.B. Du Bois.

When Wilson allowed his cabinet members to segregate government offices, Trotter led the delegation from the National Independent Political League to meet with the president and protest this discriminatory policy. Wilson's explanation, that "segregation was caused by friction between the colored and white clerks, and not done to injure or humiliate the colored clerks, but to avoid friction," infuriated Trotter. After the shouting match that followed, Trotter was ordered out of the White House. Trotter then did what Wilson considered unforgivable. Standing on the White House grounds, he held a press conference and detailed what had just happened. A Wilson supporter in 1912, Du Bois now sided with Trotter. In Du Bois' view, Wilson "was by birth . . . unfitted for largesse of view or depth of feeling about racial injustice."

Du Bois supported America's entry into war as one more way for black Americans to gain equality and to advance political reform both at home and abroad. It was largely wishful thinking. When black workers began appearing in the great war factories in the North, white resentment intensified, leading to race riots in cities like St. Louis. A rampage by black troops near Houston over the arrest of one of their members coming to the aid of a black woman left seventeen whites dead. Nineteen of the soldiers were convicted and executed without any chance to appeal.

In 1919, as the peace talks in Paris began, Du Bois reached Europe as part of the American press delegation. But Trotter, denied a passport by Wilson's State Department, had to obtain a job on a trans-Atlantic steamer as a cook in order to get there. He appeared at the conference as a delegate from two groups pressing for more racial justice in the postwar world. Du Bois quietly pressured the French to mount a three-day Pan African Conference, with its findings presented to the president's inner circle. He also met with Wilson's advisor Colonel House on the matter, but, predictably, nothing came of it.

Du Bois, Trotter, and Garvey continued their efforts in the fight for civil rights long after Wilson was gone. Marcus Garvey was permanently deported from the U.S. in 1927 after a vicious campaign by the federal government and other black leaders to discredit him. Yet Garveyís legacy extended directly to later civil rights activists, like Malcolm X, whose parents had been Garveyites. By the time of his death in 1934, Trotter had become increasingly marginalized because of his strident unwillingness to work with established groups, but his use of nonviolent protest was adopted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. Du Bois lived long enough to become increasingly radicalized, both embracing Communism and leaving America for Ghana in 1959. He died there four years later at the age of 95.