W.E.B. Du Bois

In this final, magisterial volume, fifteen years in the research and writing, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Levering Lewis stunningly re-creates the second half of W.E.B. Du Bois's charged and brilliant career. Beginning with the return of World War I African-American veterans to the riots and lynchings of the "Red Summer" of 1919 and ending with Du Bois's self-imposed exile and death in Ghana forty-four years later, Lewis charts the dramatic evolution of the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement from Talented Tenth elitist to internationalist and proponent of economic as well as racial democracy for all people of color. Based on original research on three continents, this richly detailed volume of history alters our understanding of the culture and politics of race in the in the twentieth century.