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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born an African American in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and died an American African 95 years later in Accra, Ghana. His lifetime included two Johnson Administrations (Andrew's and Lyndon's) and stretched from the betrayal of Reconstruction to the unfinished dream of civil rights. He was "the Old Man" to generations of black leaders and Moses to their followers. But Old Testament robes were a poor fit, as David Levering Lewis' painstaking scholarship makes clear in W.E.B. Du Bois, the first of a two-part biography (Henry Holt; 735 pages...
...Du Bois was cut out to be a modern intellectual: conflicted, inconsistent and alienated from the conditions and customs of the race he strove to transform. To begin with, he was a Northerner and nearly as white as he was black. There were Dutch and French as well as West African branches on his family tree. He was a child prodigy who became an editor, activist (he was a founder of the N.A.A.C.P.) and writer. His best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), gave new dimension to understanding racism through the concept of double consciousness, which he described...
This was brave talk in a society where descendants of slaves had traditionally been admired for their muscles, not their mind. Du Bois' program for broadening education has been well documented, but Lewis demonstrates the extent to which the Old Man fought to make African Americans heirs to their own intellectual and cultural past...
More than any other black leader, Du Bois gave his people a story of their own. To charges that he was an imaginative historian he replied, "There is little danger of long misleading here, for the champions of white folk are legion." Yet for all his insights, he was uneasy about his own identity. His writings are full of references to skin tone, the lighter the more becoming. "This subtext of proud hybridization is so prevalent," Lewis writes, "that the failure to notice it in the literature about him is as remarkable as the complex itself...
...this ironic racism contribute to Du Bois' aloofness and inability to work and play well with others? Did it underlie his conflicting positions on racial inclusion and separatism? The second volume of this impressive study of a divided soul should provide some answers. They are necessary if people of all tints are to find common ground in their own flawed natures...