- [Narrator] William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts in 1868, the year the newly ratified 14th Amendment guaranteed full citizenship and equal protection of the law to all Americans, black men and black women included.

(upbeat music) - Du Bois is born in a small town in a very white state, in a area that has a very small black population.

He's able to enjoy freedoms that the vast majority of black Americans can never have.

- [Narrator] William's mother's family had been free for generations and planted deep roots in Great Barrington.

(singer singing in foreign language) They also held tight to the thread that tied the family to its distant past across the Atlantic.

A song was passed down from an ancestor who was kidnapped from West Africa and sold into slavery.

- It was Wolof, a language that seemed to say, "Let me out, let me out."

"Do bana coba, do bana coba, gene me, gene me."

Dubois always used that memory and that ancestor to peg himself by African roots.

- [Narrator] William's father, a mixed race native of Haiti and Civil War veteran, feuded with his in-laws and abandoned the family when William was a toddler.

He would never see his father again.

The Burghardt family in the town rallied around his mother, Mary Silvina, so that young William could concentrate on his education.

- Mary Silvina, she has a precocious kid, a brilliant child, who is devouring everything that comes into his view.

He's gonna be introduced to Latin, he's gonna be introduced to Greek, he's gonna be introduced to religious doctrine, so Du Bois is kind of baptized in this understanding of the West.

He was able to distinguish himself as a student, becoming the valedictorian of his high school class.

- His mother had a stroke right around the time that Du Bois was getting out of high school.

She died shortly after Du Bois graduated from high school.

- "There followed the half-guilty feeling, that now I could begin my life without forsaking my mother.

Now I was free and unencumbered, and at the same time, more alone than I had ever dreamed of being.

This very grief was a challenge.

Now, especially, I must succeed, as my mother so desperately wanted me to."