At the end of the decade, Du Bois would expound on his antiracist socialism in Dusk of Dawn (1940). “Instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers,” Du Bois put forward. The vertical cutting knife was constructed of centuries of racist ideas. “This flat and incontrovertible fact, imported Russian Communism ignored, would not discuss.”2 Du Bois’s antiracist socialism reflected his disenchantment with not just capitalism, but assimilationist thinking.
