Darkwater

The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Part essay, part autobiography, Darkwater explicitly addresses significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines. Reflecting the author's ideas as a politician, historian, and artist, this volume has long moved and inspired readers with its militant cry for social, political, and economic reforms for black Americans.

The greatest of the early civil-rights leaders, a figure of towering significance in American politics and letters., Du Boise ssentially defined black America in the 20th century with his notion of "double consciousness" - the idea that African Americans experience everything in this world both as Americans and as black people. Scholars have come up shaky in their efforts to update Du Bois's simple, but ingenious formula., Du Bois' philosophy is significant today because it addresses what many would argue is the real world problem of white domination.So long as racist white privilege exists, and suppresses the dreams and the freedoms of human beings, so long will Du Bois be relevant as a thinker, for he, more than almost any other, employed thought in the service of exposing this privilege, and worked to eliminate it in the service of a greater humanity., We need to view [Du Bois] not simply as the individual genius that he undoubtedly was. We need to view him and his life of struggle and achievement-and betrayal by his native land-as a metaphor for the essential meaning of black life in America. Advocate, statesman, negotiator, defender,champion, ambassador, griot, and peerless challenger of the system, Du Bois was all these things and more of-and for-our national self. . . . He was the best prime minister we ever had for our State That Never Was., [Du Bois was] the greatest of the early civil-rights leaders, a figure of towering significance in American politics and letters ... Remembered for his single-minded commitment to racial justice and his capacity to shape black consciousness, Du Bois used language and ideas to hammer out a strategy for political equality and to sound the depths of the black experience in the aftermath of slavery.

W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. He was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era.