W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader [Paperback]

David Levering Lewis (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0805032649 | ISBN-13: 978-0805032642 | Publication Date: February 15, 1995 | Edition: 1st

The essential writings of Du Bois have been selected and edited by David Levering Lewis, his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

The contradictions, the uncompromising brilliance, the allure, still has David L. Lewis asking, "Who is Du Bois, the man?" The more the details of his early life are probed, the more evident it becomes that Du Bois's "facts" differ from how he wrote about them. He crafted "a grand prose wherein the 'golden river' flowing near his birthplace is in fact the highly polluted Housatonic River; the 'mighty [Burghardt] clan' of his mother's people is in reality a hardscrabble band of peasant landholders clinging to postage-stamp-size holdings; the dashing cavalier father, Alfred Du Bois, is an army deserter and philanderer; and the 'gentle and decent poverty' of his childhood is more often sharp and deep." Are such discrepancies significant? In as much, claims Lewis, that they represent Du Bois's cultivation of his outsider vision--a stance articulated in his 1903 classic, The Soul of Black Folk, which describes the essential and necessary double-consciousness of the American black.

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.

This vast collection of the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois is 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. Students of race and the civil rights movement in American history will want to add this remarkable collection of Du Bois's essential writings to their library. -Hollis Giammatteo

From Library Journal

In his introduction to this anthology of Du Bois's writings, editor Lewis (W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, LJ 11/1/93) continues to offer insights into the political life of a man considered the premier architect of Civil Rights in the United States. He focuses on four turning points in Du Bois's life-his relationship with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey; his departure from the NAACP; his quest for foundation money to launch an encyclopedia; and his turn to the Left. The pieces in this collection are drawn from Du Bois's books, commencement addresses, and magazine articles. They provide a good supplement to Lewis's biography. [For another perspective on this scholar-activist, see LJ's roundup on Du Bois, "W.E.B. Du Bois: A Century of Conscience," LJ 8/93, p. 122-123.]-Ann Burns, "Library Journal.
--Ann Burns, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (February 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805032649
• ISBN-13: 978-0805032642
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 5.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #537,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reveals The DuBois you Didn't Know, June 4, 2001

By 

Andre M. "brnn64" (Mt. Pleasant, SC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (Paperback)

Most Black History fans think they have DuBois figured out. You either hate him for his haughtiness and elitism or you love his militant stands. This collection of DuBois' writings shows that the truth was somewhere in between. We see DuBois change his mind on Marcus Garvey and the elitist "Talented Tenth" idea. We see DuBois evolve from Integrationism to Black Nationalism to Communism. We basically see a man who is not afraid to change his ideas and admit his errors, a very human and complex man.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars indescribable, December 8, 2009

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J. Johnson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (Paperback)

If I liked Du Bois before, I love him after purchasing this collection of essays! I have enjoyed reading through all of them

3.0 out of 5 stars readable, November 9, 2010

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M. Heiss (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (Paperback)

These are published essays and columns brought together and presented topically (not chronologically) - a very readable book.

I got it specifically to understand better the long-term rift between the labor movement and the NAACP. Labor has always treated blacks as useful stepping stones. DuBois (as a Socialist) understood very well that his loyalties were divided.

Class solidarity is all well and good in a homogenous society, but in America the racism of the labor movement means that the white working class is united against the capitalists and ALSO against minorities. DuBois's expose' of this fundamental problem is important.

Great use of language, very quotable. Well written pro-socialism propaganda is always worth savoring, and WEB DuBois writes lyrical pro-socialism propaganda. No good timeline, but the introduction is excellent.

In the end, socialism is evil. DuBois doesn't quite get there, but his consternation over the talented tenth joining the bourgeoisie and leaving the working-class cause, and his APPROVAL of them for doing so, shows him trending in the direction of liberty instead of tyranny.