W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963
by David Levering Lewis
Summary
David Levering Lewis closes his two volume life of W. E. B. Du Bois with the decades in which the scholar and activist who helped found the NAACP grew steadily more radical rather than less. The book picks up after the First World War, when Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1919 to organize the first Pan African Congress and to interview Black American soldiers about their treatment in uniform, returning home, in Lewis's account, more determined than before to press for full equality rather than gradual reform.
Lewis follows Du Bois through the 1920s dispute with Marcus Garvey, whose leadership Du Bois first called extraordinary before investigating the Black Star Line in the pages of The Crisis and denouncing Garvey as a threat to the movement's credibility, and through Du Bois's deepening embrace of socialism, which he had come to see as a genuine alternative to a capitalism he blamed for sustaining American racism. The book carries him through the following decades of continued Pan African organizing, worsening tension with the NAACP leadership that eventually cost him his position there, and an old age spent moving further left, including formal ties to Communist politics that made him a target of Cold War suspicion in a country that had once celebrated his early scholarship.
The volume closes with Du Bois's final years in Ghana, where he settled in 1961 after the United States refused to renew his passport, taking Ghanaian citizenship near the end of his life, and where he died in Accra in August 1963, at ninety five, essentially in exile from the country whose institutions he had spent his life trying to open. Lewis writes with the same command of primary sources that built the first volume, and reading the book means watching one of the twentieth century's most consequential Black intellectuals grow more uncompromising as America grew less willing to listen, a demanding but genuinely rewarding portrait for a reader willing to follow him all the way to Accra.
Historical Context & Significance
This concluding volume won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography over finalists H. W. Brands's The First American, a life of Benjamin Franklin, and Christoph Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. It also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The win gave Lewis two biography Pulitzers for two volumes on one subject, a double the prize had seen only once before, for Burton Hendrick's books on Walter Hines Page in 1923 and 1929, following the 1994 prize for the first volume, Biography of a Race, which had also won the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize.
Together the two volumes remain the standard modern biography of Du Bois, credited with restoring the full arc of a career that shorter earlier accounts had tended to compress into either the young sociologist of The Souls of Black Folk or the aging radical of his final years, rather than the single continuous life Lewis traces across both books.