W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader

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Macmillan, Feb 15, 1995 - History - 801 pages
Even as the lunch counters were being liberated in the South, W.E.B. Du Bois predicted the "... deepening class conflict within black America and superficial economic improvement at best in the lot of the great majority of black people." Always an utterer of difficult and unpopular truths, Du Bois's writing still has the ring of prophecy come true. "The inflexible truth he embraced was that, just as Africans in the United States 'under the corporate rule of monopolized wealth ... will be confined to the lowest wage group,' so the peoples of the developing world faced subordination in the global scheme of things capitalist." The long span of Du Bois's remarkable life (95 years) embodied the essence of African American dilemmas, from the early 1870s and post-Reconstruction to the early 1960s' civil rights revolution. Honored primarily for his enormous breakthroughs in black scholarship, urban sociology, and civil rights, Du Bois also paradoxically "... espoused racial and political beliefs of such variety and seeming contradiction as to bewilder and alienate as many Americans, black and white, as he inspired or converted." Marxism, in his old age, would supersede civil liberties as his ideological foundation. In his concentrated but vastly informative introduction, David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois, posits four career turning points that shaped this highly charged political life--from the disputes between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey to the New York-NAACP years (1934) and the internal rift caused by Du Bois's fearless denunciations to the halls of academe to a run for the U.S. Senate at the age of 82. His directorship of the Peace Information Center (PIC), which advocated nuclear disarmament, would get him declared a foreign agent. Turning to communism, even as Khrushchev disclosed the Stalin-era crimes and Soviet atrocities, he exiled himself to West Africa. The timing seemed ironic. The American civil rights revolution was just gathering force. Organized under 15 headings to reflect the philosophical shifts and changes in a long and contradictory life, each section is introduced by Lewis with commentary on where Du Bois stood historically in relation to issues of race and, where appropriate, elucidating on the issues. Lewis's selections from the Du Bois opus arise from a vast and confident knowledge.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Address to the Country 367
2
SEPARATIST SOLUTIONS
5
THE COLD
9
AFRICA PANAFRICA AND IMPERIALISM
12
Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization
17
To the Nations of the World 639
31
Of the Meaning of Progress
34
The Negro Problems
48
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About the author (1995)

Civil rights leader and author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868. He earned a B.A. from both Harvard and Fisk universities, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and studied at the University of Berlin. He taught briefly at Wilberforce University before he came professor of history and economics at Atlanta University in Ohio (1896-1910). There, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he pointed out that it was up to whites and blacks jointly to solve the problems created by the denial of civil rights to blacks. In 1905, Du Bois became a major figure in the Niagara Movement, a crusading effort to end discrimination. The organization collapsed, but it prepared the way for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in which Du Bois played a major role. In 1910, he became editor of the NAACP magazine, a position he held for more than 20 years. Du Bois returned to Atlanta University in 1932 and tried to implement a plan to make the Negro Land Grant Colleges centers of black power. Atlanta approved of his idea, but later retracted its support. When Du Bois tried to return to NAACP, it rejected him too. Active in several Pan-African Congresses, Du Bois came to know Fwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, and Jono Kenyatta the president of Kenya. In 1961, the same year Du Bois joined the Communist party, Nkrumah invited him to Ghana as a director of an Encyclopedia Africana project. He died there on August 27, 1963, after becoming a citizen of that country.