W. E. B. Du Bois

Shawn Leigh Alexander is associate professor and graduate director of African and African American studies and director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas, where he specializes in African American social and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published an anthology of T. Thomas Fortune's writings, T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator (2008); a study of African American civil rights activity in the post-Reconstruction era entitled, An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights before the NAACP (2012); a reprint of William Sinclair’s classic 1905 study, The Aftermath of Slavery: A Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro (2012); and a collection on racial violence after the Civil War, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings (2015).

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter 1: The Early Years Chapter 2: The Study of the Negro Chapter 3: Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Others: A Challenge of Leadership Chapter 4: Building Movements: The NAACP, Pan-Africanism, Garvey, and a Renaissance Chapter 5: Back to the Wings of Atlanta and the NAACP Redux Chapter 6: Marching towards PeaceA Note on SourcesIndexAbout the Authors

The Library of African-American Biography is to be commended for giving readers an accessible biography of one of the most prolific writers of the 19th and 20th centuries and a constant champion of civil rights. W. E. B. Du Bois deserves this sympathetic telling of his life story, a 95-year life that had many phases, bridging Reconstruction and the March on Washington. Alexander draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including Du Bois’s own voluminous writings, to chronicle his intellectual journey, downplay the oft-reported tensions with Booker T. Washington, give significant attention to Du Bois’s contribution to the founding and development of the NAACP, and describe Du Bois’s indefatigable role as editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, a 20th-century voice in the struggle to improve race relations in the US. The author also recounts Du Bois’s often-strident anti-colonial positions and the challenges he faced in the midst of the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.