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The Writings of W.E.B. Du Bois (two volumes)

The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade | The Souls of Black Folk | Dusk of Dawn | Black Reconstruction | essays More

Edited by Eric Foner, Nathan Huggins, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News “Funny thing happens in the life of a trope”: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston
July 27, 2023

Interviews The Wounded World: Chad L. Williams on a lost masterwork by W.E.B. Du Bois
April 20, 2023

Library of America presents in two volumes the most important writings of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.

The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States 1638–1870 (1896), his first book, renders a dispassionate account of how, despite ethical and political opposition, Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until a bloody civil war taught them the disastrous consequences of moral cowardice.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of beautifully written essays, narrates the cruelties of racism and celebrates the strength and pride of black America. By turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical, Du Bois pays tribute to black music and religion, explores the remarkable history of the Reconstruction Freedman’s Bureau, assesses the career of Booker T. Washington, and remembers the death of his infant son.

Dusk of Dawn (1940) was described by Du Bois as an attempt to elucidate the “race problem” in terms of his own experience. It describes his boyhood in western Massachusetts, his years at Fisk and Harvard universities, his study and travel abroad, his role in founding the NAACP and his long association with it, and his emerging Pan-African consciousness. He called this autobiography his response to an “environing world” that “guided, embittered, illuminated and enshrouded my life.”

Upon its publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction offered a radical new assessment of the post–Civil War era, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and, ultimately, the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Previously cast as a misguided, even villainous effort to impose an inverted and “unnatural” racial hierarchy on the defeated South, Reconstruction was for Du Bois nothing less than a milestone in the course of human history, “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”

Du Bois’s influential essays and speeches span the period from 1890 to 1958. They record his evolving positions on the issues that dominated his long, active life: education in a segregated society; black history, art, literature, and culture; the controversial career of Marcus Garvey; the fate of black soldiers in the First World War; the appeal of communism to frustrated black Americans; his trial and acquittal during the McCarthy era; and the elusive promise of an African homeland.
Table of Contents

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade

The Souls of Black Folk

Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept

Essays and Articles

Essays
Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization
The Conservation of Races
Careers Open to College-Bred Negroes
The Talented Tenth
The Negro in Literature and Art
Negro Education
An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War
The Souls of White Folk
The Hands of Ethiopia
The Damnation of Women
Marcus Garvey
The Black Star Line
A Lunatic or a Traitor
Criteria of Negro Art
So the Girl Marries
The Negro College
On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride
The Propaganda of History
The Revelation of Saint Orgne the Damned
The Trial
The Acquittal
A Vista of Ninety Fruitful Years
To an American Born Last Christmas Day
My Character

Articles from The Crisis
The Crisis (November 1910)
Agitation (November 1910)
Pink Franklin (February 1911)
Rampant Democracy
A Golden Wedding (June 1911)
Business and Philanthropy (June 1911)
I Am Resolved (January 1912)
A Mild Suggestion (January 1912)
An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson (March 1913)
Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson (September 1913)
Howells and Black Folk (November 1913)
The Three Wise Men (December 1913)
A Question of Policy-The Philosophy of Mr. Dole (May 1914)
Votes for Women (August 1914)
The Prize Fighter (August 1914)
Does Race Antagonism Serve any Good Purpose (September 1914)
From the “Boston Globe” (January 1915)
An Amazing Island (June 1915)
Woman Suffrage (November 1915)
A Singer (October 1916)
“We Should Worry” (June 1917)
Houston (October 1917)
The Black Man and the Unions (March 1918)
Paul Le Rol Robeson (March 1918)
Tillman (August 1918)
“Jim Crow” (January 1919)
Reconstruction and Africa (February 1919)
Returning Soldiers (May 1919)
Race Intelligence (July 1920)
An Open Letter to Warren Gamaliel Harding (March 1921)
The Negro and Radical Thought (July 1921)
President Harding and Social Equality (December 1921)
Charles Young (February 1922)
Abraham Lincoln (May 1922)
Ten Phrases (July 1922)
Again, Lincoln (September 1922)
On Being Crazy (June 1923)
The Tuskegee Hospital (July 1923)
The Technique of Race Prejudice (August 1923)
The Younger Literary Movement (February 1924)
The Challenge of Detroit (November 1925)
“Porgy” by DuBose Heyward (March 1926)
Books (Van Vechten’s “Nigger Heaven”) (December 1926)
Flood (July 1927)
Lynchings (August 1927)
The Name “Negro” (March 1928)
Robert E. Lee (March 1928)
DePriest (February 1929)
Gambling (January 1930)
Patient Asses (March 1930)
Protest (October 1930)
Books (March 1931)
Chestnut (January 1933)
The Right to Work (April 1933)
Our Music (July 1933)
Segregation in the North—“No Segregation”—Objects of Segregation—Boycott- Integration (April 1934)
William Monroe Trotter (May 1934)
The Board of Directors on Segregation (May 1934)
Counsels of Despair—The Anti-Segregation Campaign—Protest—Methods of Attack (June 1934)
Dr. Du Bois Resigns (August 1934)

Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880
To the Reader
I. The Black Worker
II. The White Worker
III. The Planter
IV. The General Strike
V. The Coming of the Lord
VI. Looking Backward
VII. Looking Forward
VIII. Transubstantiation of a Poor White
IX. The Price of Disaster
X. The Black Proletariat in South Carolina
XI. The Black Proletariat in Mississippi and Louisiana
XII. The White Proletariat in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida
XIII. The Duel for Labor Control on Border and Frontier
XIV. Counter-Revolution of Property
XV. Founding the Public School
XVI. Back Toward Slavery
XVII. The Propaganda of History
Bibliography

Other Writings
Of the Dawn of Freedom (1901/1903)
Reconstruction and Its Benefits (1910)
The Experts (1913)
The Reconstruction of Freedom (1924)

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