UP FROM SLAVERYThe autobiography of Booker T Washington is a startling portrait ofone of the great Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The illegitimate son of 'a white man and a Negro slave, Washington, a man who struggled for his education, would go on to struggle for the [...]

W. E. B. Du Bois was the pre-eminent African American intellectual of the twentieth century. As a pioneering historian, sociologist and civil rights activist, and as a novelist and autobiographer, he made the problem of race central to an understanding of the United States within both national and [...]

On the 27th August, 1963, the day before Martin Luther King electrified the world from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the immortal words, "I Have a Dream", the life of another giant of the Civil Rights movement quietly drew to a close in Accra, Ghana. W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts[...]

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois - the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America - was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out o[...]

After four centuries of bondage, the nineteenth century marked the long-awaited release of millions of black slaves. Subsequently, these former slaves attempted to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectual leaders in United States history, evalua[...]

One of the most widely read and influential works in African American literature, "The Souls of Black Folk" is W.E.B. Du Bois's classic collection of essays in which he details the state of racism and black culture at the beginning of the 20th century. Often autobiographical, "The Souls of Black Fol[...]

"The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." This quote is among the most prophetic in American history. It was written by W. E. B. DuBois for the Exhibition of American Negroes displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition. They are words whose force echoed throughout the Twent[...]