“If we neglect to mark this history, it may be distorted or forgotten:” Socialism and Democracy in W.E.B. DuBois’s Life, Thought, and Legacy
The 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s birth in 2018 offers an opportunity to reflect on his remarkable life and legacy in light of his specific commitments to socialism and democracy. The current political period of neoliberalism’s extractive inequality, the debilitating reality of economic precarity, an expansive and invasive surveillance state, the grotesque injustice of the prison industrial complex, the ongoing crisis of police violence and the militarization of law enforcement, and a White House unashamedly spewing white supremacist, nationalist rhetoric in word and deed calls scholars and activists to undertake thoughtful and analytical explorations about how Du Bois’s commitments to socialism and democracy can inform current methodology and praxis. Considering such contemporary conditions, this issue collectively ponders how Du Bois’s radicalism can shape and re-texture historical understanding and underscore a reflective urgency about the future.
The act of commemoration—remembering history critically through the lens of current affairs in order to mobilize collective action—was a practice on which Du Bois regularly commented. From his earliest scholarly book published in 1896 on the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to the newspaper columns he wrote for The Crisis, Amsterdam News and other periodicals, to the poetry, prayers and plays he composed, to the final volume of historical fiction in the Black Flame trilogy published in 1961, Du Bois never failed to craft historical narrative, offer historical observations, and even deploy historiographical arguments that attended deeply to the humanity of African descended peoples. For example, in January 1957, six years before his death, Du Bois wrote “Negro History Centenaries” for the radical periodical National Guardian. He called for black individuals and organizations to commemorate anniversaries “which deeply affect the history of the Negro race and of his country.” Du Bois listed the centenary of the Dred Scot decision that year, and the centennial of John Brown’s death that was to occur in 1959. He suggested commemorating the Civil War’s anniversary in 1961 and acknowledging Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 100th birthday in 1972. “There are many other significant anniversaries which recall Negro history and the cultural tie of the black man with American history,” Du Bois wrote. However, he also warned that “If we neglect to mark this history, it may be distorted or forgotten.” Of the centennial celebrations themselves, Du Bois suggested that these events “should be occasions for calm and scientific inquiry into the past” instead of triumphalist or bombastic rhetoric heated to stoke “controversies or exacerbation of race hate.” According to Du Bois “persons of authority, white and black, Northern and Southern” should lead commemorative events since “[w]e must only be sure that every point of view has adequate and worthy representation.”1 Du Bois was keenly aware of the historical shifts through which he lived during his 95 years—even anticipating those anniversaries that he would not live to see—and sought to put into practice holistic knowledge production in the service of black liberation.
With the same attitude of purposeful commemoration, the sesquicentennial of Du Bois’s birth is part of a larger moment of remembering his life and times. Consider for example that 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of his death in Ghana. The occasion produced numerous recognitions not only about Du Bois’s history, but also about the potential for how scholars and activists could mobilize his ideas for contemporary currents of freedom work.
Scholars and artists gathered at Clark Atlanta University (CAU) and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) to reflect on Du Bois’s work and legacy. The late Amiri Baraka closed the CAU conference by reading from his play “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” a theatrical account of the anti-communist repression Du Bois experienced in the early 1950s due to his socialist advocacy. In mid-2015, about a year after Baraka died, the play premiered under Woodie King, Jr.’s direction at New York City’s New Federal Theatre. The CAU conference also inaugurated the re-launch of Phylon, a scholarly journal Du Bois founded in 1940 and edited until 1944.2 Meanwhile, at UMass Amherst the “Du Bois in Our Time” conference hosted leading Du Bois scholars and visual artists to consider in the present time the historical meaning of his enduring work and ideas. In an anthology of conference presentations and art, Loretta Yarlow, Director of UMass’s University Museum of Contemporary Art, emphasized Du Bois’s aesthetic imagination and called for a reconsideration of his work as both “a thinker and a humanist” and the impact of his ideas on contemporary social and political relations.3
The global newswire echoed similar sentiments. Literary scholar Keith Feldman’s Al Jazeera essay “A Haunting Echo: W.E.B. Du Bois in a Time of Permanent War” recalled the legacy of Du Bois’s “thick emancipatory dreams” to proclaim, “We need Du Bois today, perhaps more than ever.” After recounting the full-career focus of Du Bois on justice and equality and the occasion of his death on the eve of the March on Washington, peace activist, sociologist, and pastor Werner Lange commented, “It is high time for the roaring silence and/or gross distortions regarding DuBois to end. Fifty years after his death, let his prophetic voice be heard once again.”4
Similar commemorative gestures materialized in 2018. Both in the United States and across the world at universities and in town halls scholars and activists called their communities to action around Du Bois’s memory and legacy.5
China Global Television Network produced a short documentary titled “Ghana’s W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Center and the Pan African Spirit.” Filmed in Accra, it emphasized the global circulation of Du Bois’s life and legacy. The film’s narrative attributed an inspirational role of “Du Bois’s ideology” to Kwame Nkrumah’s work. Belinda Franklin Tetteh, the Center’s Program Director observed that “Dr. Du Bois was the driving force of the Pan-African spirit . . . it’s a continuous legacy, it’s a continuous revolution.”6 Similarly, peace, as sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter’s sesquicentennial transatlantic reflection points out, was part of that Pan-African legacy. Despite the precarious dimensions of black scholarly life today—something Du Bois experienced particularly in the 1950s—he commended reflection about Du Bois’s closing years in Accra where he imagined freedom dreams up to his final hour. “Until we live in a world in which it is safe to simultaneously advocate for peace and be Black without fear of death or defamation, to produce research that affirms the Black experience while challenging racial capitalism and White supremacy,” Hunter contends, “Du Bois’s birthday must serve as annual marker, a new Black holiday to work together, support, and love on each other so as to ensure that what happened to him on his birthday does not assail the liberatory potential of another brilliant Black mind again.”7
In Atlanta, a gathering at CAU recognized the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination and Du Bois’s sesquicentennial. Scholars and students representing a wide array of academic disciplines combined historical interpretation with current-day analysis through the lenses of racial and economic justice. Phylon plans to publish revised conference proceedings. Similarly, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania, Morgan State University, and Harvard University, among others, sought to mark Du Bois’s 150th birthday with presentations on contemporary social conditions in conversation with his historical significance.8
Online the African American Intellectual History Society hosted a “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” roundtable on its blog Black Perspectives. Similarly, the Sounding Out! blog, a creative clearinghouse for sound studies scholarship, organized an “Amplifying Du Bois at 150” forum. Essays published on both blogs examined Du Bois and politics, poetry, history, literature, war, philosophy, and his productivity as a public intellectual, subjects which offer profound historical insight for current day issues.9
In Du Bois’s hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, artists with the Railroad Street Youth Project unveiled a series of murals about his childhood and history of intellectual and cultural work. Other community-based events from the “Du Bois 150th Festival” included lectures by historians and Du Bois scholars such as David Levering Lewis and Reiland Rabaka; artistic performances by Guy Davis, Craig Harris, Paloma McGregor, and the Du Bois Youth Ensemble; and commentary from local experts and activists about the enduring immediacy of Du Bois’s influence for today. Around the same time, several local veterans channeled a half-century of anti-communist rhetoric and denounced plans to erect a Du Bois statue on the lawn of the town’s library, while a newly assembled W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Committee continues working on ways to productively remember one of its most notable residents. Such a clash of generations and memories reveals longstanding antagonisms of race and class; however, it also speaks undeniably to the ongoing vitality of Du Bois’s politics and the pertinence of his legacy.10
In Philadelphia, another site of some of Du Bois’s most important intellectual production (i.e., the publication of his 1899 book The Philadelphia Negro), scholars and activists gathered for “The Year of W.E.B. Du Bois,” a community-based series of reading groups, conference meetings, and cultural celebrations. “Perhaps no thinker has contributed more to our scientific understanding of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism and their connections to capitalism, war and poverty,” organizers stated. “Knowledge, in his understanding, should serve freedom and must be anchored to the struggles of common women and men.” Year of Du Bois co-organizer Tony Monteiro added that the “emancipatory tools” of Du Bois’s mixed methodology of analyzing race and class remains central to and transformative in contemporary freedom struggles.11
The current juncture of pervasive political and social crises coupled with deep and dramatic commemorative expressions about Du Bois contextualizes the importance of devoting an issue of Socialism and Democracy to his life, thought, and legacy. It is a unique material manifestation that enters into fruitful conversation with a vibrant and expanding stream of incredibly important work on the black intellectual published during the last half-decade that investigates both the origins and outcomes, indeed the transformation of his political and intellectual work from a reform-minded progressive in his early days to a true radical whose late career insights during the early Cold War advanced historical materialist arguments for economic democracy and political liberation. The articles in this issue tap into many of the liveliest directions in current Du Bois scholarship. While biography has been and remains a compelling yet challenging task in Du Bois studies as the thoughtful work of David Levering Lewis, Manning Marable, Shawn Leigh Alexander, and Bill Mullen show—along with Gerald Horne and Charisse Burden-Stelly’s insightful co-authored text—books and articles about his social theory, sociological practice, educational reflection, historical methodology, and global Pan-African politics as well as the publication of several of his untouched writings and manuscripts offer fresh consideration of Du Bois’s thought and legacy.12
A number of book-length studies and key articles delve into Du Bois’s early career scholarship in social science, literary studies, and educational theory. For example, Aldon Morris and Earl Wright III published books on his early sociological thought and practice that advanced claims about Du Bois’s innovative social scientific methodology, his central, definitive place in modern sociology’s origins, and his earliest encounters with socialism. Covering the same era of modernity, Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert assembled the images from Du Bois’s sociological research arranged for the 1900 World’s Fair in a critical scholarly edition of his “data portraits.”13 To mark the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth, historians Shawn Leigh Alexander and Ibram X. Kendi authored critical editorial introductions for special releases of The Souls of Black Folk in 2018.14 The recovery of his early career theoretical insight and labor—including books by Stephanie Shaw and Nahum Dimitri Chandler—places Du Bois at the vanguard of early 20th century philosophy and social science.15 Chandler’s volume The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, along with several of his articles in The New Centennial Review, curated many of Du Bois’s previously unpublished writings. Outside of Herbert Aptheker’s extensive editorial efforts during the 1970s and 1980s, Chandler is the leading scholar who in recent times has edited and published the largest number of Du Bois’s unpublished manuscripts. His work documents another fruitful avenue of recent Du Bois scholarship that provides burgeoning insight about his reflections on the political life of democracy and socialism.16
With respect to Du Bois’s later career from about 1935 onward, the year that he published Black Reconstruction, to 1963 when he died in Ghana, until very recently a residual post-Cold War anti-black anticommunism left extensive scholarly gaps in addressing the dynamism of his late career affiliations with socialism and communism. Building on the scholarship of Cedric Robinson, Gerald Horne, and Manning Marable whose innovative books in the 1980s chipped away at long-standing anticommunist renderings of Du Bois, recent studies by Eric Porter, Bill Mullen, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, and Amy Bass coupled with a sprinkling of articles and book chapters on Du Bois’s closing decades represents renewed and deepening interest in his politics of black self-determination, anti-capitalism, antiracism, black feminism, and Pan-Africanism—and why such black radical commitments possess an ongoing significance in the contemporary historical moment.17
Reflecting such a sense of change over time and expanse of topics, this issue selectively addresses the range and evolution, the shifts and changes in Du Bois’s commitment to historical materialism as a political framework and interpretive grid presented in his academic scholarship, creative publications, and political work. Collectively, the issue covers Du Bois’s life and thought from the 19th century to his death in 1963, including reflections on his legacy. While there is a chronological unfolding with respect to the articles’ arrangement, thematic particulars of slavery, abolitionism, democracy, freedom, blackness, white supremacy, education, and social justice speak within and across the essays to explore Du Bois’s impact both in the U.S. and across the world.
Historian Jesse Olsavky’s article on abolitionism documents Du Bois’s analysis of black freedom and how aspects of global change across the span of his career such as World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II recalibrated and refined his articulations of anti-imperialism and Marxism. It is precisely these historicized dimensions of how Du Bois’s thought changed over time that essays by philosopher Thomas Meagher and sociologist Brandon Alston explore. Combining sociological and literary analysis Alston reads the materialist dimensions of Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness” in both The Souls of Black Folk and Dusk of Dawn to underscore what “second sight” means in a racialized and stratified society. Using another of Du Bois’s seminal works, Meagher sees in and through Darkwater some of the most important of his developing reflections on socialism in the U.S. and throughout the world following World War I. Meanwhile, analyzing essays such as “The Souls of White Folk” and texts like Black Reconstruction, UC San Diego’s Thomas Reifer, a sociologist, and Carlton Floyd, a literary scholar, use Du Bois’s historical materialist political imagination to innovatively locate within California politics, history, literature, and popular culture a place of radical interracial possibility in the current historical moment.
On a related point of collaboration, economist Curtis Haynes finds from Du Bois’s thought on cooperativism—published in his early 20th century Atlanta Studies series, books such as Dusk of Dawn, and numerous speeches—the power of black self-determination and potential for black-white unity in the practice of economic democracy. Both Lisa McLeod, a philosopher, and Charisse Burden-Stelly, a political theorist, trace additional dimensions of Du Bois’s consideration of organized political collectivity. Assessing his unpublished novel written in the mid-1930s, A World Search for Democracy, McLeod shows how during the New Deal era Du Bois used creative writing to think through socialist praxis globally by both educating the working class about labor history and through empowering workers and redistributing resources for people of color. Defining political and racial alliances by crafting the concept of mutual comradeship, Burden-Stelly explains how Du Bois’s increasingly radical thought on socialism and communism during his late career emerged from conversations and collaborations with an international network of black women radicals, including his second wife Shirley Graham Du Bois. While such networks proved formidable in shaping Du Bois’s radical politics, they also worked to create and maintain how Du Bois was remembered and commemorated, a point historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere’s article makes by focusing on when, where, and how Shirley Graham Du Bois and her son (and W. E. B.’s adopted stepson) David Graham Du Bois crafted Du Bois’s legacy both in America and throughout the world.
Essays by theorist Lasana Kazembe and historian Denise Lynn highlight the role of education and educational theory in Du Bois’s life and times. Kazembe reveals through Du Bois’s writings and speeches how he worked out his convictions through political education in the broader context of African American knowledge networks and learning communities. Assessing a chapter from Du Bois’s latter period of life, Lynn narrates his role as a teacher in the New York City-based Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) sponsored institution designed to educate workers in the history of resistance and the art of protest. Lynn’s article on Du Bois and the Jefferson School tracks one dimension of his work with the CPUSA in the 1950s, a relationship that culminated in his official membership in the Party that commenced in late 1961 when he was 93 years old.
While the articles in this issue collectively reveal how socialism and democracy operated over time in Du Bois’s life, thought, and legacy, interviews with literary scholar Alys Eve Weinbaum, anthropologist Whitney Battle-Baptiste, historian Yunxiang Gao, and activist-organizer Jarvis Tyner probe further into what Du Bois means in today’s times. Weinbaum discusses how her innovative analysis of gender and sexuality in Du Bois’s writings—particularly Darkwater and Black Reconstruction—bring some of the most important theoretical insights to bear on how he understood both the immediate and longer term possibilities for black liberation and economic equality and in what capacities these questions resonate currently. As an anthropologist and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst, Battle-Baptiste shares how western Massachusetts fueled Du Bois’s imagination and how her own work in black feminist archaeology centers the kinship networks that made his strivings and successes possible. She also explains how through the Du Bois Center his intellectual and political legacy inspires scholarly knowledge production and community-based actions that mobilize his memory for the contemporary moment. Gao’s historical explorations of Du Bois and China spotlight the importance of his and Shirley Graham Du Bois’s visits there in the late 1950s. Her work also tracks the black scholar’s reception in China more broadly over the 50 years since his death and demonstrates the importance of an international horizon in evaluations of Du Bois’s work and legacy. Tyner’s half-century of activism and organizing, most especially through his work with founding the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs in 1962 and in his long-time labor with the CPUSA reveals what Du Bois’s ideas look like in practice and how his legacy has mobilized many to materialize the practice of socialism and democracy.
Throughout the articles and across the interviews in this special issue, the weight and gravity of Du Bois’s ideas receive paramount attention. However, on the occasion of commemorating the 150th anniversary of his birth, we should also remember that his protean intellect found expression through an enterprising aesthetic sensibility. To acknowledge the creativity of his literary imagination, this issue includes poems about W.E.B. Du Bois written by Tara Betts, Lasana Kazembe, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, and Sandra Staton-Taiwo.
Kazembe’s poem “Because Time is Long,” which adopts its title from the closing lines of Du Bois’s 1957 “Last Message to the World,” moves biographically while coupling experimental form with improvisational style reminiscent of both the Black Arts movement and hip-hop culture. Its free-verse syncopation co-exists with internal and end rhyme to offer intellectual pleasure with language that demands reflective pause about what Du Bois’s work means today. Sinitiere’s poems also traces Du Bois’s life biographically. It accounts for the black scholar’s human dimensions by historicizing and unfolding the expansive range of his decades-long intellectual productivity. Utilizing Eugene Redmond’s experimental Kwansaba form, i.e., a 7-line poem in which each line has 7 words with none longer than 7 letters—except proper nouns—Tara Betts’s “The Seventh Son” versifies double consciousness by drawing from Du Bois’s language of the Veil and second sight from The Souls of Black Folk. Sandra Staton-Taiwo’s five poems, adopted from her 2018 volume Broad Sympathies in a Narrow World: The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, canvass the passions of his intellect, the everyday experiences of his well-traveled life, and the intersections of his historical and cultural witness to contemporary times. In the last line of her final poem “Drumbeat” she writes that “your drumbeat lives again.” This announcement not only resonates with the special issue’s emphasis on Du Bois’s legacy, but it also ends with a striking finality that remains open ended while holding space for re-interpreting and re-inscribing what Du Bois’s means for the contemporary moment. The poetic efforts in this issue address particular aspects of Du Bois’s biography that span the full run of his life. They emphasize the creative cadence of his literary art and meditate on his legacy’s ongoing salience. They artfully explore how his political imagination incubated freedom’s possibility. In true Du Boisian fashion, the poetry featured herein presents a literary complement to the scholarly dimensions of the articles and the personal, political aspects of the interviews.
The essays, interviews, and poems in this issue of Socialism and Democracy document the perpetual importance of visiting and re-visiting the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Focusing on education, social theory, political activism, aesthetics, and historical memory while analyzing many of Du Bois’s most well-known books and some of his unpublished writings, the articles advance understanding within some of the liveliest conversations in the field of Du Bois studies. Finding socialism and democracy in Du Bois’s life, thought, and legacy brings the past into conversation with the present to combine intellectual innovation, artistic creativity, and concrete political action on pathways to liberation.
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Negro History Centenaries,” National Guardian, January 14, 1957, in W. E. B. Du Bois, Newspaper Columns by W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 2: 1945-1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 982.
2 The conference website, http://cauduboislegacy.net/Home_Page.html, hosts photos and videos of selected conference sessions, including Baraka’s concluding keynote. On Phylon’s rebirth, see Stephanie Y. Evans, “Sankofa: The Deed of Memory,” Phylon 51/1 (Fall 2014): vii.
3 Loretta Yarlow, “Reflections on Du Bois in Our Time,” in Ten Contemporary Artists Explore the Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois in Our Time, ed. Radcliffe Bailey, et. al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 9.
4 Keith Feldman, “A Haunting Echo: W. E. B. Du Bois in a Time of Permanent War,” Al Jazeera, February 10, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132772031503974.html; Werner Lange, “On the Passing of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Torch, 50 Years Ago,” Cleveland.com, August 25, 2013, http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/08/on_the_passing_of_web.... For another 2013 commemorative reflection see Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “A Legacy of Scholarship and Struggle: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Political Affairs of His Twilight Years,” Political Affairs, August 26, 2013, http://politicalaffairs.net/a-legacy-of-scholarship-and-struggle-w-e-b-d... (link active as of 2013, until Political Affairs terminated its online publication).
5 Timely essays in 2017 anticipated the importance of marking Du Bois’s 150th birthday. See, for example, Andrew Lanham, “When W. E. B. Du Bois Was Un-American,” Boston Review (January 13, 2017), http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/andrew-lanham-when-w-e-b-du-bois-w... Gary Wilder, “If You Want to Build an Alternative to Trumpism, You Need to Read Black Freedom Fighter W. E. B. Du Bois,” Open Democracy (May 6, 2017), https://www.opendemocracy.net/gary-wilder/if-you-want-to-build-alternati....
6 “Ghana’s W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Center and the Pan-African Spirit,” China Global Television Network, May 25, 2016, https://duboiscentreghana.org/sermon/ghanas-web-du-bois-center-and-the-p.... Although released in 2016, the Memorial Center re-published the documentary on its website in February 2018.
7 Marcus Anthony Hunter, “A New Black Holiday, or Why W. E. B. Du Bois’s 150th Birthday Matters,” Contexts, February 23, 2018, https://contexts.org/blog/a-new-black-holiday-dubois/.
8 For the conference program and videos of conference proceedings from “A Symposium Examining Race and Economic Inequality on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of W. E. B. Du Bois and the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” see, http://www.cau.edu/curc/Du%20Bois%20King%20Symposium.html.
For the University of Pennsylvania meeting, see “The 2018 Souls of Du Bois Conference: 150th Birthday Celebration,” Almanac, February 20, 2018, https://almanac.upenn.edu/articles/2018-souls-of-du-bois-conference-150t.... For the Morgan State conference, see https://www.morgan.edu/college_of_liberal_arts/departments/english/progr.... For proceedings of the “Scholarship Above the Veil” conference at Harvard, see https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/dubois150/program.
9 See the “W. E. B. Du Bois @ 150” essays at Black Perspectives, https://www.aaihs.org/tag/DuBoisForum/ and the “Amplifying Du Bois at 150” forum at Sounding Out!, https://soundstudiesblog.com/category/amplifying-du-bois-forum/.
10 On the “Du Bois 150th Festival,” see the event’s website with archived recordings and bibliographic resources, https://dubois150th.com/ as well as Kristin Palpini, “‘Let’s celebrate Du Bois’: Community gathers for 150th birthday celebration,” The Berkshire Eagle, February 25, 2018, https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/lets-celebrate-du-bois-community-.... For the murals and history of Du Bois activist in Great Barrington, see Whitney Battle-Baptiste, “Bringing W. E. B. Du Bois Home Again,” Black Perspectives, February 23, 2018, https://www.aaihs.org/bringing-w-e-b-du-bois-home-again/. On the Du Bois statue, see Terry Cowgill, “Veterans protest statue to memorialize ‘communist’ Du Bois,” The Berkshire Edge, June 15, 2018, https://theberkshireedge.com/war-veterans-protest-statue-to-memorialize-.... For more on the Du Bois Legacy Committee, see Heather Bellow, “Historic moment as Du Bois Legacy Committee kicks off in Great Barrington,” The Berkshire Eagle, October 16, 2018, https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/historic-moment-as-du-bois-legacy....
11 For the full scope of Philadelphia’s “The Year of Du Bois,” see the project’s website, https://www.yearofdubois.org/. Tony Monteiro spoke extensively about “The Year of W. E. B. Du Bois” on the Beyond Prisons podcast, https://shadowproof.com/2018/02/23/beyond-prisons-episode-21-year-du-boi....
12 For one historical assessment of the history of Du Bois studies scholarship, see Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “‘A Legacy of Scholarship and Struggle’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Life After Death,” in Phillip Luke Sinitiere, ed., Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019). For the latest Du Bois biography, see Gerald Horne and Charisse Burden-Stelly, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2019).
13 Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Earl Wright III, The First American School of Sociology: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (London: Ashgate, 2016); Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds., W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Recent representative articles that advance scholarship on Du Bois, social science, education, and literature include Shirley Moody-Turner, ““Dear Doctor Du Bois”: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing,” MELUS 40/3 (Fall 2015): 47-68; Lawrence J. Oliver, “Apocalyptic and Slow Violence: The Environmental Vision of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22/3 (Summer 2015): 466-484; Dan S. Green and Robert A. Wortham, “Sociology Hesitant: The Continuing Neglect of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Sociological Spectrum 35/6 (Nov/Dec 2015): 518-533; Marcus Anthony Hunter, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Heterogeneity: How The Philadelphia Negro Shaped American Sociology,” American Sociologist 46 (2015): 219-233; José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown, “Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Phenomenology of Racialized Subjectivity,” Du Bois Review 12/2 (Fall 2015): 231-248; Les Black and Maggie Tate, “For a Sociological Reconstruction: W. E. B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall and Segregated Sociology,” Sociological Research Online 20/3 (2015); Michael J. Beilfuss, “Iconic Pastorals and Beautiful Swamps: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Troubled Landscapes of the American South,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22/3 (Summer 2015): 486-506; Kerry Burch, “Platonic & Freierean Interpretations of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John,”” Educational Studies 52/1 (2016): 38-50; Tommy J. Curry, “It’s for the Kids: The Sociological Significance of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Brownies’ Books and Their Philosophical Relevance for our Understanding of Gender in the Ethnological Age,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36/1 (2015): 27–57; Andrew J. Douglas, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society,” Du Bois Review 12/1 (January 2015): 25-40; Derrick P. Alridge, “On the Education of Black Folk: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Paradox of Segregation,” Journal of African American History 100/3 (Summer 2015): 473-493.
14 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, With an Introduction by Shawn Leigh Alexander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Introduction by Ibram X. Kendi (New York: Penguin, 2018).
15 Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, ed. Nahum Dimitri Chandler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Stephanie J. Shaw, W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
16 On the unpublished Du Bois materials in The New Centennial Review and elsewhere, see Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “The Meaning of Japan,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12/1 (2012): 233-56; Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Chapter 16—Jones in Japan,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12/1 (2012): 257-74; Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Chapter 17—Jones looks back on China,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12/1 (2012): 275-90; Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “A Persistent Parallax: On the Writings of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois on Japan and China, 1936-1937,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12/1 (2012): 291–316. See also Nahum D. Chandler, “Of Horizon: An Introduction to “The Afro-American” by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois—Circa 1894” and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Afro-American” both of which appeared in The Journal of Transnational American Studies 2/1 (2010). Other unpublished Du Bois articles include Du W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “A. D. 2150/W. E. B. Du Bois Looks at the Future from Beyond the Grave,” Edited by Nagueyalti Warren, African American Review 49/1 (Spring 2016): 53-57, W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Princess Steel,” Edited by Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, PMLA 130/3 (2015): 819-829, and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, ““Outline of Report on Economic Condition of the Negroes in the State of Texas”: W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1935 Speech at Prairie View State College,” Phylon 54/1 (Summer 2017): 3-24.
17 See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); and Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005 [1986]), and the monographs that extended their analysis of the late-career Du Bois: Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of the World (London: Living Commons Collective, 2013); and Bill Mullen, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). A selection of articles on Du Bois’s late career includes, Yunxiang Gao, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China,” Du Bois Review 10/1 (2013): 59-85; Seok-Won Lee, “The Paradox of Racial Liberation: W. E. B. Du Bois and Pan-Asianism in Wartime Japan, 1931-1945,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 16/4 (2015): 513-530; Seneca Vaught, “Du Bois as Diplomat: Race Diplomacy in Foreign Affairs, 1926-1945,” Journal of Race and Global Social Change 1/1 (Summer 2014): 4-29; Michael Joseph Viola, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Filipino/a American Exposure Programs to the Philippines: Race Class Analysis in an Epoch of ‘Global Apartheid,’” Race Ethnicity and Education 19/3 (2016): 500-523. On Du Bois’s final literary efforts in The Black Flame trilogy, see Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, The Black Flame Revisited: Recursion and Return in the Reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Trilogy,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15/2 (Fall 2015): 157-169. The fall 2015 issue in which Phillips’s article appears, under the editorship of Nahum Dimitri Chandler, is singularly devoted to Du Bois. Also, see the essays in the following anthologies: Nick Bromell, ed., A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018); Monique Leslie Akassi, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois and the Africana Rhetoric of Dealienation (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018); and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, ed., Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019).