19 things you didn’t know about Atlanta’s past

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk at Atlanta University

W.E.B. Du Bois
1918: W.E.B. Du Bois

Photograph by C. M. Battey

A century before FX’s Atlanta broadcast an experimental take on the Southern African American experience, W.E.B. Du Bois invented the genre with his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois wrote and published this hybrid collection of essays and sketches while he was a professor at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta). But it’s not widely associated with Atlanta—perhaps because he had a contentious relationship with the university, or perhaps because his legacy is more tightly bound with his home state of Massachusetts.