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W.E.B. Du Bois #1
W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
This monumental biography--eight years in the research and writing--treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.
736 pages, Hardcover
First published October 29, 1993
60 people are currently reading
7425 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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April 26, 2010
This is a biography that actually merits the “magisterial” among its blurbs, the kind of book that shows biography second only to the novel for difficulty of organization and effect. As epigraph to the first of the five volumes he would devote to the life of Henry James, Leon Edel quoted a line from his subject’s rare foray into biography (William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903):
To live other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived.
Du Bois began his intellectual life in the 1870s, a prodigious New England preteen saving odd job money to buy Macaulay’s History of England on an installment plan—and died in 1963, a Pan-Africanist Marxist with a villa in Accra, capital of newly-independent Ghana, and a chauffeured limousine provided by the Soviet embassy. So yeah, Lewis had a lot of ground to cover, plenty of change “to live over.”
Du Bois requires two +500 page volumes (this is the first) in which Lewis synchronizes his subject’s restless ninety-five years with an account of the turbulent modernity he inhabited and strove so variously to interpret. This book is full of fascinating microhistories. Every page is dense, chewy with a trenchant portrait or ideological summary or sketch of socio-political context; the history of the United States from Andrew Johnson to Lyndon Johnson, from the Civil War in which Du Bois’s father fought to the Vietnam War he predicted and denounced a decade in advance; imperialism, Gilded Age economics, race and class dynamics, assimilation and separatism, Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Bismarck and Négritude, German philosophy, Romantic Nationalism, and every stripe of social thought. In some people egoism is a revelation of spirit; Du Bois’ life is a political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.
Things I learned, stuff I was prompted to recall, random notes:
1. At Harvard Du Bois read The Critique of Pure Reason with Santayana—not under him, with him. Just hangin’ out.
2. At Harvard Du Bois was a star student of William James, who sent The Souls of Black Folk to Henry, who admired it and invited Du Bois to conclude his 1909 bicycle tour of the Lake District with a visit to Rye House. They never did meet. But James-Santayana is the missed friendship of American Letters.
3. After former U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes publicly questioned the relevance of higher education to blacks, the undergraduate Du Bois wrote him a stern letter in which he told Hayes that he “owed an apology to the Negro People.” This was particularly egregious of Hayes, who at the time was trustee of a black college fund, and particularly ballsy of Du Bois, whose application to that same fund—he wanted a doctorate from a German university; Herr doktor, the prestigious credential of the era—was pending. Hayes was impressed and Du Bois got his grant. Du Bois studied political economy at the University of Berlin, wrote a dissertation comparing the black American peasantry with the Eastern European variety; drank in beer gardens, romanced shop girls, hiked throughout Austra-Hungary, thrilled at Prussian military parades, and affected the upturned points of Wilhelmine mustache.
4. Du Bois was labeled a “dangerous man” by another president, Teddy Roosevelt, for his “freewheeling, militant” editorship of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (I love that subtitle; Du Bois ran plenty of pride-instilling Nubian images on the cover; my aunt has several sets of Sphinx-head bookends). When the Justice Department formed its Bureau of Investigation in 1908, Du Bois’ was an inaugural dossier, henceforth a rite of passage for African-American leaders. The white establishment was quite dismayed that by 1914 many American blacks had turned away from the earthy, humble, accommodating, vo-tech vice-principal Booker T. Washington, to listen at the feet of this “sociologist turned propagandist,” a colleague of Weber and Durkheim who could provoke like an old school Abolitionist, who had put aside brilliant historical work and foundational contributions to the new sociology to rake American pretentions up and down, in sermonic editorials of a grandly indignant style, a lynchable sass—“When it was not hurling thunderbolts, The Crisis dripped acid, issue after issue. Mordant observations and gratuitous asides filled its pages”—that needled even whites on the NAACP board and made Du Bois a hero to blacks, who named children, learned societies and even a brand of cigars after him. Du Bois died the night before the March on Washington; when Sidney Poitier and James Baldwin, standing around a hotel lobby, got the news that "the Old Man is dead," they
didn't need to be told who he was.
5. Booker T. Washington’s power was a function of educational funding. In the absence of a federal Dept. of Education, national funding for higher education was in the hands of robber baron philanthropies. Washington had the philanthropic ear and whispered that blacks were rooted to the peasant soil of the south, uninterested in demanding rights that would upset the southern caste system, or in education beyond that of mechanics and menials, carpenters and cooks. Black liberal-arts colleges, like Du Bois’s alma mater Fisk and periodic hub Atlanta University, were left to wither on the vine; the trustees of the Rockefeller and Carnegie education monies wanted to see such institutions literally perish.
6. Washington’s lackeydom extended throughout the black press—he attempted to disrupt the forming of NAACP, then a cutting-edge attempt at interracial civil rights action, by planting lurid news stories about the fraternization of black men and white women in the ranks of the new organization, a specter he thought sure to enrage popular sentiment. Washington could also advance or quash federal civil service appointments of blacks due to his pull with Republican administrations, and was a pretty smooth bureaucratic operator, buying off potential dissenters with plum posts; although to his credit he also secretly funded early legal efforts against the imposition of Jim Crow—secret because his white backers would not have been cool with that.
7. At philanthropic conclaves Washington would warm up the crowd with “darkie jokes” and savage lampoons of citified “college negroes.” That ridicule still echoes. I wonder if he used a super-nerdy “white voice” when doing Du Bois.
8. Washington is the quintessence of Uncle Tomism, a representative man of southern caste. Uncle Toms don’t like whites, as is commonly thought, but fear and distrust them, and so resort to obsequious accommodation as a way of staying out of the cross-hairs. They fawn and flatter but are extremely angry. Southern mores—backed up by the rope, the pyre, the castrating blade—exacted a degree of Tomism from all blacks, especially men. Washington’s relevance waned when it became clear that the progress of the race was in the north. His assault by a street tough while out whoring, and his incapacitation and slow death from what looked like syphilis, weakened his standing also.
9. Du Bois and Jack Johnson show pride and egoism in heroic, visionary dimensions. They exemplify unintimidated blackness at the post-emancipation high noon of white supremacy. The love of beat-downs and the poses of a frosty hauteur never looked so good. And both were sharp dressers.
10. Newly arrived, cash-strapped Vladimir Nabokov did a lot of peripatetic lecturing in the early 1940s, and was a great favorite at black colleges in the south. He always brought down the house by declaring Pushkin the striking example of what mankind can achieve when the races are allowed to freely mingle. In the fall of 1942 he met Du Bois and recorded his impression in a letter to Edmund Wilson:
Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears—prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Très gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was listed as “Colonel” on the Channel boat, because his name bore the addition “Col.” on his passport.
To live other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived.
Du Bois began his intellectual life in the 1870s, a prodigious New England preteen saving odd job money to buy Macaulay’s History of England on an installment plan—and died in 1963, a Pan-Africanist Marxist with a villa in Accra, capital of newly-independent Ghana, and a chauffeured limousine provided by the Soviet embassy. So yeah, Lewis had a lot of ground to cover, plenty of change “to live over.”
Du Bois requires two +500 page volumes (this is the first) in which Lewis synchronizes his subject’s restless ninety-five years with an account of the turbulent modernity he inhabited and strove so variously to interpret. This book is full of fascinating microhistories. Every page is dense, chewy with a trenchant portrait or ideological summary or sketch of socio-political context; the history of the United States from Andrew Johnson to Lyndon Johnson, from the Civil War in which Du Bois’s father fought to the Vietnam War he predicted and denounced a decade in advance; imperialism, Gilded Age economics, race and class dynamics, assimilation and separatism, Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Bismarck and Négritude, German philosophy, Romantic Nationalism, and every stripe of social thought. In some people egoism is a revelation of spirit; Du Bois’ life is a political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.
Things I learned, stuff I was prompted to recall, random notes:
1. At Harvard Du Bois read The Critique of Pure Reason with Santayana—not under him, with him. Just hangin’ out.
2. At Harvard Du Bois was a star student of William James, who sent The Souls of Black Folk to Henry, who admired it and invited Du Bois to conclude his 1909 bicycle tour of the Lake District with a visit to Rye House. They never did meet. But James-Santayana is the missed friendship of American Letters.
3. After former U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes publicly questioned the relevance of higher education to blacks, the undergraduate Du Bois wrote him a stern letter in which he told Hayes that he “owed an apology to the Negro People.” This was particularly egregious of Hayes, who at the time was trustee of a black college fund, and particularly ballsy of Du Bois, whose application to that same fund—he wanted a doctorate from a German university; Herr doktor, the prestigious credential of the era—was pending. Hayes was impressed and Du Bois got his grant. Du Bois studied political economy at the University of Berlin, wrote a dissertation comparing the black American peasantry with the Eastern European variety; drank in beer gardens, romanced shop girls, hiked throughout Austra-Hungary, thrilled at Prussian military parades, and affected the upturned points of Wilhelmine mustache.
4. Du Bois was labeled a “dangerous man” by another president, Teddy Roosevelt, for his “freewheeling, militant” editorship of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (I love that subtitle; Du Bois ran plenty of pride-instilling Nubian images on the cover; my aunt has several sets of Sphinx-head bookends). When the Justice Department formed its Bureau of Investigation in 1908, Du Bois’ was an inaugural dossier, henceforth a rite of passage for African-American leaders. The white establishment was quite dismayed that by 1914 many American blacks had turned away from the earthy, humble, accommodating, vo-tech vice-principal Booker T. Washington, to listen at the feet of this “sociologist turned propagandist,” a colleague of Weber and Durkheim who could provoke like an old school Abolitionist, who had put aside brilliant historical work and foundational contributions to the new sociology to rake American pretentions up and down, in sermonic editorials of a grandly indignant style, a lynchable sass—“When it was not hurling thunderbolts, The Crisis dripped acid, issue after issue. Mordant observations and gratuitous asides filled its pages”—that needled even whites on the NAACP board and made Du Bois a hero to blacks, who named children, learned societies and even a brand of cigars after him. Du Bois died the night before the March on Washington; when Sidney Poitier and James Baldwin, standing around a hotel lobby, got the news that "the Old Man is dead," they
didn't need to be told who he was.
5. Booker T. Washington’s power was a function of educational funding. In the absence of a federal Dept. of Education, national funding for higher education was in the hands of robber baron philanthropies. Washington had the philanthropic ear and whispered that blacks were rooted to the peasant soil of the south, uninterested in demanding rights that would upset the southern caste system, or in education beyond that of mechanics and menials, carpenters and cooks. Black liberal-arts colleges, like Du Bois’s alma mater Fisk and periodic hub Atlanta University, were left to wither on the vine; the trustees of the Rockefeller and Carnegie education monies wanted to see such institutions literally perish.
6. Washington’s lackeydom extended throughout the black press—he attempted to disrupt the forming of NAACP, then a cutting-edge attempt at interracial civil rights action, by planting lurid news stories about the fraternization of black men and white women in the ranks of the new organization, a specter he thought sure to enrage popular sentiment. Washington could also advance or quash federal civil service appointments of blacks due to his pull with Republican administrations, and was a pretty smooth bureaucratic operator, buying off potential dissenters with plum posts; although to his credit he also secretly funded early legal efforts against the imposition of Jim Crow—secret because his white backers would not have been cool with that.
7. At philanthropic conclaves Washington would warm up the crowd with “darkie jokes” and savage lampoons of citified “college negroes.” That ridicule still echoes. I wonder if he used a super-nerdy “white voice” when doing Du Bois.
8. Washington is the quintessence of Uncle Tomism, a representative man of southern caste. Uncle Toms don’t like whites, as is commonly thought, but fear and distrust them, and so resort to obsequious accommodation as a way of staying out of the cross-hairs. They fawn and flatter but are extremely angry. Southern mores—backed up by the rope, the pyre, the castrating blade—exacted a degree of Tomism from all blacks, especially men. Washington’s relevance waned when it became clear that the progress of the race was in the north. His assault by a street tough while out whoring, and his incapacitation and slow death from what looked like syphilis, weakened his standing also.
9. Du Bois and Jack Johnson show pride and egoism in heroic, visionary dimensions. They exemplify unintimidated blackness at the post-emancipation high noon of white supremacy. The love of beat-downs and the poses of a frosty hauteur never looked so good. And both were sharp dressers.
10. Newly arrived, cash-strapped Vladimir Nabokov did a lot of peripatetic lecturing in the early 1940s, and was a great favorite at black colleges in the south. He always brought down the house by declaring Pushkin the striking example of what mankind can achieve when the races are allowed to freely mingle. In the fall of 1942 he met Du Bois and recorded his impression in a letter to Edmund Wilson:
Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears—prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Très gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was listed as “Colonel” on the Channel boat, because his name bore the addition “Col.” on his passport.
July 12, 2010
I didn’t appreciate this book at first. I found Lewis’s style a little too wordy. But Du Bois was a giant – of ideas and study, appetites, activity and accomplishment – and in these hands he’s found expression equal to his engulfing vitality. It’s small wonder both volumes won the Pulitzer. And here’s one reason why: From his exegesis on DuBois's classic "The Souls of Black Folk"-
“Had Du Bois left double consciousness in this epiphenomenal limbo – as a sort of non-ego or psychic negative pole –the partial legacy of Souls would have been perpetual, devastated psychic passivity. But Du Bois intended the divided self to be a phenomenon that was spiritually and socially evolving –one that would define itself through struggle and attain “self-conscious manhood” through “strife”. The German influences are unmistakable with their suggestion of materializing spirit and dialectical struggle, the whole surging process coming to concretion in das Volk – a mighty nation with a unique soul. It is as though the voices of Schopenhauer and Sojourner Truth were blended”. Further. “Du Bois’s concept of racial twoness at the beginning of the twentieth century was profoundly radical. With millions of Europeans arriving from religious and cultural backgrounds strikingly dissimilar to earlier immigrant infusions……..Du Bois was a decade ahead of the generation of mainstream younger artists and writers who would express their disenchantment with the Anglo-Saxon cultural paradigm by celebrating immigrants and workers, mounting scandal raising art shows, launching iconoclastic little magazines, and clamoring for social revolution.”
Dope. And let the church say Amen.
“Had Du Bois left double consciousness in this epiphenomenal limbo – as a sort of non-ego or psychic negative pole –the partial legacy of Souls would have been perpetual, devastated psychic passivity. But Du Bois intended the divided self to be a phenomenon that was spiritually and socially evolving –one that would define itself through struggle and attain “self-conscious manhood” through “strife”. The German influences are unmistakable with their suggestion of materializing spirit and dialectical struggle, the whole surging process coming to concretion in das Volk – a mighty nation with a unique soul. It is as though the voices of Schopenhauer and Sojourner Truth were blended”. Further. “Du Bois’s concept of racial twoness at the beginning of the twentieth century was profoundly radical. With millions of Europeans arriving from religious and cultural backgrounds strikingly dissimilar to earlier immigrant infusions……..Du Bois was a decade ahead of the generation of mainstream younger artists and writers who would express their disenchantment with the Anglo-Saxon cultural paradigm by celebrating immigrants and workers, mounting scandal raising art shows, launching iconoclastic little magazines, and clamoring for social revolution.”
Dope. And let the church say Amen.
January 15, 2024
Among the questions resolved with the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in 1865 was that of whether slavery would continue to exist legally within the United States. Yet with the demise of slavery, a new issue arose: if the formerly enslaved people were no longer slaves, then what was their legal status? Answering this consumed the nation for decades afterward, and with the end of Reconstruction was left conditionally for the Southern states to resolve. What emerged by the end of the 19th century was a system of race-based restrictions known as “Jim Crow” laws passed by white-dominated state legislatures, which disenfranchised African-Americans and imposed a system of racial segregation that effectively made them a permanent underclass.
As this tide of racial segregation swelled in the 1890s, African-Americans debated over what was the best ways to overcome it. Among the most influential of these voices was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a pioneering sociologist and intellectual activist who denounced segregation for the artificial restrictions it imposed upon his people. That this became the central focus of his life is reflected in the subtitle of the first volume of David Levering Lewis’s award-winning biography of Du Bois, which seeks not just to recount Du Bois’s remarkable life and career, but to set as well within the context of a civil rights movement of which he became a leading member.
Du Bois himself was among the best examples of the falsity of the claims of inferiority on which segregation was based. Growing up in western Massachusetts in the aftermath of the Civil War, Du Bois enjoyed opportunities that African-Americans in the South were in the process of losing. His intellectual gifts were evident at an early age, and they inspired the members of his community to support his education at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville. This proved the beginning of a remarkable educational career, one that led to graduate study in Germany and culminated in Du Bois becoming the first African-American ever to earn a doctorate at Harvard University. This record of academic success made Du Bois a celebrity within his community, and ensured him no shortage of job offers.
After a brief period teaching at Wilberforce University, Du Bois embarked upon a series of sociological studies on African-American communities throughout the United States. These were all the more impressive for the travails Du Bois overcame to research them, which Lewis describes in detail. With funding dependent on the whims of a handful of philanthropic institutions, Du Bois collected much of the data himself through personal interviews with African-Americans living in various communities. The reports these efforts produced cemented his reputation as one of the rising stars among African-Americans, and ensured that his views enjoyed a wide audience at conferences and in print.
Du Bois’s work challenged many of the stereotypes then forming about African-Americans, which had been used to justify the introduction of Jim Crow. This led him to pose a direct challenge to the segregationist regime then in the ascendant in the United States, a decision which put him at odds with Booker T. Washington. Though Lewis notes that the two shared similar positions on many issues and Washington often courted Du Bois for a remunerative position at his Tuskegee Institute, Du Bois balked at Washington’s accommodationist response to segregationist measures. Lewis sees Du Bois’s reaction to the brutal lynching and disfigurement of Sam Hose as pivotal in his turn towards activism, which built upon his scholarship to make a case for African-Americans taking charge of their own fate through the development of their own leadership rather than deferring to whites.
The challenge to Washington’s approach found its clearest expression in Du Bois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, which argued for the “intellectual and cultural parity” of African Americans and whites. And while Lewis downplays any personal conflict between the two men, he describes the growing polarization of African-American leaders around the positions they asserted. As violent episodes in Brownsville, Texas and Atlanta discredited Washington’s advocacy of accommodation, more people were drawn to Du Bois’s calls for greater activism. This culminated in 1909 with the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which soon became the country’s foremost civil rights organization. In his role as the body’s Director of Publicity and Research, Du Bois became the editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine The Crisis, which he built up into a formidable platform while battling with other members over the purpose of their group. Yet Du Bois often found himself fighting in vain against segregation’s advancement. Frustrated with African-American voters being taken for granted by Republicans, he encouraged his readers to vote for Woodrow Wilson in 1912, only to watch the Southern-born Democrat introduce segregation into the federal government. And despite America’s entry into the First World War, Du Bois’s hopes that worthy Black officers would receive overdue promotions to high command were crushed by the increasing relegation of African-American servicemen to menial tasks commanded by white officers.
For all his disappointment, though, Du Bois recognized that the war created opportunities for the pan-African cause with which he was long associated. And while white Americans greeted the end of the war with a new wave of racial hostility, Lewis notes that Du Bois was not one to be deterred by setbacks. His efforts during the years covered in this book would indeed bear fruit in the decades that followed with achievements that were all the more impressive for the obstacles that had been overcome to accomplish them. In recounting them, the author provides a study of the man and his era that lives fully up to the scope promised by the subtitle of his book. More than just a biography of Du Bois, it is an excellent study as well of how African-Americans laid the foundation for the victories won by the civil rights movement against segregation in the generations that followed, many of which Du Bois lived to witness. The last part is a story that Lewis reserves for the second volume of his monumental work, which together comprises the definitive account one of the great intellectuals and activists of American history.
As this tide of racial segregation swelled in the 1890s, African-Americans debated over what was the best ways to overcome it. Among the most influential of these voices was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a pioneering sociologist and intellectual activist who denounced segregation for the artificial restrictions it imposed upon his people. That this became the central focus of his life is reflected in the subtitle of the first volume of David Levering Lewis’s award-winning biography of Du Bois, which seeks not just to recount Du Bois’s remarkable life and career, but to set as well within the context of a civil rights movement of which he became a leading member.
Du Bois himself was among the best examples of the falsity of the claims of inferiority on which segregation was based. Growing up in western Massachusetts in the aftermath of the Civil War, Du Bois enjoyed opportunities that African-Americans in the South were in the process of losing. His intellectual gifts were evident at an early age, and they inspired the members of his community to support his education at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville. This proved the beginning of a remarkable educational career, one that led to graduate study in Germany and culminated in Du Bois becoming the first African-American ever to earn a doctorate at Harvard University. This record of academic success made Du Bois a celebrity within his community, and ensured him no shortage of job offers.
After a brief period teaching at Wilberforce University, Du Bois embarked upon a series of sociological studies on African-American communities throughout the United States. These were all the more impressive for the travails Du Bois overcame to research them, which Lewis describes in detail. With funding dependent on the whims of a handful of philanthropic institutions, Du Bois collected much of the data himself through personal interviews with African-Americans living in various communities. The reports these efforts produced cemented his reputation as one of the rising stars among African-Americans, and ensured that his views enjoyed a wide audience at conferences and in print.
Du Bois’s work challenged many of the stereotypes then forming about African-Americans, which had been used to justify the introduction of Jim Crow. This led him to pose a direct challenge to the segregationist regime then in the ascendant in the United States, a decision which put him at odds with Booker T. Washington. Though Lewis notes that the two shared similar positions on many issues and Washington often courted Du Bois for a remunerative position at his Tuskegee Institute, Du Bois balked at Washington’s accommodationist response to segregationist measures. Lewis sees Du Bois’s reaction to the brutal lynching and disfigurement of Sam Hose as pivotal in his turn towards activism, which built upon his scholarship to make a case for African-Americans taking charge of their own fate through the development of their own leadership rather than deferring to whites.
The challenge to Washington’s approach found its clearest expression in Du Bois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, which argued for the “intellectual and cultural parity” of African Americans and whites. And while Lewis downplays any personal conflict between the two men, he describes the growing polarization of African-American leaders around the positions they asserted. As violent episodes in Brownsville, Texas and Atlanta discredited Washington’s advocacy of accommodation, more people were drawn to Du Bois’s calls for greater activism. This culminated in 1909 with the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which soon became the country’s foremost civil rights organization. In his role as the body’s Director of Publicity and Research, Du Bois became the editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine The Crisis, which he built up into a formidable platform while battling with other members over the purpose of their group. Yet Du Bois often found himself fighting in vain against segregation’s advancement. Frustrated with African-American voters being taken for granted by Republicans, he encouraged his readers to vote for Woodrow Wilson in 1912, only to watch the Southern-born Democrat introduce segregation into the federal government. And despite America’s entry into the First World War, Du Bois’s hopes that worthy Black officers would receive overdue promotions to high command were crushed by the increasing relegation of African-American servicemen to menial tasks commanded by white officers.
For all his disappointment, though, Du Bois recognized that the war created opportunities for the pan-African cause with which he was long associated. And while white Americans greeted the end of the war with a new wave of racial hostility, Lewis notes that Du Bois was not one to be deterred by setbacks. His efforts during the years covered in this book would indeed bear fruit in the decades that followed with achievements that were all the more impressive for the obstacles that had been overcome to accomplish them. In recounting them, the author provides a study of the man and his era that lives fully up to the scope promised by the subtitle of his book. More than just a biography of Du Bois, it is an excellent study as well of how African-Americans laid the foundation for the victories won by the civil rights movement against segregation in the generations that followed, many of which Du Bois lived to witness. The last part is a story that Lewis reserves for the second volume of his monumental work, which together comprises the definitive account one of the great intellectuals and activists of American history.
March 1, 2020
Do I get a medal? Please tell me I get a medal! I feel like I deserve a medal.
Let me quote a SENTENCE from the book:
With Du Bois selecting or writing most of its copy, weekly subject matter included both domestic (paving roads in Fort Smith, Arkansas; an Oswald Village high school address in Washington, D.C.; a race riot in Springfield, Ohio; the novelist Lew Wallace's alleged African ancestry; Alabama disfranchisement) and international (commerical, political, or racial developments in Barbados, Libereria, and Zululand) events.
Yes, that is one sentence and it is not unusual for the book.
I read this book and I expected a lot. Lewis is one of a handful of authors to win multiple Pulitzer Prize's for biography and the only one to win multiple Prizes for the same subject. I expected a Robert A. Caro quality book. I was severely disappointed.
There is a lot of good writing in this book (particularly in the last third), but the story is lost in Lewis' desire to name drop. For example, he mentions how Clarence Darrow called for the legalization of interracial marriages---but who is Clarence Darrow? I know. But the reference misses something because Lewis doesn't provide any more information on Darrow than the fact that he called for the legalization of interracial marriages.
And there are so many more cases wherein he drops a name without context or meaning. Wherein he alludes to an event. IF you are familiar with the name or event, then you go "wow!" But if you aren't familiar with them, you wonder why the name/event was dropped. Unfortunately, this occurs on almost every page.
I think there is a really good 300 page book in here.
PS can I get my medal now?
Let me quote a SENTENCE from the book:
With Du Bois selecting or writing most of its copy, weekly subject matter included both domestic (paving roads in Fort Smith, Arkansas; an Oswald Village high school address in Washington, D.C.; a race riot in Springfield, Ohio; the novelist Lew Wallace's alleged African ancestry; Alabama disfranchisement) and international (commerical, political, or racial developments in Barbados, Libereria, and Zululand) events.
Yes, that is one sentence and it is not unusual for the book.
I read this book and I expected a lot. Lewis is one of a handful of authors to win multiple Pulitzer Prize's for biography and the only one to win multiple Prizes for the same subject. I expected a Robert A. Caro quality book. I was severely disappointed.
There is a lot of good writing in this book (particularly in the last third), but the story is lost in Lewis' desire to name drop. For example, he mentions how Clarence Darrow called for the legalization of interracial marriages---but who is Clarence Darrow? I know. But the reference misses something because Lewis doesn't provide any more information on Darrow than the fact that he called for the legalization of interracial marriages.
And there are so many more cases wherein he drops a name without context or meaning. Wherein he alludes to an event. IF you are familiar with the name or event, then you go "wow!" But if you aren't familiar with them, you wonder why the name/event was dropped. Unfortunately, this occurs on almost every page.
I think there is a really good 300 page book in here.
PS can I get my medal now?
June 19, 2017
Du Bois was always a name I had heard of and wanted to learn more of his life. This first volume of this epic bio was truly a fascinating book. I had no idea of the animosity that existed between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and how this complex relationship helped form modern racial theory for good and bad. Also, I never knew how African Americans were so impacted by World War I in ways that affected their livelihoods globally, both by racism at home and abroad. (Now, on to the second volume!)
July 4, 2020
I wrote my senior college paper on this book right after it came out. I learned so much about this country from reading it. It’s formed part of who I am.
December 31, 2020
I hugely enjoyed reading the one-volume history of W.E.B. Du Bois. Spoiler alert: my review isn't for the volume listed above. I read the 2009 "W. E. B. Du Bois: a Biography" by David Levering Lewis. That book combines the material of the two volumes for which Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize. His editing is so precise that the reader would never know that anything was shortened except that it is acknowledged at the beginning. Even with editing, this is a meaty volume and is just as enjoyable, but faster to read than the original two volumes. In fact, I found the writing to be of the highest quality. This is a book that is hard to put down.
Lewis shows how Du Bois's work influenced the course of civil rights for African Americans by his uncompromising demand for full civil rights. He shone a harsh light the common paternalistic practice of holding out the promise of full equality for Blacks in American society until some indefinite future date in return for refraining from agitation for legal and social rights. His was a loud voice for airing and challenging the legitimacy of lynchings and Jim Crow laws. He also was a leading advocate for justice for Africans who were living under European colonial domination. His many personal efforts for racial justice were joined by the widespread influence of his prolific writings, both in the NAACP publications and in books. He notably wrote powerfully of the injustices, and the deceptions, of the country's editorial and educational establishments regarding Reconstruction in his "Black Reconstruction in America".
I was very happy to find this volume to read and to discover the writings of David Levering Lewis. In this particular instance, the importance of reporting on the life of one of the most important, if not universally read authors and speakers of the first half of the twentieth century was accomplished in this honest, detailed and articulate work of literature.
Lewis shows how Du Bois's work influenced the course of civil rights for African Americans by his uncompromising demand for full civil rights. He shone a harsh light the common paternalistic practice of holding out the promise of full equality for Blacks in American society until some indefinite future date in return for refraining from agitation for legal and social rights. His was a loud voice for airing and challenging the legitimacy of lynchings and Jim Crow laws. He also was a leading advocate for justice for Africans who were living under European colonial domination. His many personal efforts for racial justice were joined by the widespread influence of his prolific writings, both in the NAACP publications and in books. He notably wrote powerfully of the injustices, and the deceptions, of the country's editorial and educational establishments regarding Reconstruction in his "Black Reconstruction in America".
I was very happy to find this volume to read and to discover the writings of David Levering Lewis. In this particular instance, the importance of reporting on the life of one of the most important, if not universally read authors and speakers of the first half of the twentieth century was accomplished in this honest, detailed and articulate work of literature.
November 16, 2020
A justifiably hefty book, Lewis' first biography of Du Bois recounts the civil rights legend's childhood, college years at Fisk then Harvard, his study abroad, the authorship of "The Souls of Black Folk" and most importantly, Du Bois' seminal work as a professor/organizer at Atlanta University and as an editor for "Crisis" magazine, the polemical arm of the NAACP (which Du Bois co-founded). His was a life full of purpose and meaning, commitment and courage. Du Bois recognized nothing defined 20th century America as much as "the color line." So far, you can say the same about the 21st century, too.
December 26, 2024
Indispensable. Foundational. Essential. Monumental. All the words you can think of. If you want to know the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, in additional to the myriads of particular studies of aspects of his long and prolific life, the backbone biography is Lewis's two-volume, 1000+ pages (combined), Pulitzer prize winning biography. I've finished only the first volume and it is wonderful. Du Bois is on the very short list of figures for me that I plan to be reading for the rest of my life--I haven't made it out of the 1900s yet, for goodness sake! If you have any interest in Du Bois, you owe it to yourself to work through Lewis.
May 4, 2019
This volume makes you feel a sense of time and historical progression in the scale of human lifespans like very little else I've read ever has. The beginning delves into a lot of the kind of personal specifics that I tend not to enjoy such a focus on in biographies, but this sets up a phenomenally deep work that tracks Du Bois' life in parallel with the trajectory of racial politics in the US from the end of reconstruction through the first two decades of the twentieth century
September 19, 2020
A very well written work.
DuBois' first 50 years offer so much context and detail that the reader can literally (re)learn American history--with a careful read of this book.
There are many citations and notes and a "thick" description of historical moments.
DuBois' first 50 years offer so much context and detail that the reader can literally (re)learn American history--with a careful read of this book.
There are many citations and notes and a "thick" description of historical moments.
September 27, 2020
What a great read. Extremely informative, well written with great detail of a great American up to the end of WWI. After reading I can see why it won a Pulitzer Prize. I look forward to the second volume of this masterful work.
September 3, 2022
Brilliant and inspiring. My favorite biographies locate the subject in historical context, and DuBois's fascinating life is a microcosm of his time. This volume follows DuBois from Reconstruction through WWI, documenting his tireless scholarship and his constant self-reinvention.
June 11, 2016
Essential.
July 25, 2022
this was a behemoth
December 18, 2022
Pulitzer, Bancroft, etc winner. Not sure that I can add anything to the existing accolades. Going to take a break before starting volume 2.
July 22, 2020
I haven't read this whole thing. I slogged through about 150 pages, and then flipped through it. There's some meaty content regarding the DuBois/Washington struggle, and I can honestly say this is a scholarly, carefully researched volume. It appears to be the go-to biography of this luminary, but it is dry, dry, dry. I don't have to read all of it and so it's going on the bookshelf as research material.
For those that are seriously studying DuBois or any of the issues or events he was associated with, I recommend this title. I only wish that Lewis was as articulate as his subject; but then, almost nobody is.
For those that are seriously studying DuBois or any of the issues or events he was associated with, I recommend this title. I only wish that Lewis was as articulate as his subject; but then, almost nobody is.
September 26, 2012
When Wikipedia featured their article on the Lynching of Jesse Washington it reminded me that I had read Du Bois' classic The Souls of Black Folk and the Pulitzer prize-winning biography of its author's early years quite a few years ago. Both of these books are foundational readings bringing to light the struggle of black's in America after the civil war. Many would rate these books with 5 stars and perhaps I should as well. However, I haven’t done so primarily because I had all but forgotten reading them some five years ago and thus not having the lasting impression that a top rated book should have.
March 13, 2013
I found it really fascinating and tremendously sad with regard to the way African Americans have been treated ever since their ancestors were taken from their homelands. W.E.B. Du Bois was an incredibly gifted man who worked tirelessly to help his people achieve real equality and died just before the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s was passed. We fool ourselves as Americans that our nation was founded on principles of freedom and liberty -- it was, but only if you were white, male and well to do. Definitely worth reading.
June 25, 2014
I hope my local library has part II, because as thick as this book is, I felt kind of unfulfilled when I came to the end and ran out out of proper Du Bois mayhem.
Fascinating biography of a real social justice pioneer, but keep in mind that you will probably need to have a dictionary handy while you read this; Lewis has a huge vocabulary, and he puts in quite a few recondite terms that you don't see that much. I probably ended up looking about 20 words,at the very least.
Fascinating biography of a real social justice pioneer, but keep in mind that you will probably need to have a dictionary handy while you read this; Lewis has a huge vocabulary, and he puts in quite a few recondite terms that you don't see that much. I probably ended up looking about 20 words,at the very least.
January 15, 2009
This book is a bear! The detail is beyond anything I could have imagined. I wasn't up to the challenge and had to put it down halfway through. Really great discussion on the tensions between the Washington camp and those in DuBois's. It is hard to imagine this is ONLY part 1.
July 17, 2013
Lewis leaves no rock unturned in his biography of this great pillar of the academy. DuBois is undoubtedly one of America's foremost scholars.
March 26, 2016
This. Is. A. Brilliant. Book .
August 25, 2017
When one thinks of the scope of American History, there are few names that stand out. Chief among them is a man by the name of William Edward Burghardt DuBois, better known as W.E.B. DuBois. For nearly all of his life, wherever DuBois attended an academic institution, he excelled at the highest levels. Though he was reared in a predominately White town in Massachusetts, his academic gifts were so apparent that the White residents got together and secured funds to send him to college since his single mother was too indigent to do so. Despite the White residents "liberalism," they weren't liberal enough to send him across state, though his academic record qualified him, to enter Harvard. In the eyes of the White townsmen, he was still, "just a Negro," so color prejudice prevented him from attending the school of his choice. So, instead DuBois was sent South to attend the historically Black institution of Fisk University, where he excelled. DuBois, ever the supremely persistent, confident, ambitious person that he was, turned right around and took his behind to his unfinished business of graduating from Harvard, where he was allowed to enter as a junior, and ultimately graduated. He went on to graduate school in Germany, at a time when the University of Berlin was considered several levels above the level of Harvard. Imagine going to Germany, having to speak an unknown foreign tongue, then having to perform in that foreign tongue at what is considered the highest levels of academic life--that is what DuBois did, and once again, he excelled. He did so well, that his fellowship was cut off "because he was receiving (in the eyes of the White Gatekeepers) an education that was too high for a Negro." Oh well, guess what? DuBois would have to settle and compromise. So all he did was become the first African-American to get his PHD in History from Harvard. Some compromise, huh? He would go on to use all of his intellectual gifts to push for full representation for Black People as human beings, in every area of American life. He advocated that we should be allowed to pursue and move in directions wherever our talents took us. He debated this issue with Booker T. Washington who was mainly interested in "Industrial Education." DuBois wound up writing one of the masterpieces in American literary History with his "Souls Of Black Folks." This book, a book filled with cultural and emotional pride, was inspiration for another book called "Reality's Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture" by Thomas D. Rush. "Reality's Pen" has several relevant quotations from DuBois, and for anyone who enjoys his life's work, "Reality's Pen" is a treat. Everyone that ever knew DuBois praised him for the supreme loftiness of his intellect. Clearly, if all of DuBois documents were put in one place, they would certainly fill a small library. He was a pioneering sociologist, a productive Historian, a pioneering founder of the NAACP, and articulated, at some point in his life, nearly every conceivable liberation ideology that can be imagined for Black Americans to pursue our human and civil rights. One writer, Arnold Rampersad, in reviewing the life work of DuBois, wrote in his book "The Art & Imagination Of W.E.B. DuBois" the following: "By the time I finished reading the last of his many volumes of history, sociology, biography, autobiography, journalism, and fiction, I knew that I had been privileged to learn from the preeminent mind in black American intellectual history, and most likely, the preeminent mind among all Americans who have pondered the myriad consequences to the nation of its centuries of slavery, segregation and racism." (pg. vi). He goes on to wonder why DuBois would suffer the academic fate from American academia of neglect and insouciance. Throughout his life, DuBois fought tooth and nail against White Supremacy, NEVER accepting it and confidently holding himself, and his people, above the insanity of inferiority, and the equal of any and all human beings. As one Black journalist said of him in this volume of Levering-Lewis', "They could not look at him and call me inferior." (Pg. 3) This book is meticulously researched and written from a sympathetic, sagacious angle, capturing the vast comprehensiveness and brilliance of one of the greatest intellects that America has ever produced. Everything in this book captures the summary of DuBios' life, inherent in the previous quotation by Arnold Rampersad. For those of us with deep respect for DuBois, this volume of Levering-Lewis' 2 volume biography is like a gift from Heaven. There will probably never be a more meticulously written biography of DuBois' life, especially by someone who cares as deeply about DuBois and who writes from such a deep, personal understanding of him. All-in-all, this is an outstanding work written at the highest level of interpretation and scholarship. It is simply a job well done. This book is a gift to the ages and I am thankful for it.
February 8, 2011
I finally got around to this book given to me by my high school history teacher on graduation just in time for Black History Month. I knew very little about DuBois prior to reading these 600 pages on only the first half of his life. The biography covered a difficult time in America's history (1868-1919) that I hadn't covered before. This is a meticulously researched book that's dense at times, but still quite an enjoyable read.
August 24, 2020
The opening chapter is SUPER overly-detailed and I was concerned at how badly written it is, given there’s 600 pages of tiny typeface in this book (plus endnotes). I decided to keep going anyway. To a certain extent, that was a mistake, because the book is the equivalent of 800-1000 pages of a normal typeface and sized book, and yet it stops dead halfway through Du Bois’ life with no summary of what he did later. You’re expected to go pick up David Levering Lewi’s sequel of equal length! I do not have that level of interest. If, however, you are someone who wants to know which on days of the week each of Du Bois’ college courses were held, this book is glad to tell you! I am a stubborn fool who forces myself to finish books when I really shouldn’t. There were just enough interesting anecdotes in this book to help feed my self-flagellation to keep reading.
Something that stands out in chapter after chapter is how Du Bois re-wrote his past to make himself appear in a better light. The author frequently finds a comparison between Du Bois’ writings at the time and his autobiographies written later to reveal a changed story. It is rather self-serving. (It seems to be Du Bois’ arrogance combined with the common phenomenon of memory being suspect.)
Chapter two has extraneous details, speculation before presentation of facts, and clumsy writing. A good author does not ramble through their research and thought process in the final book, but instead presents the reader with what is actually most relevant to the main story, in this case, the biography of W.E.B. Du Bois and the world in which he lived.
Chapter three is an improvement, so I decided to keep reading a chapter a day when I could. (Basically every day for weeks I struggled to motivate myself to keep reading this overly detailed biography that was a heavy slog to get through.) Chpt 3 covered Du Bois’ youth in Great Barrington, and there was much of interest in his foundation years. So many of the big men in black nineteenth century history had early lives shadowed by slavery, but Du Bois grew up post-Civil War in a small New England industrial town. There are still the author’s unnecessary details and digressions, confusing sentences or needlessly long sentences, and the clumsy name-dropping without proper introduction of new characters, but overall this was a more manageable chapter to read.
The Oedipal theory stuff is belabored, inconsistently applied, and sloppily written. Not to mention an out-dated theory (though more popular when this book was written). It is interesting to read in Chapt 4 of the changes Du Bois begins in college in his personal growth, and that he returned to teach in a one room school in the south a second summer, despite saying it was a terrible experience after the first time. I was surprised that the author quickly glosses over Du Bois’ statement about being raped (I’m guessing it happened the second summer, as he wouldn’t have wanted to live with the perpetrator, his landlady, once again if it had taken place the first year). Rape is serious no matter whether inflicted on a man or a woman, and the author acknowledged that Du Bois expresses his later sexual experiences as colored by the way he lost his virginity. The author seemed blasé about the chances of pregnancy and the conservative sexual mores of Du Bois’ New England Victorian village world-view, instead smugly wondering why Du Bois didn’t lose his virginity sooner (and throwing out some silly Oedipal theories). It was not at all unusual for Du Bois, with his upbringing, to wait to explore his sexuality; altogether the author mishandled this event in Du Bois’ life.
The author is surprised that Du Bois “had never even heard of Phi Betta Kappa” (an invitation-only academic honors society that means little other than bragging rights, as far as I can tell) when he arrived at Harvard College. I had not heard of it either until part way through graduate school, when someone mentioned it in an off-hand manner and I went and looked it up later. Is it really that unusual not to have heard of it?
Thankfully, the book improves around 100 pages in, though there is still plenty of name-dropping and confusing passages that will be especially problematic to anyone not a dedicated historian.
So many white people wonder aloud why blacks don’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps given that their own white immigrant ancestors supposedly managed to do so. Here are some fantastic Du Bois quotes that answer that misguided assumption:
“...the difference is that the ancestors of the English and the Irish and the Italians were felt to be worth educating, helping and guiding because they were men and brothers.”
And
“No differences of social condition allowed any Negro to escape from the group, although such escape was continually the rule among Irish, Germans, and other whites.”
And
“...Philadelphia has said to its black children: ‘Honesty, efficiency, and talent have little to do with your success; if you work hard, spend little and are good you may earn your bread and butter at those sorts of work which we frankly confess we despise”
Consider how upset a white rich trustee of Tuskegee Institute was to learn that students were studying natural philosophy, ancient history, and civil government; he immediately demanded that Booker T. Washington stick to educating them in the manual labor trades instead. Black people were literally denied opportunities to earn a living wage, join union jobs, or uplift themselves through education. (Page 197. I recommend the excellent biography “Up from History” for more information on the challenges Washington faced. For all the hype, which the Du Bois biography mostly perpetuates, about manual or industrial education at Tuskegee, it was primarily a teacher-training college and most of its graduates were teachers. The book also reveals the anti-racism work that Washington secretly funded because he was in constant threat of assassination from whites who thought his uplift message went too far even if he couched it in industrial training language. The Du Bois biography does talk about some of Washington’s challenges and secret civil rights work pages 257-258.)
Pages 277-291 give an essay by essay summary and commentary on Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” Helpful if you haven’t read that book, and also discusses ways in which Du Bois’ thinking was ahead of his times, behind the times, embarrassing, or changed later.
Some excellent Du Bois quotes from his “Address to the Country” in 1906 (pg 33):
“We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and to assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave—a by-word and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments.”
And
“Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?”
Page 385 the author states that Du Bois realized that his many attempts to solve the “race problem” through scholarship, speeches, articles, and scientific sociological studies, was not going to be any more successful at making cultural, political, or economic change in the U.S. than Booker T. Washington’s public lauding of hard work and good behavior. The many set-backs of influential or government employed white people ignoring or hiding Du Bois’ work pointed out to him that he would have to change tactics to affect change. He turned himself to journalism to promote the various causes and problems of struggling black America by running and writing most of The Crisis magazine, tied to the fledgling NAACP.
Chapter 16 the author shows the emotional and physical distance between Du Bois and his first wife Nina, blaming both Nina’s lower intelligence compared to Du Bois and Du Bois’ spending most of his time living elsewhere and not corresponding with his family. The author faults Nina for her homely concerns and praises Du Bois’ work, intellectual achievements, and support for women’s suffrage, yet fails to acknowledge that Du Bois was able to devote all his energy to his work precisely because he had someone else who was entirely focused on the home front (who benefited poorly, if at all, from any feminism of Du Bois’). Although author Lewis acknowledged later in the chapter that Du Bois could be unfair, bullying, and always patriarchal in his relationship with his wife and daughter, he continues to use Du Bois’ career achievements as an excuse not to criticize Du Bois for his mistreatment of his family. Without comment, Lewis mentions several vacations that Du Bois takes by himself without his wife and daughter, and also several known adulterous affairs that Du Bois kept running for years. It seems to me that many biographers fall in love with their subjects, and here I notice clearly Lewis’ failure to interrogate Du Bois’ misbehavior, neglect, and betrayal of his family.
page 502 back to the controversy between Du Bois and Washington that "was really not about" them but "would have emerged inevitably in one form or another. Essentially [their ideas/efforts] were responses by two African-American leadership groups to white supremacy as it existed in two regions of the United States. In that sense, Washington's impoverished, agrarian South, with its monocrop economy and biracial demographics, was no fit arena for the high-minded cultural and exigent civil agenda of the people for whom Du Bois spoke. Conversely, the lowest-common-denominator realities and patient abnegation embraced by Washington was no program for racial advancement in the urban, industrial, mutiethnic North. Du Bois and Washington, in speaking for two dissimilar socieconomic orders, were really speaking past each other rather than to the same set of racial problems and solutions; but Du Bois, for all his Victorian sensibilities and elitism, had the advantage of speaking to the future, while Washington, business-oriented and folksy, spoke, nevertheless, for the early industrial past."
I read up to the final chapter. I flipped through the final chapter and saw that it was not written to give a hint at Du Bois’ later life, and that I was expected to read another lengthy tome to learn the rest. At that point my self-preservation finally kicked in and I could no longer convince myself that I had to finish this deadly dry book about half of the life of an important writer & sociologist at the expense of my own very limited time and energy.
Something that stands out in chapter after chapter is how Du Bois re-wrote his past to make himself appear in a better light. The author frequently finds a comparison between Du Bois’ writings at the time and his autobiographies written later to reveal a changed story. It is rather self-serving. (It seems to be Du Bois’ arrogance combined with the common phenomenon of memory being suspect.)
Chapter two has extraneous details, speculation before presentation of facts, and clumsy writing. A good author does not ramble through their research and thought process in the final book, but instead presents the reader with what is actually most relevant to the main story, in this case, the biography of W.E.B. Du Bois and the world in which he lived.
Chapter three is an improvement, so I decided to keep reading a chapter a day when I could. (Basically every day for weeks I struggled to motivate myself to keep reading this overly detailed biography that was a heavy slog to get through.) Chpt 3 covered Du Bois’ youth in Great Barrington, and there was much of interest in his foundation years. So many of the big men in black nineteenth century history had early lives shadowed by slavery, but Du Bois grew up post-Civil War in a small New England industrial town. There are still the author’s unnecessary details and digressions, confusing sentences or needlessly long sentences, and the clumsy name-dropping without proper introduction of new characters, but overall this was a more manageable chapter to read.
The Oedipal theory stuff is belabored, inconsistently applied, and sloppily written. Not to mention an out-dated theory (though more popular when this book was written). It is interesting to read in Chapt 4 of the changes Du Bois begins in college in his personal growth, and that he returned to teach in a one room school in the south a second summer, despite saying it was a terrible experience after the first time. I was surprised that the author quickly glosses over Du Bois’ statement about being raped (I’m guessing it happened the second summer, as he wouldn’t have wanted to live with the perpetrator, his landlady, once again if it had taken place the first year). Rape is serious no matter whether inflicted on a man or a woman, and the author acknowledged that Du Bois expresses his later sexual experiences as colored by the way he lost his virginity. The author seemed blasé about the chances of pregnancy and the conservative sexual mores of Du Bois’ New England Victorian village world-view, instead smugly wondering why Du Bois didn’t lose his virginity sooner (and throwing out some silly Oedipal theories). It was not at all unusual for Du Bois, with his upbringing, to wait to explore his sexuality; altogether the author mishandled this event in Du Bois’ life.
The author is surprised that Du Bois “had never even heard of Phi Betta Kappa” (an invitation-only academic honors society that means little other than bragging rights, as far as I can tell) when he arrived at Harvard College. I had not heard of it either until part way through graduate school, when someone mentioned it in an off-hand manner and I went and looked it up later. Is it really that unusual not to have heard of it?
Thankfully, the book improves around 100 pages in, though there is still plenty of name-dropping and confusing passages that will be especially problematic to anyone not a dedicated historian.
So many white people wonder aloud why blacks don’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps given that their own white immigrant ancestors supposedly managed to do so. Here are some fantastic Du Bois quotes that answer that misguided assumption:
“...the difference is that the ancestors of the English and the Irish and the Italians were felt to be worth educating, helping and guiding because they were men and brothers.”
And
“No differences of social condition allowed any Negro to escape from the group, although such escape was continually the rule among Irish, Germans, and other whites.”
And
“...Philadelphia has said to its black children: ‘Honesty, efficiency, and talent have little to do with your success; if you work hard, spend little and are good you may earn your bread and butter at those sorts of work which we frankly confess we despise”
Consider how upset a white rich trustee of Tuskegee Institute was to learn that students were studying natural philosophy, ancient history, and civil government; he immediately demanded that Booker T. Washington stick to educating them in the manual labor trades instead. Black people were literally denied opportunities to earn a living wage, join union jobs, or uplift themselves through education. (Page 197. I recommend the excellent biography “Up from History” for more information on the challenges Washington faced. For all the hype, which the Du Bois biography mostly perpetuates, about manual or industrial education at Tuskegee, it was primarily a teacher-training college and most of its graduates were teachers. The book also reveals the anti-racism work that Washington secretly funded because he was in constant threat of assassination from whites who thought his uplift message went too far even if he couched it in industrial training language. The Du Bois biography does talk about some of Washington’s challenges and secret civil rights work pages 257-258.)
Pages 277-291 give an essay by essay summary and commentary on Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” Helpful if you haven’t read that book, and also discusses ways in which Du Bois’ thinking was ahead of his times, behind the times, embarrassing, or changed later.
Some excellent Du Bois quotes from his “Address to the Country” in 1906 (pg 33):
“We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and to assail the ears of America. The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth the land of the thief and the home of the slave—a by-word and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments.”
And
“Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?”
Page 385 the author states that Du Bois realized that his many attempts to solve the “race problem” through scholarship, speeches, articles, and scientific sociological studies, was not going to be any more successful at making cultural, political, or economic change in the U.S. than Booker T. Washington’s public lauding of hard work and good behavior. The many set-backs of influential or government employed white people ignoring or hiding Du Bois’ work pointed out to him that he would have to change tactics to affect change. He turned himself to journalism to promote the various causes and problems of struggling black America by running and writing most of The Crisis magazine, tied to the fledgling NAACP.
Chapter 16 the author shows the emotional and physical distance between Du Bois and his first wife Nina, blaming both Nina’s lower intelligence compared to Du Bois and Du Bois’ spending most of his time living elsewhere and not corresponding with his family. The author faults Nina for her homely concerns and praises Du Bois’ work, intellectual achievements, and support for women’s suffrage, yet fails to acknowledge that Du Bois was able to devote all his energy to his work precisely because he had someone else who was entirely focused on the home front (who benefited poorly, if at all, from any feminism of Du Bois’). Although author Lewis acknowledged later in the chapter that Du Bois could be unfair, bullying, and always patriarchal in his relationship with his wife and daughter, he continues to use Du Bois’ career achievements as an excuse not to criticize Du Bois for his mistreatment of his family. Without comment, Lewis mentions several vacations that Du Bois takes by himself without his wife and daughter, and also several known adulterous affairs that Du Bois kept running for years. It seems to me that many biographers fall in love with their subjects, and here I notice clearly Lewis’ failure to interrogate Du Bois’ misbehavior, neglect, and betrayal of his family.
page 502 back to the controversy between Du Bois and Washington that "was really not about" them but "would have emerged inevitably in one form or another. Essentially [their ideas/efforts] were responses by two African-American leadership groups to white supremacy as it existed in two regions of the United States. In that sense, Washington's impoverished, agrarian South, with its monocrop economy and biracial demographics, was no fit arena for the high-minded cultural and exigent civil agenda of the people for whom Du Bois spoke. Conversely, the lowest-common-denominator realities and patient abnegation embraced by Washington was no program for racial advancement in the urban, industrial, mutiethnic North. Du Bois and Washington, in speaking for two dissimilar socieconomic orders, were really speaking past each other rather than to the same set of racial problems and solutions; but Du Bois, for all his Victorian sensibilities and elitism, had the advantage of speaking to the future, while Washington, business-oriented and folksy, spoke, nevertheless, for the early industrial past."
I read up to the final chapter. I flipped through the final chapter and saw that it was not written to give a hint at Du Bois’ later life, and that I was expected to read another lengthy tome to learn the rest. At that point my self-preservation finally kicked in and I could no longer convince myself that I had to finish this deadly dry book about half of the life of an important writer & sociologist at the expense of my own very limited time and energy.
October 19, 2017
Although it only encompasses the first fifty years in the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, it is so crammed with information that you will be overwhelmed to remember all the names and places. Also, have a dictionary handy.
January 21, 2020
I LIKE THIS BOOK.
July 23, 2017
This is the first volume of a two volume biography. Both volumes won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Remember that my ratings are personal, not reflecting objective merit but rather my personal reaction. Objectively this is a stunningly detailed and well-researched biography of a fascinating man. As a graduated textbook it would be all one needs on the subject.
Du Bois was an intellectual giant excelling from his earliest days as a school boy, at Fiske, and at Harvard. His career was marked more by what he wrote than what he did. Yes, he was crucial to the NAACP and other national and international organizations, but mostly as a researcher and intellectual force. Unfortunately, for a non-academic that does not make for a gripping yarn. It does illuminate the competing threads of the black leadership, the DuBois and Booker Washington camps. Further, I knew relatively little about the emerging black intelligentsia of the post-civil war period. It was really my introduction to civil rights in this period. I just wish I hadn't had to wade through so much academia.
Remember that my ratings are personal, not reflecting objective merit but rather my personal reaction. Objectively this is a stunningly detailed and well-researched biography of a fascinating man. As a graduated textbook it would be all one needs on the subject.
Du Bois was an intellectual giant excelling from his earliest days as a school boy, at Fiske, and at Harvard. His career was marked more by what he wrote than what he did. Yes, he was crucial to the NAACP and other national and international organizations, but mostly as a researcher and intellectual force. Unfortunately, for a non-academic that does not make for a gripping yarn. It does illuminate the competing threads of the black leadership, the DuBois and Booker Washington camps. Further, I knew relatively little about the emerging black intelligentsia of the post-civil war period. It was really my introduction to civil rights in this period. I just wish I hadn't had to wade through so much academia.
March 6, 2024
This biography is a very scholarly introduction to one of the most pivotal, vocal leaders of the civil rights launch at the turn of the 20th century. The author David Lewis provides insight into William Dubois's temperament growing up in Great Barrington in a rarity where meritocracy, in a small town where racial demagogy was absent and abolitionists were collaborating to initiate reforms to eradicate the exploitation of the transatlantic slavery system. Dr. Dubois was able to excel at the top of his class and eventually become the figurehead for the birth of the NAACP.
I must admit this book is quite wordy and the prose style David Lewis used made getting from chapter to chapter a "bore". The ending of the book was left with an incomplete glimpse of what his later acts were beyond his fifties. The volume is overdue for a revamp. This book could be condensed from 600 pages to 300. The name drops without context to who this person was in relationship to Dr. Dubois left me leaving the realm of reading to do a quick Google search, not something that will have you glued, but rather doing random research as to who the person was.
I must admit this book is quite wordy and the prose style David Lewis used made getting from chapter to chapter a "bore". The ending of the book was left with an incomplete glimpse of what his later acts were beyond his fifties. The volume is overdue for a revamp. This book could be condensed from 600 pages to 300. The name drops without context to who this person was in relationship to Dr. Dubois left me leaving the realm of reading to do a quick Google search, not something that will have you glued, but rather doing random research as to who the person was.
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