The most recommended W. E. B. Du Bois books

I have been reading about W.E.B. Du Bois since graduate school. He’s a fascinating character in American history who is always surprising me.

In this book, Chad Williams finds an unpublished 800-page manuscript in the archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and gives the reader a peak into the complexities of Du Bois’s brain. Having read nearly everything Du Bois wrote as I use his work in my own historical writings, I had never seen this side of Du Bois.

For the first time, followers of Du Bois’s work can see how World War I shaped him, his political evolution, and his later work. Williams’ book tackles Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness (being Black and American) within the context of fighting for one’s country and demonstrates how Du Bois originally thought he could reconcile being Black and American during the war but eventually became disillusioned.

As a historian,… show more.

The first half of this book offers a rich, careful textual engagement with the works of Immanuel Kant and his intellectual descendants. It is sure to be rewarding to those interested in Kant’s cosmopolitanism and its present-day variants.

But, to me, the real beauty of Valdez’s book lies in its second half, where she discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought and the history of his transnational activism against racism and empire.

Drawing on Du Bois, Valdez presents a radical vision of what democracy and political community can look like beyond the nation-state. She also offers an excellent model of how to discuss oppressed people not as helpless victims, but as political agents in their own right with lessons to teach the world about how best to struggle for justice.

A penetrating story of the person many considered the intellectual leader of nineteenth-century African American.

A man who rose from poverty in New York City to gain a degree from Cambridge University, spent almost thirty years in Liberia, wrote some of the most incisive analyses of African civilization before returning to America where he mentored W.E. B. DuBois and other leaders of the new Civil Rights Movement.

Cemented in popular consciousness by the 2020 Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, African American millionaire and philanthropist Madam C.J. Walker stands as one of the foremost emblems of Black economic achievement. The woman born Sarah Breedlove to former slaves in 1867 transformed herself from cotton picker to washerwoman to direct sales pioneer to iconic beauty empire head and social activist at a time when even educated Black women of privilege were constrained by the white male hierarchy. The bare bones of this narrative would be sufficient for a book. But in the hands of Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, journalist A’Lelia Bundles, the rags-to-riches story becomes a window into the social, economic, and racial realities of the times and a riveting portrait of the shrewd, unflinching and ambitious woman who triumphed despite them.

I love this book, which was published in 1903, because of how timeless it is and because of how relevant Du Bois’ words are to our present moment in which racial inequality and racism persist.

I appreciate the historical perspective Du Bois provides his readers so the past is not forgotten, so the past helps us understand the historical trajectory that led us to right now. The writing is clear, smart, and beautiful, offering a blend of genres—from music to memoir—that keeps readers engaged as they read Du Bois’ astute analyses of the past and his suggestive projections about the future.

As an English professor, I love introducing my students to this classic text, which inevitably evokes empathy from them and, in some, elicits a desire for activism. This is a text that moves people. 

Anna Julia Cooper is one of the nineteen and twentieth American philosophers I find most exciting.

Her book, A Voice from the South, is the first feminist book to introduce the idea of intersectionality! She spent her very long lifetime writing about education, women’s rights, racism, and she has a fascinating correspondence with the intellectuals of her time, including W.E.B Dubois.

But until recently getting hold of her writings wasn’t terribly easy, unless you were willing to read online, or had access to a good academic library.

This beautiful and cheap edition is a godsend and everyone should buy it. 

W.E.B. Du Bois is widely acknowledged as the leading activist for racial equality of his generation. But until very recently little had been known of his deep commitment to the pursuit of equality within and through data technology. As Du Bois was preparing notes for his famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, he was also preparing an exposition of what we would today call “infographics” (or what the editors of this volume aptly call “data portraits”) for exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition world’s fair. This volume handsomely reproduces for the first time a full-color complete set of Du Bois’s charts, graphs, maps, and ingenious spirals. A beautiful book to live with, it also subtly transforms one’s understanding of the history of racial progress and inequality in America.

I read Imperium in an Afro-American Literature course in college. The instructor was excellent. I was the only non-Afro-American male in the class. I sat in the back. As soon as I finished reading Imperium I said to myself “This would make a great movie.” About ten years later I adapted the book into a screenplay. I typed it myself on my old typewriter. There was gunk on some of the keys and they needed cleaning. I realized that around Scene Five. If you ever read my old manuscript, I apologize for the first twenty pages. You can tell Sutton Griggs I’m sorry, also.

Finally, if we are to understand the intellectual foundations of the post-Western world in terms of IR isms, then we ought to study the power/culture intersection well.

For these reasons, as this book does, it’s important to consider the potential dialogue between classical realism of scholars such as E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, on the one hand, and post-colonial theorists including Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Aimé Césaire, on the other. Both sides have much to benefit from each other in understanding the phenomena of race, imperialism, and war. 

The author points to the ways American media designated sound as “black” or “white” even as “colorblindness” became the dominant paradigm for liberal attitudes towards race. While Americans claimed that they didn’t “see race”, they were exposed to an increasingly segregated soundscape and media environment. Stoever opens up new ways for us to listen to familiar voices, such as those of WEB du Bois, Lena Horne, Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and many more.