W. E. B. Du Bois explores race, identity, and the African diaspora in this influential collection of early 20th century essays. Through personal reflection and sharp social analysis, he examines the global color line and its impact on Black communities worldwide.
I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The house was quaint, with clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were five rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious strawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to the Berkshire Hills, owned all this--tall, thin, and black, with golden earrings, and given to religious trances. We were his transient tenants for the time. My own people were part of a great clan. Fully two hundred years before, Tom Burghardt had come through the western pass from the Hudson with his Dutch captor, "Coenraet Burghardt," sullen in his slavery and achieving his freedom by volunteering for the Revolution at a time of sudden alarm. His wife was a little, black, Bantu woman, who never became reconciled to this strange land; she clasped her kne…Continue reading →
A brilliant scholar and civil rights pioneer, this Harvard PhD became the first African American to earn a doctorate from the university in 1895. He challenged Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach, co-founded the NAACP, and spent seven decades fighting for racial equality through groundbreaking research, powerful writing, and fearless activism that shaped the modern civil rights movement. All works by W. E. B. Du Bois →