W. E. B. Du Bois
One of the most influential books ever published in America, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk is an eloquent collection of fourteen essays that describe the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of African Americans at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose
..."The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature.
First published in 1903, this collection of fifteen essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois' writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his
...This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 has justly been called a classic.