William Du Bois was one of only a handful of blacks to be born in New England during the 1860s. His experience of racism there led directly to his commitment to equal rights, and to his writing 'The Souls of Black Folk', in which Dr. Du Bois aspired to portray what it was like to be black in the final years of the nineteenth century. The book has amply fulfilled its author's hopes, and according to critic and essayist Henry Louis Gates, Jnr. "has served as a veritable touch-stone for every successive generation of black scholars since".