W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919

David Levering Lewis's biography, the first of two volumes, follows W. E. B. Du Bois from his 1868 birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in a community relatively free of the overt segregation he would encounter later, through Fisk University, where he first experienced Jim Crow directly, and into Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in 1895 as the first African American to do so, having studied for a period in Berlin under scholars including Gustav von Schmoller. The book follows Du Bois's early scholarship, especially The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, one of the first empirical sociological studies of an American Black community, and The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, whose essays introduced the idea of double consciousness and named what Du Bois called the problem of the color line.

Lewis follows Du Bois's break with Booker T. Washington's accommodationist politics into open rivalry, tracing the 1905 Niagara Movement Du Bois helped organize and his role in the founding of the NAACP, where in 1910 he became editor of its magazine, The Crisis, building it into a publication with a hundred thousand subscribers by 1920 and a genuine platform against lynching and segregation. This volume closes in 1919, following Du Bois to the first Pan African Congress in Paris and covering his organization of the 1917 Silent Parade in New York, a march of roughly nine thousand people protesting the East St. Louis riots.

Lewis writes as a historian working from Du Bois's own vast archive of papers and correspondence, and reading the book means following the making of an intellectual and organizational leader across five decades before the more famous controversies of his later life. It suits a reader who wants the scholarly and organizational groundwork behind Du Bois's public reputation laid out in full detail.