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About W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963
Review “Splendid . . . A landmark of American scholarship. Lewis develops the most convincing portrayal ever written of Du Bois.” ―The Washington Post Product Description The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois from renowned scholar David Levering Lewis, now in one condensed and updated volumeWilliam Edward Burghardt Du Bois―the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America―was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of this monumental figure that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era. In his magisterial prose, Lewis chronicles Du Bois's long and storied career, detailing the momentous contributions to our national character that still echo today.W.E.B. Du Bois is a 1993 and 2000 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction and the winner of the 1994 and 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. About the Author David Levering Lewis is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He has been awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Lewis lives in Manhattan and Stanfordville, New York, with his wife. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1Postlude to The FutureThe announcement of W.E.B. Du Bois’s death came just after Odetta finished singing, a mighty trumpet of a voice that had accompanied the nonviolent civil rights movement from early days. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), broke the news in his precise midwestern voice that always reminded you of a proper Protestant pastor or one of the older men behind the counter at Brooks Brothers. From late morning into mid-afternoon, the scalding sun and suffocating clamminess had exacted their toll from more than 250,000 men, women, and young people who crowded the length of the Reflecting Pool of the nation’s capital in extraordinary response to the charge of Asa Philip Randolph, grand old man of civil rights and the moving force behind the March on Washington. Tall, white-maned, and as ebony as an African chief’s walking stick, Randolph had summoned Americans to Washington that twenty-eighth day of August, 1963, in all their professional, social, and ethnic variety to act, as he said in his cathedral baritone, as “the advance guard of a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.”1Before Wilkins’s brief, epochal announcement, speaker after speaker had stepped up to the altar of microphones to music and song by Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Pete Seeger; Marian Anderson; and Mahalia Jackson. As the sun blazed down, the marchers witnessed a who’s who of America’s civil rights, religious, and labor leadership. Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches, with a speech too dry for this evangelical occasion, was followed by young John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose speech in its original draft, threatening to lay waste to the white South, had brought down upon his militant head the collective wrath of the civil rights elders and Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle of the Washington archdiocese. Lewis finally agreed to soften his words, but not by much, and the crowd cheered when he intoned, “Listen, Mr. Kennedy, listen, Mr. Congressman, listen, fellow citizens—the black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a ‘cooling-off’ period.” The United Automobile Workers’ ebullient Walter Reuther almost matched Lewis’s cautionary rhetoric, telling a nation on guard against Soviet imperialism that it could not “defend freedom in Berlin, so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham.” Then came Floyd McKissick of the
