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W.E.B. Du Bois #2
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963
The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize--winning biography that The Washington Post hailed as "an engrossing masterpiece"
Charismatic, singularly determined, and controversial, W.E.B. Du Bois was a historian, novelist, editor, sociologist, founder of the NAACP, advocate of women's rights, and the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement. His hypnotic voice thunders out of David Levering Lewis's monumental biography like a locomotive under full steam.
This second volume of what is already a classic work begins with the triumphal return from WWI of African American veterans to the shattering reality of racism and lynching even as America discovers the New Negro of literature and art. In stunning detail, Lewis chronicles the little-known political agenda behind the Harlem Renaissance and Du Bois's relentless fight for equality and justice, including his steadfast refusal to allow whites to interpret the aspirations of black America. Seared by the rejection of terrified liberals and the black bourgeoisie during the Communist witch-hunts, Du Bois ended his days in uncompromising exile in newly independent Ghana. In re-creating the turbulent times in which he lived and fought, Lewis restores the inspiring and famed Du Bois to his central place in American history.
Charismatic, singularly determined, and controversial, W.E.B. Du Bois was a historian, novelist, editor, sociologist, founder of the NAACP, advocate of women's rights, and the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement. His hypnotic voice thunders out of David Levering Lewis's monumental biography like a locomotive under full steam.
This second volume of what is already a classic work begins with the triumphal return from WWI of African American veterans to the shattering reality of racism and lynching even as America discovers the New Negro of literature and art. In stunning detail, Lewis chronicles the little-known political agenda behind the Harlem Renaissance and Du Bois's relentless fight for equality and justice, including his steadfast refusal to allow whites to interpret the aspirations of black America. Seared by the rejection of terrified liberals and the black bourgeoisie during the Communist witch-hunts, Du Bois ended his days in uncompromising exile in newly independent Ghana. In re-creating the turbulent times in which he lived and fought, Lewis restores the inspiring and famed Du Bois to his central place in American history.
752 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2000
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2108 people want to read
About the author
David Levering Lewis
42 books62 followersDavid Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
July 6, 2017
This second Pulitzer Prize winning volume sees Du Bois through WWII, years at Atlanta University, and to his 1963 death in Ghana. Feel like I have taken a mini-course in Black Studies by reading these two volumes and have come away with a valuable perspective that enriches my 20th century historical knowledge.
March 4, 2012
I checked the second volume of Lewis' DuBois biography out of the library right after finishing the first volume which I think is a testament to the excellence of the author's work. Volume II was much harder to make my way through, which is not due to any fault of Lewis. In the second volume you could feel the increasing pace of the modern world, especially as DuBois widened his intellectual horizons into Marxism and the Pan-African movement. It was also interesting to see how Lewis showed the rise of African American protest movements in the 20th century as well as the expansion of DuBois' Talented Tenth through DuBois' eyes. Even as someone whose primary interest has always been American history, it was fascinating to see DuBois' role in the international community. In this regard especially, Lewis' integrity as a biographer is evident as he openly and honestly acknowledges DuBois' tendency to downplay/misread the horrors associated with totalitarianism in the mid-20th century. He also shows DuBois the man, both immensely gifted and personally flawed.
The final chapter of the biography covering the last 10-15 years of DuBois' life after his federal trial seemed rushed on Lewis' part. I would have liked to see that period in DuBois' life more fully developed, but that's a small fault of such an excellent volume. When Lewis discussed DuBois' death at the March on Washington and wrote, "W.E.B DuBois said nothing in his last hours. But it had all been said" I felt a little sad to be done with the book.
The final chapter of the biography covering the last 10-15 years of DuBois' life after his federal trial seemed rushed on Lewis' part. I would have liked to see that period in DuBois' life more fully developed, but that's a small fault of such an excellent volume. When Lewis discussed DuBois' death at the March on Washington and wrote, "W.E.B DuBois said nothing in his last hours. But it had all been said" I felt a little sad to be done with the book.
May 27, 2019
Second volume of Lewis's biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, the black historian and activist who played a major role in shaping the development of African-American culture and activism. Lewis's book picks up in the aftermath of World War I, as Du Bois's dreams that the war would spur collapse amidst the "Red Summer" of 1919, marked by race riots, lynchings and general reaction across the country. From there, a disillusioned Du Bois grows increasingly angry - he spent much of the '20s feuding with NAACP leader Walter White and separatist Marcus Garvey - isolated, and radical. His belief in a Talented Tenth of African-Americans bettering American society from within transformed into an embrace of socialist and pan-African ideas that led him far outside the American mainstream. Lewis is sympathetic yet unsparing in his portrait of Du Bois, balancing his great accomplishments (his encouragement of the Harlem Renaissance and publishing a classic revisionist history of Reconstruction) with his personal shortcomings - a prickly ego, a weakness for womanizing and a mercurial ideology. Du Bois's radicalization is understandable considering the times, though it took him down some bizarre roads: his lauding Imperial Japan as a champion of colored peoples, his opposition to World War II and his increasing friendliness towards Stalin and the Soviet Union made him an outcast. Shunned by moderate blacks, investigated and harassed by the government (he was indicted as a foreign agent, though he never went to trial) he spent much of his later life abroad, dying in Ghana in August 1963 as the Civil Rights Movement back home reached its apex. Like all great biographers, Lewis presents Du Bois's life, personality and ever-shifting allegiances with skill, composure and objectivity: he emerges as an immensely important and sympathetic figure, but a flawed one whose idealism took him in strange, not always defensible directions. Excellent read, highest recommendation.
July 8, 2019
The Power Broker by Robert Caro changed how I feel about biography as a genre. It gave me a real appreciation for how, when trying to tell the story of a place and an era, following one person who was deeply involved can be a perfect framing mechanism\jumping off point for all of the context that makes this time and place worth talking about, even if you aren't particularly interested in the individual at the center I've now finally finished David Levering Lewis' two part biography of W.E.B. Du Bois (Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 and 1919-1963 The Fight for Equality and the American Century) and it's another phenomenal monumental project on the level of Caro's biographies and clearly deserving of its two separate Pulitzers. With a lifespan reaching from the beginning of reconstruction to the height of the civil rights movement, and as the preeminent figure of black political thought for the decades of the racial nadir, Du Bois' life is the ideal opportunity to trace the arc of racial politics in America in the first century after emancipation. While the entire biography is deeply researched and well written, the standout portion is easily the middle half (the second half of the first volume and first half of the second), covering the least often discussed era of race relations in the US, the progressive era and its aftermath. Here Du Bois is at the height of his influence, working through the NAACP and The Crisis domestically and the Pan-African Congresses abroad in a world rapidly being transformed by modernization and colonization with deep uncertainty about how separable these two projects were. No other book I've read since The Warmth of Other Suns has so clearly and powerfully conveyed the shape of social and cultural changes over vast expanses of time in the US and I can't recommend it enough.
June 9, 2013
In part because the pace slows as Lewis' level of detail increases, this was even more work than the first volume. Unquestionably worth it, though. Between Du Bois' story and Lewis' prose (which reaches extraordinary heights in a few places), this is a masterful examination of an extraordinary life.
June 16, 2012
The first time I tried reading this book I could not get through it; the second time I tried, years later, I couldn't put it down. Go figure. It's long, scholarly, meticulously researched, and if you're interested in Du Bois, I doubt you will find a better biography.
July 25, 2011
After the first few sentences of this masterpiece by David Levering Lewis, it is obvious why his account of the second half of the life of Du Bois won the Pulitzer Prize For Biography. Lewis possesses a writing style that has smoothness to it. Page after page the life of W. E. B. Du Bois and the thoughts of the man seem real enough to be your own (provided you can accept the controversy of a figure as great as Du Bois). Lewis does his best to be objective in his account of Du Bois, or I should say, as objective as is possible for a historian. Lewis is unafraid to show the human side of Du Bois; the side that engaged in regular extra-marital affairs, and the side that overlooked the atrocities committed by such variances as the governments of Japan, Stalin and Mao.
Du Bois is portrayed as genuine from the start. He genuinely wanted to help his people, the African Americans, achieve the franchise and self-determination. He wanted to not only achieve this for the American Africans, but for world Africans, people of color and those of Nordic or Aryan origin, in that order. Ultimately he WAS an anti-imperialist. He was against exploitation of all peoples by Capitalistic domination. He was all for eradicating poverty wherever it may be found as he believed that to be one of the underlying causes of racism, and ultimately, war. In the efforts of this noble pursuit, Du Bois was open to any system available that would allow the eradication of racism and poverty. He refused, however, to be confined to a box as Lewis portrayed in the astute observation that he was “A thinker whose obligation was to be dissatisfied continually with his own thoughts and those of others”. His study of Marxism came relatively late in life, but Lewis is very fair in his portrayal of the revolution in Russia and how it would have affected the mind of Du Bois. Here was a mind looking for a way out, and he saw in the Russian, and later the Chinese, revolutions the first establishments of governments whose primary mission was stated to eradicate poverty and provide literacy, free health care, and the full benefits of the means of production to everyone. To state whether or not these governments actually achieved this misses the point. Du Bois was looking for a better way for his people, and did not restrict his thinking to a purely “American” line. He even went so far as to join the Communist Party USA in his 90’s. He believed that Capitalism would ultimately destroy its people and eventually itself. As an alternative, he believed the only way to be one where the lower classes of society had the power. As an observer of politics in America, he was ahead of his time in realizing that the two-party system would never work. He deplored the fact that business had so much say in government and said that a citizenry governed by Democrats and Republicans, both of which were controlled by the rich, was NOT a democracy.
Lewis takes the time to show that the life of a great African-American thinker during the critical times of Reconstruction, the turn of the century, Jim Crow and two World Wars was not a life without adversity. Sure Du Bois had an ego that could be easily bruised at times, but, more often than not, he found himself and his life guarded by people with a lighter skin tone whose intelligence was merely a fraction of the man they were restricting.
This is a book whose tone may not agree with everyone. Like Du Bois himself, some will accuse Lewis of being too radical, of not coming down hard enough on radical ideology. It must be stated before you read this book that it is radical because the subject of the book is radical. Historical figures like the one portrayed here challenge us in our own thinking. They challenge us to re-evaluate how we are living in the possibility that there IS a better way. The importance of remembering not to define one’s self by the currents flowing through society in the pursuit of equality is no where better stated than in the life of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Du Bois is portrayed as genuine from the start. He genuinely wanted to help his people, the African Americans, achieve the franchise and self-determination. He wanted to not only achieve this for the American Africans, but for world Africans, people of color and those of Nordic or Aryan origin, in that order. Ultimately he WAS an anti-imperialist. He was against exploitation of all peoples by Capitalistic domination. He was all for eradicating poverty wherever it may be found as he believed that to be one of the underlying causes of racism, and ultimately, war. In the efforts of this noble pursuit, Du Bois was open to any system available that would allow the eradication of racism and poverty. He refused, however, to be confined to a box as Lewis portrayed in the astute observation that he was “A thinker whose obligation was to be dissatisfied continually with his own thoughts and those of others”. His study of Marxism came relatively late in life, but Lewis is very fair in his portrayal of the revolution in Russia and how it would have affected the mind of Du Bois. Here was a mind looking for a way out, and he saw in the Russian, and later the Chinese, revolutions the first establishments of governments whose primary mission was stated to eradicate poverty and provide literacy, free health care, and the full benefits of the means of production to everyone. To state whether or not these governments actually achieved this misses the point. Du Bois was looking for a better way for his people, and did not restrict his thinking to a purely “American” line. He even went so far as to join the Communist Party USA in his 90’s. He believed that Capitalism would ultimately destroy its people and eventually itself. As an alternative, he believed the only way to be one where the lower classes of society had the power. As an observer of politics in America, he was ahead of his time in realizing that the two-party system would never work. He deplored the fact that business had so much say in government and said that a citizenry governed by Democrats and Republicans, both of which were controlled by the rich, was NOT a democracy.
Lewis takes the time to show that the life of a great African-American thinker during the critical times of Reconstruction, the turn of the century, Jim Crow and two World Wars was not a life without adversity. Sure Du Bois had an ego that could be easily bruised at times, but, more often than not, he found himself and his life guarded by people with a lighter skin tone whose intelligence was merely a fraction of the man they were restricting.
This is a book whose tone may not agree with everyone. Like Du Bois himself, some will accuse Lewis of being too radical, of not coming down hard enough on radical ideology. It must be stated before you read this book that it is radical because the subject of the book is radical. Historical figures like the one portrayed here challenge us in our own thinking. They challenge us to re-evaluate how we are living in the possibility that there IS a better way. The importance of remembering not to define one’s self by the currents flowing through society in the pursuit of equality is no where better stated than in the life of W. E. B. Du Bois.
August 4, 2015
Lewis continues and completes his incredibly detailed, nuanced biography of one of the world's most influential and charismatic black rights activists. This book was a little harder for me to follow than the first one, probably because the world that Du Bois inhabited was getting more complicated all the time. In the time frame the book covers, you have the Roaring '20s (and sadly, all the lynchings that took place during that time, as well as Southern kangaroo courts for black men), the Great Depression, the growing popularity of socialism, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, World War II, and McCarthyism-- all covered to some extent here. You can understand Du Bois growing frustration that black rights were continually ignored (which, I believe, is what lead to some of his more radical beliefs later in life), while at the same time have some sympathy for those who were too distracted by the rapid pace of change to be as focused on civil rights as they should have been.
Wisely, Lewis doesn't shy away from covering the areas where Du Bois proved to be, in modern parlance, "on the wrong side of history." The NAACP leader failed to recognize the threat presented by Nazi Germany, and was in favor of Japanese imperialism in China, among other things. While contemporary readers may be tempted to hold the book at arm's length and yell "The hell were you thinking, man?" upon discovering these views, I think it's important to recognize that Du Bois was looking at the world through a different lens than many of his contemporaries; in some cases, that perspective led him to be incredibly ahead of his time; in others, it led him astray, and it's interesting to ponder how and why that happened. Was his apparent myopia in regard to international politics the result of his focus on civil rights, or despite it?
Anyway, while there's still a lot I don't know about the battle for civil rights in America, I know a hell of a lot more than before I read all about the fascinating life of WEB Du Bois. I wish he were alive today; I'd love to know what he would think of today's crop of civil rights activists. My guess is that he wouldn't be very impressed, but what can you do? The Professor was a demanding guy.
Wisely, Lewis doesn't shy away from covering the areas where Du Bois proved to be, in modern parlance, "on the wrong side of history." The NAACP leader failed to recognize the threat presented by Nazi Germany, and was in favor of Japanese imperialism in China, among other things. While contemporary readers may be tempted to hold the book at arm's length and yell "The hell were you thinking, man?" upon discovering these views, I think it's important to recognize that Du Bois was looking at the world through a different lens than many of his contemporaries; in some cases, that perspective led him to be incredibly ahead of his time; in others, it led him astray, and it's interesting to ponder how and why that happened. Was his apparent myopia in regard to international politics the result of his focus on civil rights, or despite it?
Anyway, while there's still a lot I don't know about the battle for civil rights in America, I know a hell of a lot more than before I read all about the fascinating life of WEB Du Bois. I wish he were alive today; I'd love to know what he would think of today's crop of civil rights activists. My guess is that he wouldn't be very impressed, but what can you do? The Professor was a demanding guy.
January 22, 2016
W.E.B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the NAACP, was a towering intellect and a never-ending advocate for blacks during the dark days before Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act. Reading this account of the second half of his life, I was struck by the similarities between his story and that of his contemporary, Paul Robeson. Both were extraordinary men of great achievement who were constantly slightly and denied their due recognition because of their race. Both died as outcasts because of the leftist beliefs to which they were driven, and both have at least somewhat been passed over by history.
This biography reminds us of just how racist America’s even recent past is. I kept highlighting aspects of the Jim Crow South and the callous North that jumped out to me, whether the exclusion of blacks from the benefits of the New Deal and unionization, to the death of blacks on roadsides due to segregated ambulances, to a White House press corps that remained lily-white, to the exhilaration that Du Bois felt whenever he left the U.S. and was treated as just another person in Europe.
This is timely given the recent discussions the country has been having over race, and it adds needed perspective on where we were, how far we've come, and how far we still need to go.
This biography reminds us of just how racist America’s even recent past is. I kept highlighting aspects of the Jim Crow South and the callous North that jumped out to me, whether the exclusion of blacks from the benefits of the New Deal and unionization, to the death of blacks on roadsides due to segregated ambulances, to a White House press corps that remained lily-white, to the exhilaration that Du Bois felt whenever he left the U.S. and was treated as just another person in Europe.
This is timely given the recent discussions the country has been having over race, and it adds needed perspective on where we were, how far we've come, and how far we still need to go.
October 2, 2013
Not just a biography of a great man, but a look at the struggles of african americans from reconstruction thru the Civil Rights Movement in the 60's. Really enjoyed the view of the first half of the 20th century thru Black eyes. Showed me how biased and "white" the history I learned in school was.
October 26, 2020
The first volume of the epic biography was excellent and did not expect the second volume to be as good but I was surprised in that it turned out to be even better. Du Bois live a very long and note worth life and these two books are as good they can possible be in detailing his life and times.
September 29, 2013
Fantastic scholarship and writing--the best of both worlds.
March 4, 2019
This is truly a monumental work.
In terms of scope and impact, it reminds me of Robert Caro's Master of the Senate. Just like that book is not only a record of Senator Lyndon Johnson but also a solid history of the US Senate, this volume not only describes the second half of Du Bois' extraordinarily long and productive life but also gives a lucid history of race relations in the US from 1920 to 1960 since Du Bois was heavily involved in almost every major pro-black effort in that time period (especially in the 1920s and 1930s).
What strikes me the most about Du Bois
(i) His boundless energy which allowed him to juggle a massive load of speaking and writing projects into his 90s
(ii) His penetrating and curious intellect which engaged him in so many subjects
(iii) His emotional resilience to handle so many controversies and setbacks (even exile) without ever becoming discouraged.
I'll just point out a few of the things that struck me:
(1) The picture of Du Bois with Mao in 1959 is iconic. He is 91 years old, looks so vigorous, relaxed and happy.
(2) I was amused to learn that he initially thought he would retire in 1930 (at age 62) to a quiet and peaceful life in Massachusetts. Instead, he proceeded to write one of his most influential scholarly works (Black Reconstruction in America), embrace the far left, get indicted in anti-communist witchhunt, have his passport confiscated, self-exile to Ghana and engage in numerous high profile international controversies, all between the ages of 65 to 95.
(3) As of now (2019) his critique of capitalism is looking more and more prescient. Both from the populist left (Bernie Sanders et. al. in the US) and the populist right (Tucker Carlson and co.) questions are being raised about whether unfettered capitalism can truly fulfill our deepest human needs. Du Bois would have recognized many of these critiques (especially the ones from the left).
So if you're interested in American history, I very strongly recommend this. This is a perspective most Americans don't know very much about, especially the numerous efforts between 1920 and 1950 to advance black civil rights which yielded fairly meager gains.
In terms of scope and impact, it reminds me of Robert Caro's Master of the Senate. Just like that book is not only a record of Senator Lyndon Johnson but also a solid history of the US Senate, this volume not only describes the second half of Du Bois' extraordinarily long and productive life but also gives a lucid history of race relations in the US from 1920 to 1960 since Du Bois was heavily involved in almost every major pro-black effort in that time period (especially in the 1920s and 1930s).
What strikes me the most about Du Bois
(i) His boundless energy which allowed him to juggle a massive load of speaking and writing projects into his 90s
(ii) His penetrating and curious intellect which engaged him in so many subjects
(iii) His emotional resilience to handle so many controversies and setbacks (even exile) without ever becoming discouraged.
I'll just point out a few of the things that struck me:
(1) The picture of Du Bois with Mao in 1959 is iconic. He is 91 years old, looks so vigorous, relaxed and happy.
(2) I was amused to learn that he initially thought he would retire in 1930 (at age 62) to a quiet and peaceful life in Massachusetts. Instead, he proceeded to write one of his most influential scholarly works (Black Reconstruction in America), embrace the far left, get indicted in anti-communist witchhunt, have his passport confiscated, self-exile to Ghana and engage in numerous high profile international controversies, all between the ages of 65 to 95.
(3) As of now (2019) his critique of capitalism is looking more and more prescient. Both from the populist left (Bernie Sanders et. al. in the US) and the populist right (Tucker Carlson and co.) questions are being raised about whether unfettered capitalism can truly fulfill our deepest human needs. Du Bois would have recognized many of these critiques (especially the ones from the left).
So if you're interested in American history, I very strongly recommend this. This is a perspective most Americans don't know very much about, especially the numerous efforts between 1920 and 1950 to advance black civil rights which yielded fairly meager gains.
July 5, 2019
What a doozy! 1100-odd pages on the eventful life of sociologist, historian, activist, and man in the running as greatest American intellectual of the twentieth century, W.E.B Du Bois. It’s in the tradition of full-dress, life-and-times biographies like “The Power Broker” and “The Rascal King” — lots of detail, lots and lots of background on where Du Bois grew up, the histories of the settings he found himself in, the lives of people involved with his, so on and so on. Du Bois went many places: starting in Great Barrington, going to Fisk University, Harvard, Germany for grad school, back to Harvard, Atlanta, New York, touring the world and finally ending up in Ghana. He knew a lot of people. It’s two big books.
To give even a cursory examination of Du Bois’s career is beyond the scope of this review. Suffice it to say he was a scholar who played a major role in founding the NAACP and in shaping civil rights discourse and activism. His intellect was powerful and protean, finding outlet in sociology, history, memoirs, and novels (he was also a tremendous and well-organized worker). He redefined the history of Reconstruction in ways that historians only caught up with forty years later, and his philosophical works like “The Souls of Black Folk” went a long way towards shaping race consciousness in America in the twentieth century. Levering Lewis doesn’t stint from the nitty-gritty of Du Bois’s travels (one imagines his diaries were a source hard not to mine at sometimes tedious depths) and of his bureaucratic battles within the Niagara Movement and its successor, the NAACP.
Levering Lewis paints a picture of Du Bois as fiery, imperious, well aware of his own talents, and always fighting someone. My favorite parts were those dedicated to his epochal battles to define how black politics would look: with Booker T. Washington, with Marcus Garvey, with Walter White, etc. Washington played a game between the Jim Crow South, national authority, and the black community for which he acted as semi-official spokesman, where he attempted to bargain obedience to white rule for economic advancement. His struggle with Du Bois began over education — Washington being almost neurotically opposed to broad liberal arts education for black people and Du Bois a staunch advocate — but it quickly became a matter of broader vision for the community. No sooner had Washington left the scene and the Tuskegee network started seeing things more Du Bois’s way than Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association arise. There was a viscerality to Du Bois’s despisal of Garvey, the wrath of a sophisticated, highly educated man for an interloper who was neither but who undeniably had the common touch Du Bois lacked. Garvey’s nationalism had more than a little of flim-flammery to it but it spoke to people fed up with Jim Crow, south and north, and seeing few ways out. Finally, Du Bois fought endlessly within his own organizations, the NAACP and the magazine The Crisis, and it was battle with Walter White — who became the archetype of the polished, establishment-friendly, legalistic civil rights advocate — that finally drove him from the group.
Du Bois lived a lot longer than he expected to- 95 years. Levering Lewis describes his politics and manner as essentially late-Victorian, a product of the 1880s and 1890s, which helped define but, ironically, had trouble managing the contradictions of the twentieth century as it unfolded. I would categorize his politics, insofar as I can, as “Fabian” — a belief in a socialized economy led by a meritocratic intellectual elite. He became a communist in the end, but Levering Lewis doubts how much he really believed in the destiny of the working class, though it’s worth noting Du Bois put much stock in Marxist historiographical technique, as his work on Reconstruction shows. Du Bois had tilted at socialists, black and white, for decades, but the Communist Party’s consistent efforts at organizing black workers probably decided the question for him. It was McCarthyism that drove him out of the country just as generations steeped in his thought began undertaking successful civil rights and decolonization work on both sides of the Atlantic. Hounded by his government, deprived of a passport, he lived out his days under Kwame Nkrumah’s aegis.
Like I said, there’s a lot here. Apparently Du Bois was a mediocre dad and a lousy husband, a major philanderer. Levering Lewis stints on neither praise nor blame and what you’re left with is a picture of both complexity and greatness (in the value neutral classical sense of the word “great”). That seems appropriate. All told, a solid piece of work. ****
To give even a cursory examination of Du Bois’s career is beyond the scope of this review. Suffice it to say he was a scholar who played a major role in founding the NAACP and in shaping civil rights discourse and activism. His intellect was powerful and protean, finding outlet in sociology, history, memoirs, and novels (he was also a tremendous and well-organized worker). He redefined the history of Reconstruction in ways that historians only caught up with forty years later, and his philosophical works like “The Souls of Black Folk” went a long way towards shaping race consciousness in America in the twentieth century. Levering Lewis doesn’t stint from the nitty-gritty of Du Bois’s travels (one imagines his diaries were a source hard not to mine at sometimes tedious depths) and of his bureaucratic battles within the Niagara Movement and its successor, the NAACP.
Levering Lewis paints a picture of Du Bois as fiery, imperious, well aware of his own talents, and always fighting someone. My favorite parts were those dedicated to his epochal battles to define how black politics would look: with Booker T. Washington, with Marcus Garvey, with Walter White, etc. Washington played a game between the Jim Crow South, national authority, and the black community for which he acted as semi-official spokesman, where he attempted to bargain obedience to white rule for economic advancement. His struggle with Du Bois began over education — Washington being almost neurotically opposed to broad liberal arts education for black people and Du Bois a staunch advocate — but it quickly became a matter of broader vision for the community. No sooner had Washington left the scene and the Tuskegee network started seeing things more Du Bois’s way than Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association arise. There was a viscerality to Du Bois’s despisal of Garvey, the wrath of a sophisticated, highly educated man for an interloper who was neither but who undeniably had the common touch Du Bois lacked. Garvey’s nationalism had more than a little of flim-flammery to it but it spoke to people fed up with Jim Crow, south and north, and seeing few ways out. Finally, Du Bois fought endlessly within his own organizations, the NAACP and the magazine The Crisis, and it was battle with Walter White — who became the archetype of the polished, establishment-friendly, legalistic civil rights advocate — that finally drove him from the group.
Du Bois lived a lot longer than he expected to- 95 years. Levering Lewis describes his politics and manner as essentially late-Victorian, a product of the 1880s and 1890s, which helped define but, ironically, had trouble managing the contradictions of the twentieth century as it unfolded. I would categorize his politics, insofar as I can, as “Fabian” — a belief in a socialized economy led by a meritocratic intellectual elite. He became a communist in the end, but Levering Lewis doubts how much he really believed in the destiny of the working class, though it’s worth noting Du Bois put much stock in Marxist historiographical technique, as his work on Reconstruction shows. Du Bois had tilted at socialists, black and white, for decades, but the Communist Party’s consistent efforts at organizing black workers probably decided the question for him. It was McCarthyism that drove him out of the country just as generations steeped in his thought began undertaking successful civil rights and decolonization work on both sides of the Atlantic. Hounded by his government, deprived of a passport, he lived out his days under Kwame Nkrumah’s aegis.
Like I said, there’s a lot here. Apparently Du Bois was a mediocre dad and a lousy husband, a major philanderer. Levering Lewis stints on neither praise nor blame and what you’re left with is a picture of both complexity and greatness (in the value neutral classical sense of the word “great”). That seems appropriate. All told, a solid piece of work. ****
July 19, 2020
good research. sentences are rough.
October 1, 2025
Outstanding!
Want to read
March 24, 2007I got this home and then found out it was the second in a series. Dammit!
Read
August 3, 2011One of the first man to ever receive a PH.d in Harvard University...he tells his facts and truths about humanity.
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