Customer Reviews

The Professor and the Pupil: The Politics and Friendship of W. E. B Du Bois and Paul Robeson

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W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson are giants in black history and key influences on the civil rights movement, but each man's distinctive political viewpoints have been glossed over by subsequent historians. Their long professional and personal friendship, not to mention their influence on each other's thinking, are also unappreciated. Here Murali Balaji provides a unique political biography of the interactions between the two great men. (It may help to be familiar with the personal biographies of Du Bois and Robeson before tackling this book, which is a more focused historical study.) In the era between the two World Wars, Du Bois and Robeson moved inexorably from fairly conventional civil rights activists to purveyors of a very distinct Leftist political philosophy, and later got into trouble with anti-Communists and drifted away from the mainstream of black political thought as espoused by the NAACP and similar organizations.

Here we find that during the darkest days of McCarthyism and the early civil rights movement, these two formerly inspirational leaders fell out with many of their former devotees and were ostracized by the mainstream, and had to rely on their friendship to withstand great amounts of government harassment and popular criticism. Fortunately, the works of Du Bois and Robeson enjoyed new influence with later black leaders who were not cowed by the establishment that kept the two great thinkers down and which forced conformity and moderation from the mainstream black community. An additional bonus of Balaji's political history is his coverage of the sheer complexity and variety of political thought during the first half of the 20th Century, which came to an end with the anti-Left bowdlerization of the American political scene in subsequent decades. This book offers very unique coverage of the political lives of two fellow travelers and the confounding times in which they lived. [~doomsdayer520~]

Good Book...a must read for those interested in the not so popular African American History. The book makes a great gift also.