W. E. B. DuBois

First published in 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois's biography of abolitionist John Brown is a literary and historical classic. With a rare combination of scholarship and passion, Du Bois defends Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend, or traitor. Brown emerges as a rich personality, fully understandable as an unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and a devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave. This new edition is enriched with an introduction by John David Smith and with supporting documents relating to Du Bois's correspondence with his publisher.

First published in 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois's biography of abolitionist John Brown is a literary and historical classic. With a rare combination of scholarship and passion, Du Bois defends Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend, or traitor. Brown emerges as a rich personality, fully understandable as an unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and a devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave. This new edition is enriched with an introduction by John David Smith and with supporting documents relating to Du Bois's correspondence with his publisher.

"Howard Fast makes superb use of his material. ... Aside from its social and historical implications, Freedom Road is a high-geared story, told with that peculiar dramatic intensity of which Fast is a master". -- Chicago Daily News

Historian, journalist, educator, and civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois was perhaps most accomplished as a sociologist of race relations and of the black community in the United States. This volume collects his sociological writings from 1898 to 1910. The 18 selections include five on Du Bois's conception of sociology and sociological research, especially as a tool in the struggle for racial justice; excerpts from studies of black communities in the South and the North, including "The Philadelphia Negro"; writings on black culture and social life, with a selection from "The Negro American Family"; and later works on race relations in the United States and elsewhere after World War II. This section includes a powerful 50th-anniversary reassessment of his classic 1901 article in the Atlantic in which he predicted that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."

"This masterfully edited collection of some of the essays, papers, and addresses of the leading social and political thinker of the African diaspora during the first half of the twentieth century is worth every exhilarating moment that one spends perusing it."--Journal of American History

In her perceptive introduction to this edition, Irene Diggs sets this classic autobiography against its broad historical context and critically analyzes its theoretical and methodological significance.

A collection of prayers written by Du Bois for students at Atlanta University, thoughtfully compiled and introduced by Herbert Aptheker. These prayers are deeply commited to paying attention to and caring for the inner lives of black Americans. Biblical familiarity and agnosticity are both present in these autobiographical writings, uplifting the hopes and practices of W. E. B. Du Bois's life, while meditating on the still relevant question of how to make "a good life for all".