Du Bois

Media: Book
Title: W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race

I am right at the mid-point of author David Levering Lewis’s biography of Du Bois and he has just begun to clearly illuminate Du Bois as the founder of the 20th century African-American civil rights movement. He is just beginning to reveal Du Bois thinking on how America needs to accept African-Americans as full members of America in all their ‘African-ness.” Lewis has already revealed 2 previous strains of thought from African-American leaders on their place in America – to assimilate completely or to leave the U.S. entirely. In the first years of the 20th century Du Bois says no to both these options offering his new way: “He simply wishes to make it possible for man to be both a Negro and an American”. The book is startling in its descriptions of the United States’, and in particular, the South’s slide from the relative opportunity offered to African-Americans during Reconstruction into the rapid, ugly, disgraceful slide back toward a form of near-slavery and view of African-American’s as sub-human beginning in the late 1870s on into the 20th century.