The W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre occupies the Accra home associated with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the African American scholar, historian, sociologist, activist, and Pan-African organizer. Ghana's president Kwame Nkrumah invited Du Bois to the newly independent country in 1961 to direct work on an Encyclopaedia Africana. The project reflected a broader effort to produce knowledge about Africa from African perspectives after colonial rule. Du Bois moved to Accra with his wife, writer and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, late in his long public life.

Born in Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois became a pioneering scholar of race and a co-founder of the NAACP. His books, empirical studies, journalism, teaching, and political organizing challenged segregation, lynching, colonialism, and distorted scholarship about Black life. He also helped organize Pan-African congresses linking struggles in Africa and the diaspora. His views changed over decades, and his socialism, peace activism, and criticism of United States policy brought government surveillance and passport restrictions during the Cold War. The Accra residence embodies this final transatlantic chapter.

In Ghana, Du Bois worked with researchers and political leaders toward the encyclopedia while Nkrumah promoted continental unity and rapid postcolonial development. Du Bois became a Ghanaian citizen in 1963. He died in Accra on August 27 of that year, one day before the March on Washington in the United States. News of his death was announced to the gathering. The timing connected his memory to the civil-rights movement, although his intellectual and political legacy cannot be reduced to a single nation, ideology, or event.

The house, personal library, work spaces, photographs, documents, and mausoleum were developed into a memorial and research center. Shirley Graham Du Bois, an important author and political organizer in her own right, is also commemorated there. The institution presents the couple's lives and the wider history of Pan-African thought, Ghanaian independence, and diaspora exchange. Displays and ceremonies have changed over time, showing how governments, scholars, visitors, and activists continually reinterpret Du Bois's legacy amid debate about nationalism, communism, gender, and decolonization.

Preservation involves more than maintaining a residence and tomb. Books, paper, photographs, furniture, buildings, landscape, and digital records require climate control, cataloging, conservation, security, and sustained scholarly access. Interpretation should avoid portraying Ghana merely as the final refuge of an American figure; local independence politics and African collaborators shaped the project. The Centre is significant because it joins a personal home to global movements for Black freedom and knowledge, making Du Bois's final years, unfinished encyclopedia, and continuing Pan-African influence tangible in Accra.