. . . Reprinted from
      PROLOGUE
      (National Archives and Records Administration)
      Spring 1995, pp. 37-43

W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE DILEMMA OF RACE
by David Levering Lewis

     If, as Du Bois's 1903 classic THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK prophesies, the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, his 1940 memoir, DUSK OF DAWN, informs us that he sees himself virtually as the incarnation of that problem. Du Bois, who knew that he had little to be modest about, expounds upon the meaning of a race concept near the end of DUSK OF DAWN and thereby frames my large challenge as his biographer (W.E.B. DU BOIS: BIOGRAPHY OF A RACE, 1868-1919). I quote:

     I think I may say without boasting that in the period from
     1910 to 1930 I was a main factor in revolutionizing the
     attitude of the American Negro toward caste. My stinging
     hammer blows made Negroes aware of themselves, confident of
     their possibilities and determined in self-assertion. So
     much so that today common slogans among the Negro people are
     taken bodily from the words of my mouth.

     In its almost fabulous transcendence of place, time, and ultimately, even race, Du Bois's life holds large and enduring meaning. It bears the imprint of Afro-America's dilemmas from the post-Reconstruction era of the early 1870s to the civil rights revolution of the early 1960s. He was among the first of those American intellectuals who asserted that hyphenated Americans were not a cultural contradiction, as Woodrow Wilson once said, but the embodiment of enriching diversity. And in order to give his cultural and aesthetic claims a strong foundation, Du Bois led the way, along with anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits, in recovering the major lost civilizations of sub- Saharan Africa in books such as THE NEGRO and BLACK FOLK THEN AND NOW.

     Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in the year of the first Johnson's impeachment and died ninety-five years later, on the eve of the March on Washington, in the year of the second Johnson's installation. In these ninety-five years, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois cut an astonishing swath through four continents (his birthday was once a Chinese national holiday), pioneering in sociology and history while writing with confident provocation in other fields of the social sciences and the humanities. The first Harvard Ph.D. of his race, whose 1895 dissertation, THE SUPPRESSION OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE, became the first monograph of the influential Harvard Historical Series, his next book, THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO, virtually invented the field of urban sociology. The premier architect of civil rights in the United States, he was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well as the architect of Pan-Africanism. Educator, editor, propagandist, novelist, playwright, and senatorial candidate from New York, he founded an incomparable journal of opinion, THE CRISIS, when he was forty-two, the scholarly review PHYLON at seventy-one, and the prospectively influential ENCYCLOPAEDIA AFRICANA at ninety-two.

     Always a controversial figure, he espoused racial and political beliefs of such variety and seeming contradiction as to bewilder and alienate as many Americans, black and white, as he inspired or converted. Beneath the shifting complexity of alliances and denunciations, nevertheless, there was a pattern, a cohering of inclinations, experiences, and ideas, more and more inclining Du Bois to a vision of society that became, in contrast to the lives of most men and women, increasingly radical as he grew older, until the day when the civil liberties maverick was supplanted by the full-blown marxist. A proud, solitary man, awesome to most people, courtly with associates, Du Bois was on intimate terms probably with no more than six or seven men during his long life. With women, Du Bois was more accessible; he was in fact enormously attractive to most women and deeply loved by several. His monumental book, BLACK RECONSTRUCTION, is dedicated to one inamorata--in Latin, to be sure. One of the most vociferous male feminists of the early twentieth century (his essay, "The Damnation of Women," can still quicken pulses), Du Bois often fell somewhat short of his principles in his most intimate dealings with women.

     What became very clear to me early on in my research for my book is that the "world according to Du Bois" is one of facts deftly elided and masterfully molded in those almost hypnotically lyrical books he wrote about himself and his times. The more one probes those early years in the little town of Great Barrington in the Berkshires, the more they turn out to have been magnificently transformed by the seductive prose in which THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, DUSK OF DAWN, A PAGEANT OF SEVEN DECADES, and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY are launched. A grand prose wherein the "golden river" flowing near his birthplace is in fact the polluted Housatonic River; the "mighty [Burghardt] clan" of his mother's people is in reality a hardscrabble band of peasant landholders clinging to postage-stamp-size holdings; the dashing cavalier father, Alfred Du Bois, is an army deserter and bigamist; and the "gentle and decent poverty" of his childhood is more often sharp and deep.

     In reality, his was a childhood both driven, but also increasingly burdened, by his natively bright, ambitious, invalid mother, and one lacking the ballast of a father. Du Bois's debonair mulatto father, Alfred, a Union army veteran, had arrived in the valley of the Housatonic and in a lightning sweep won and married Mary Burghardt, despite the dark suspicions of her father, Othello. Then, before his son was a year old, Alfred Du Bois vanished forever. Willie, as he was known in his youth, felt a bitter ambivalence toward both parents--toward the wayfaring father, whose desertion Du Bois could never face squarely, as well as toward his eccentric mother, whom he affected to adore, yet whose well-timed death in 1884 made it possible for her subconsciously guilty son to accept the church scholarship sending him away to college.

     The partial truths and blatant inaccuracies to be found in much of what Du Bois writes about his formative years are fairly unimportant in themselves. But they are essential to an understanding of the picture Du Bois wants to convey--that of the special and compelling vision of the classic Outsider, whose deep understanding comes from being simultaneously within and outside the dominant society. That Outsider vision came early, according to Du Bois, when a female student, a white newcomer to Great Barrington, repelled his overtures of friendship at school: "Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life, and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil." Du Bois proceeds then to pour into THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK these stunning words that ever since have been quoted as summing up the African predicament in America: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double- consciousness.... One ever feels his two-ness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

     By the time he graduated from Fisk in 1888, Du Bois was inclined to draw no distinction between his own fate and that of his fellow African Americans. "Through the leadership of men like myself and my fellows," Du Bois prophesied while at Fisk, "we were going to have these enslaved Israelites out of the still enduring bondage in short order." By the time he graduated from Harvard, prophecy merged with mysticism, as this midnight diary entry of our lonely hero, then a twenty-five-year-old University of Berlin graduate student, makes clear: "These are my plans: to make a name in science, to make a name in literature, and thus to raise my race. Or perhaps to raise a visible empire in Africa.... And if I perish--I perish." Such effusions remind us that the difference between madness and inspiration is largely a matter of persuading others to share the vision.

     We confront in Du Bois, then, a massive, multilayered, complex, and splendidly self-invented life. If it were ever desirable to try writing biography by committee, this was surely the subject to justify the effort. The density of material was a major consideration--110,000 items in the Du Bois correspondence alone; some 100 related manuscript collections; 20,000 pages of Freedom of Information Rorschach; 7,000 criss-crossed miles in the former Soviet Union; more than 200 oral history interviews conducted throughout the United States; a patient, sweltering quest for documents in West Africa; and a continent of secondary reading matter. For better or worse, however, this biography has been a solitary enterprise. It has also been fairly devoid of theoretical architecture, its chapter-by-chapter construction proceeding by fact, trial and error, and by dollops of intuition, empathy, and skepticism. At the risk of some confusion, and certainly at the price of justice to this long and rich life, permit me to focus on four developments--what I call turning points--in Du Bois's life, by way of illustrating some of the controversies, the interpretive difficulties, and the solutions. I limit myself to what was once a famous controversy between Du Bois and the incomparably puissant Booker T. Washington, to Du Bois's two explosive exits in 1934 and 1948 from the NAACP, to his quixotic quest for foundation money during the late 1930s in order to launch the ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE NEGRO, and, finally, to the hard turn to the Left during the 1950s.

     Among the new ways I have of looking at the Du Bois- Washington controversy is to highlight an obscure, critical moment in their relationship that was more important than has been realized, a personal wound that Du Bois later relegated to an autobiographical footnote. In both DUSK OF DAWN (1940) and the posthumous 1968 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, he mentions his defeated candidature for the assistant superintendency of the "colored" schools of the District of Columbia merely as another passing illustration of Booker Washington's perfidiousness. It was far more significant, however. Du Bois's once brilliant prospects as a sociology professor at Atlanta University were rapidly receding by 1900. The chill of Jim Crow, symbolized by Booker Washington's famous 1895 "cast down your buckets where you are" address in Atlanta, was bringing a philanthropic freeze to academically oriented African-American institutions like Atlanta University. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court's ratification of "separate but equal" in American race relations, had followed by one year what soon became known as the Atlanta Compromise. Compounding the professional difficulties experienced by Du Bois were deep family crises. His infant son, Burghardt, had died needlessly from diphtheria the previous summer because no competent physician could be found in the segregated city. His wife's sanity had been affected; she now loathed Atlanta fiercely. Du Bois himself confessed many years later that he had suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. Ambitious, restive, deeply troubled, Du Bois counted on the assistant superintendency to bring deliverance from family and professional travail.

     So anxious to leave Atlanta was he that, in his request to Booker Washington for a reference, Du Bois asked almost wheedlingly of his future nemesis (a man he would soon characterize as the Machiavelli of the Black Belt), "could I not serve both your cause and the general cause of the Negro at the national capital better than that elsewhere?"

     Although, oddly, it appears not to have survived, Booker Washington sent Du Bois a recommendation to pass along to the District officials. Then, the promising plans for leaving Atlanta were abruptly derailed. On March 11, 1900, a curious letter arrived from Booker Washington, fresh from conferring with powerful white men in New York:

     "If you have not done so, I think it not best for you to use
     the letter of recommendation which I have sent you.... Under
     the circumstances it would make your case stronger for you
     not to present the letter which I have given you for the
     reason that it would tend to put you in the position of
     seeking the position."

     Du Bois understandably blamed the Tuskegeean for the lost superintendency--who could be more deserving of the position than he, after all?--and Du Bois's friends in Washington were to conduct an unsuccessful no-holds-barred campaign to capture the public school position for Du Bois until 1907.

     The next turning point comes in early 1934, fourteen stupendous years after Du Bois had departed Atlanta University for the New York headquarters of the new NAACP. By then, he and his magazine, THE CRISIS, were widely perceived as the very embodiment of the NAACP's struggle for racial integration. In January and March, THE CRISIS carried two Du Bois editorials bearing the inflammatory titles, "Segregation" and "Separation and Self-Respect." Since American Negroes had to live with segregation, Du Bois called on them to turn it to their advantage. "It is impossible...to wait for the millennium.... It is," he continued, "the race-conscious black man cooperating together in his own institutions and movements who will eventually emancipate the colored race." He added quickly, "This is not turning back to the older program of Booker T. Washington." Du Bois's program was meant to be a mild form of socialism that would buy time and resources for black America until the private enterprise system was profoundly modified. As he fully anticipated, his editorials raised a fire storm, roiling the NAACP in an unprecedented internal dispute and stupefying that supreme organization man, Walter Francis White, the association's integrationist executive secretary.

     But why did he do it? Du Bois tells us that "by 1930, I had become convinced that the basic policies and ideals of the Association must be modified and changed." Electing to pursue litigation and lobbying rather than focusing on economic strategies, the NAACP's general staff gave only perfunctory attention to the deepening economic hardship assailing the great majority of black people as America appeared to unravel.

     Furthermore, the Depression plunge in circulation figures of his beloved CRISIS magazine (down from a peak 100,000 a month to 15,000) necessitated emergency loans from the NAACP's general budget and loss of editorial control to the adversarial Walter White and Roy Wilkins and the NAACP board of directors. Each week brought more hectoring memorandums from Wilkins and the young Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP's chief legal counsel, about office expenditures and editorial autonomy.

     His savings, along with his life insurance, wiped out, is it credible that a disgusted Du Bois decided to manufacture a suitably controversial departure? An early 1933 letter from his good friend at Atlanta University, John Hope, alludes to previous discussions between them, cryptically hurrying Du Bois to make up his mind about relocating to Atlanta by the time of their next chat in New York. What President Hope had in mind was for his good friend to chair the graduate program in sociology and help make Hope's newly restructured, Rockefeller-financed institution into a great university. If Du Bois the aggressive integrationist were to be tempered by Du Bois the militant exponent of separate racial development, his return to the South's leading African- American university would become considerably easier. The president would almost surely have told Du Bois that something quite dramatic, unexpected--like the two wholly unexpected and ambiguous editorials--had to be done in order to effect a transition from the fiery CRISIS to the stately halls of a Rockefeller benefaction. Du Bois certainly did not see his conduct as one of Jesuitical opportunism. He was simply taking the Negro race to another place, more congenial and better salaried, from which to continue the battle for civil rights.

     Now came what I take to be the third turning point in Du Bois's career--the fulfillment of a grand idea that had been with him since the turn of the century: the multivolume ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE NEGRO. "Cruel" is the word best describing the roller- coaster involving Du Bois and the major foundations over the funding of his titanic project of research and education. His old faith in the power of ideas, scientifically formulated, to make the world better had welled up again after a quarter-century of activism and propaganda. The encyclopedia project generated preliminary endorsements and promises of collaboration from much of the international scholarly community. After his 1935 funding application was rejected by the Rockefeller-dominated combine of four or five private foundations known as the General Education Board (or the GEB), he greatly revised and elaborated the proposal for resubmission, the Phelps Stokes Fund providing seed money. Growing national and even international support for Du Bois among world experts began to exert formidable pressures for foundation funding of the encyclopedia. Rather surprisingly, one of the GEB's principal officers, Jackson Davis, had become an encyclopedia convert, introducing Du Bois to the right New York notables, stroking his own trustees, and lobbying the Carnegie Corporation for favorable action on the Carnegie portion of the Du Bois grant application. Melville Herkovits, a competitor for foundation funds, began to fret about Du Bois bagging the $250,000 research budget.

     He need not have worried. Clearly, an encyclopedia encompassing the full range of race and race relations in America and directed by Du Bois was, to say the least, troubling to the custodians of social science orthodoxy. The seven-member executive committee of the GEB, Raymond B. Fosdick presiding and John D. Rockefeller III participating, rejected the encyclopedia at the beginning of May 1936. In his conference a few days later with Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel, the GEB's Jackson Davis paradoxically pleaded for favorable Carnegie consideration of the project. "Dr. Du Bois is the most influential Negro in the United States," Davis reminded Keppel. "This project would keep him busy for the rest of his life." Predictably, the Carnegie declined. Within a remarkably short time, the study of the Negro (generously underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation) found a quite different direction under Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish scholar then unknown in the field of race relations and whose understanding of American race problems was to be distinctly more psychological and less economic than was Du Bois's. When the president of the Phelps Stokes Fund wrote Du Bois in 1944 at the time of the publication of AN AMERICAN DILEMMA that "there has been no one who has been quite so often quoted by Myrdal than yourself," Du Bois savored the irony.

     Increasingly a whale in the Atlanta University puddle, Du Bois caused the successor to the deceased president John Hope considerable heartburn. In November 1944, the seventy-six-year- old professor was suddenly informed of his voluntary retirement from the university. Pressured by several members of the NAACP board, Walter White invited the septuagenarian back as an ornament. "They assumed that my days of work were over." The NAACP badly miscalculated. COLOR AND DEMOCRACY, Du Bois's anti- imperialist book, was at his publisher's in January 1945. That same month, his CHICAGO DEFENDER column, under the heading "Reason and Reality," adumbrated a new tough-mindedness, the beginning of the end of Du Boisian intellectual idealism. "I had, I believed, launched a program which was destined to settle the Negro problem," Du Bois modestly reminded his readers. "It was no pat panacea.... In one respect alone was it vulnerable, and that was whether the world would allow it to be done." Clearly, the world of the GEB, the Carnegie Corporation, and slavish Atlanta University trustees would not allow his scholarship to serve as a beacon to American race relations.

     Collaborating with Paul Robeson, Max Yergan, and Alphaeus Hunton of the Council on African Affairs, he convened an April 1945 conference (attended by Kwame Nkrumah) at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Collection. This Harlem meeting complemented the George Padmore-planned Pan African Congress meeting held in Manchester, England, in October, which he also attended as an active presiding officer.

     Appointed by President Roosevelt as a consulting delegate, along with Walter White and Mary McLeod Bethune, to the founding of the United Nations, in May 1945, Du Bois began what would become ever sharper public attacks upon the policies of an international body whose charter was silent about the rights of colonial peoples. Although the NAACP board had unanimously endorsed Du Bois's 1947 document "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America," by June 1948, new NAACP board member and UN delegate Eleanor Roosevelt made it plain that international circulation of the petition and repeated attempts at UN General Assembly presentation "embarrassed" her and the nation. By then Du Bois had virtually endorsed Henry Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy, denounced the Marshall Plan and NATO as capitalist aggression, and distributed an explosively detailed memorandum for restructuring NAACP national headquarters.

     Already shaken in 1947 by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s charges in LIFE magazine of communist infiltration, the NAACP chose Mrs. Roosevelt and fired Du Bois in September 1948. From then on, it was politics in earnest for Du Bois. This was the beginning of the fourth and final turning point. He plunged into the March 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, organized by Harlowe Shapley, Linus Pauling, and Lillian Hellman, chairing the writers' subcommittee with Norman Mailer and A.A. Fadayev at the Waldorf-Astoria and delivered an electric closing speech at Madison Square Garden. In April he gripped the huge audience attending the Paris World Peace Conference, flaying the Atlantic Pact, Truman, and imperialism. "Drunk with power," he exclaimed, the United States was "leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us; and to a third world war which will ruin the world." Next stop, Moscow, for another peace conference. Then in 1950, at eighty-two, he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York on the American Labor Party ticket. Out of five million voters, 205,000 liked his campaign speeches enough to vote for him.

     Parallel with his Senate race, Du Bois also served as a director of the new Peace Information Center (PIC), which raised funds and provided speakers to garner 2.5 million signatures for the Stockholm Peace Petition for nuclear disarmament. On July 13, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson attacked the PIC in the NEW YORK TIMES. The newspaper carried Du Bois's hard-hitting reply: "Have we come to the tragic pass," he asked, "where, by declaration of our own Secretary of State, there is no possibility of mediating our differences with the Soviet Union? Does it not occur to you, Sir, that there are honest Americans who, regardless of their differences..., hate and fear war."

     On February 9, 1951, he and the officers of the PIC were indicted in Washington as foreign agents in a Justice Department case that was so farcical that the judge threw it out in midtrial. Du Bois's published reaction, in his book IN BATTLE FOR PEACE (1952), struck a philosophical chord. But as his friends confirm, the experience was traumatizing. What wounded him so savagely was that, with the exception of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, poet Langston Hughes, and librarian Dorothy Porter- Wesley, the Talented Tenth (the professional and college-educated leadership favorably described by Du Bois at the beginning of the century) ran for cover, while large numbers of working-class black folk attended Du Bois fund-raisers across the country. Courage was in depressingly short supply during the McCarthy era of red-baiting.

     The emotional impact of the trial experience made him profoundly pessimistic about the cause that had engaged his long life. It was now that he concluded that, for the sake of underdeveloped peoples everywhere--but especially in the third world, all tactics that contained American capitalism were fair game. Dismissing civil rights advances, he concluded that socialism alone would lift American Negroes. Thus, because the enemies of his enemies were his friends in Africa and Asia, neither marxism's doctrinal shortcomings nor the Soviet Union's 1956 rampages in Eastern Europe shook his evolving communist commitment. His passport restored, Du Bois and his second wife, Shirley Graham, spent 1959 in red carpet travel through Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, adding to his 1959 Lenin Peace Prize honorary doctorates from ancient universities. In a private Kremlin talk with Nikita Khrushchev, he persuaded the Soviet premier to create immediately the Institute of African Studies in the Academy of Sciences.

     On October 1, 1961 (the anniversary of the Russian Revolution), Du Bois petitioned the Communist Party of the United States for membership. "Today, I have reached a firm conclusion," his letter reads in language that now sounds weirdly myopic. "Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self- destruction." Why did he do it at this time--at ninety-three, five years after Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin-era crimes and the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Poland, three years after the court-ordered return of his own passport, and two years into the Sino-Soviet split? What was the meaning of an act that imposed self-exile in West Africa just as lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom bus rides foreshadowed the beginning of the end of the racial segregation in America that Du Bois had spent his life fighting? Du Bois's splendidly mischievous admission at the end of his life was only a partial explanation. "I would have been hailed with approval if I had died at fifty," he said. "At seventy-five my death was practically requested." His affronted ego relished controversy. He had the intellectual's towering impatience with fools. His own life he came to see as one in which his exceptional achievements only served to prove the rule of racism. The urge to thumb his nose, to make one last, Homeric gesture of defiance, proved irresistible. Finally, he concluded that if the problem of the century was the problem of the color line, its solution could only be found in a strong Third World.

     In the early days, Du Bois had believed that advancement of the so-called "darker peoples" would come through wise policies based on scientific knowledge. In the sunset of his days, however, he came to believe in economic revolution and political force. Integrated lunch counters and public schools were fine in themselves but pathetically insufficient to solve the problem of the color line in America, he believed. The appearance of Martin Luther King, Jr., therefore, was something of an enigma for Du Bois. Musing about the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, an agnostic and anticlerical Du Bois admitted that he had expected to live to see many things but never a militant Baptist preacher. Interestingly, Martin Luther King's earliest assessment of W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of leadership was just as severe when he wrote in STRIDE TOWARD FREEDOM that it was "a tactic for an aristocratic elite who would themselves be benefitted while leaving behind the `untalented' 90 per cent." Du Bois admired King's courage, but even as lunch counters were integrated and the first federal civil rights act since Reconstruction enacted (1957), Du Bois predicted deepening class conflict within black America and superficial economic improvement at best in the lot of the great majority of black people. As for Martin Luther King, Du Bois finally decided in late 1959 that the nonviolent pastor was not Gandhi: "Gandhi submitted, but he also followed a positive program to offset his negative refusal to use violence."

     King's last words about W.E.B. Du Bois were spoken in Carnegie Hall just a few weeks before his own martyrdom. One hundred years to the day after Du Bois's birth--February 23, 1968 --he, James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, and others gathered courageously to pay tribute to the memory of the great, widely denounced intellectual and human rights propagandist. To thunderous applause, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference declared that the old warrior "confronted the establishment as a model of militant manhood and integrity. He defied them and though they heaped venom and scorn on him, his powerful voice was never still."

     Philosophically, politically, psychologically, Du Bois was ready to sign up and move on to another phase of Pan-Africanism. The inflexible truth he embraced was that, just as Africans in the United States "under the corporate rule of monopolized wealth ...will be confined to the lowest wage group," so the peoples of the developing world faced subordination in the global scheme of things capitalist. As he settled into the work of editing what had now become, through the benevolence of President Nkrumah of Ghana, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA AFRICANA, Du Bois was greatly consoled by his fully evolved vision. He was even thankful that, wise, aged humanist that he was, his life, in a sense, had left him no alternative but to come to such a vision. Ever the wordsmith of grand summation, he would sum up the real meaning of his life in the closing thoughts of his last autobiography: "Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born."

     (c) 1995 by David Levering Lewis

     Much of the material acquired under the Freedom of Information Act has limited value because of excessive deletions made in heavy ink by federal agencies overly protective of putatively sensitive matter and a misguided tendency to protect sources that no longer need protection.

     This essay is based on a talk given by Mr. Lewis at the National Archives on February 14, 1994, on his book W.E.B. DU BOIS: BIOGRAPHY OF A RACE, 1868-1919 (Henry Holt Company, 1993). The National Archives Office of Public Programs schedules author lectures throughout the year.

     David Levering Lewis is the Martin Luther King, Jr., University Professor in the history department of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His sixth and most recent book, W.E.B. DU BOIS: BIOGRAPHY OF A RACE, 1868-1919 (1993), won the 1994 Bancroft and Parkman Prizes for history and the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Lewis has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the National Humanities Center.