linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:reformatting
First Pan-African Conference

Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London on July 23–25, 1900, shortly ahead of the Paris Exhibition of 1900 ("to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events".) The Conference had been organized by people from the Caribbean: Haitians Anténor Firmin and Benito Sylvain and Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams. Du Bois played a leading role in drafting a letter ("Address to the Nations of the World"), asking European leaders to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government and to demand political and other rights for African Americans. By this time, southern states were passing new laws and constitutions to disfranchise most African Americans, an exclusion from the political system that lasted into the 1960s.

At the conclusion of the conference, delegates unanimously adopted the "Address to the Nations of the World", and sent it to various heads of state where people of African descent were living and suffering oppression. The address implored the United States and the imperial European nations to "acknowledge and protect the rights of people of African descent" and to respect the integrity and independence of "the free Negro States of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, etc." It was signed by Bishop Alexander Walters (President of the Pan-African Association), the Canadian Rev. Henry B. Brown (vice-president), Williams (General Secretary) and Du Bois (chairman of the committee on the Address). The address included Du Bois's observation, "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line." He used this again three years later in the "Forethought" of his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903).