Volume 48, Number 2 · February 8, 2001
The Double Life of W.E.B. Du Bois
By George M. Fredrickson
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963
by David Levering Lewis
Henry Holt, 715 pp., $35.00
One sign that there has been at least some progress in black–white relations during the past half-century is the admission of a small number of African-Americans to the pantheon of national heroes and exemplary leaders. Frederick Douglass is no longer just an escaped slave who became a follower of William Lloyd Garrison, but is now seen as standing at the forefront of the antislavery movement. Martin Luther King Jr. is honored with a national holiday not only because he was an African-American protest leader but even more perhaps for his role as an American Gandhi, the prophet who showed that basic change could come through nonviolence. For scholars of American cultural and intellectual history, if not yet more generally, W.E.B. Du Bois is now recognized as one of the greatest publicly engaged intellectuals in American history, which puts him in a class with Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey.
Review, 3905 words
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