W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line

In his own time, W.E.B. Du Bois was a controversial figure, and now, more than 30 years after his death, he continues to be so. Born in 1868, Du Bois was a central figure in African American intellectual life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, yet many of his positions are difficult to reconcile with current African American thought. Du Bois, for example, was an elitist who believed that black society was divided between "the talented tenth" and everybody else. Yet in his later years, he joined the communist party and moved to Africa, where he lived out the remainder of his life. Since his death in 1963, a generation of African American intellectuals have tried to interpret, explain, or revise him according to their own beliefs; now Adolph Reed Jr. weighs in with W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought.

Reed's approach to Du Bois is simple: he believes that what you read is what you get. When, for example, Du Bois wrote movingly in The Souls of Black Folk of a feeling of "twoness," a sense of warring natures, Reed suggests that, far from embracing a notion of double consciousness, Du Bois was actually following precepts of early 20th-century social theory which described the split between primitive and civilized societies. In addition to his discussion about Du Bois, Reed comments on many other African American critics at work today, from Houston Baker to Henry Louis Gates, making the author of W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought as controversial as his subject.