Answer:
The civil rights leader that born free in Massachusetts and was the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard was W.E.B. DuBois.
Step-by-step explanation:
W.E.B. Du Bois, born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was an American civil rights activist, pan-Africanist, author, and editor.
Du Bois studied first at Fisk University, then at the University of Berlin and finally at Harvard, where he became the first African American to be promoted to a Ph.D. in philosophy at this university in 1895. In 1909, he founded the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP).