Commemorating the 150th anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s birth, the chapters in this book reflect on the local, national, and international significance of his remarkable life and legacy in relation to his specific commitments to socialism and democracy. Written with contemporary conditions in mind, such as the current political period of economic inequality, the debilitating reality of exploitative economic conditions, an expansive and invasive surveillance state, the grotesque injustice of the prison industrial complex, the ongoing crisis of police violence and the militarization of law enforcement, and a White House unashamedly spewing white supremacist, nationalist rhetoric in word and deed, this book collectively ponders how Du Bois’s radicalism can shape and re-texture historical understanding and underscore a reflective urgency about the future. In this volume, scholars and activists undertake thoughtful and analytical explorations with regards to how Du Bois’ commitments to socialism and democracy can inform current methodology and praxis. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy.

This book provides a new interpretation of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most important African American scholars and thinkers of the 20th century. This revealing biography captures the full life of W.E.B. Du Bois—historian, sociologist, author, editor, and a leader in the fight to bring African Americans more fully into the American landscape as well as a forceful proponent of their leaving America altogether and returning to Africa. Drawing on extensive research and including new primary documents, sidebars, and analysis, Gerald Horne and Charisse Burden-Stelly offer a portrait of this remarkable man, paying special attention to the often-overlooked radical decades at the end of Du Bois's life. The book also highlights Du Bois's relationships with and influence on civil rights activists, intellectuals, and freedom fighters, among them Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Louise Thompson Patterson, William Alphaeus Hunton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The biography includes a selection of primary source documents, including personal letters, speeches, poems, and newspaper articles, that provide insight into Du Bois's life based on his own words and analysis.

Contributions by Murali Balaji, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Christopher Cameron, Carlton Dwayne Floyd, Robert Greene II, Andre E. Johnson, Werner Lange, Lisa J. McLeod, Jodi Melamed, Tyler Monson, Eric Porter, Reiland Rabaka, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Camesha Scruggs, and Phillip Luke Sinitiere Although the career of W. E. B. Du Bois was remarkable in its entirety, a large majority of scholarship focuses on the first five or six decades. Overlooked and understudied, the closing three decades of Du Bois’s career reflect a generative period of his life in terms of teaching, travel, activism, and publications. Forging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory proposes to narrate the political, social, and cultural significance of Du Bois’s career during the controversial closing three decades of his life. Du Bois’s twilight years were tremendously controversial: his persistent criticism of the collusion between capitalism and racism and his choice to join the Communist Party in late 1961 raised the ire of many. At the time, Du Bois’s strident advocacy of socialism and turn to communism during the Cold War oriented most scholars away from delving into his late career. While only a few scholars have engaged the productivity of Du Bois’s later years, the fact is that an anticommunist, antiradical animus has followed Du Bois in the half century since his death. As a result, Du Bois scholarship remains impoverished to the extent that academics neglect his later years. The essays in Forging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois's Twilight Years detail selected aspects of Du Bois’s later decades and their particular connection to American social, political, and cultural history between the 1930s and the 1960s. While international concerns and a global perspective also fundamentally defined Du Bois’s latter years, chronicling his final decades in a US context presents fresh insight into his twilight years. Du Bois’s commitment to freedom’s flourishing during this period animated the Black freedom struggle’s war against white supremacy. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the durability of Du Bois’s intellectual achievements remains relevant to the twenty-first century.

'Marable's biography of Du Bois is the best so far available.' Dr. Herbert Aptheker, Editor, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois 'Marable's excellent study focuses on the social thought of a major black American thinker who exhibited a 'basic coherence and unity' throughout a multifaceted career stressing cultural pluralism, opposition to social inequality, and black pride.' Library Journal Distinguished historian and social activist Manning Marable's book, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, brings out the interconnections, unity, and consistency of W. E. B. Du Bois's life and writings. Marable covers Du Bois's disputes with Booker T. Washington, his founding of the NAACP, his work as a social scientist, his life as a popular figure, and his involvement in politics, placing them into the context of Du Bois's views on black pride, equality, and cultural diversity. Marable stresses that, as a radical democrat, Du Bois viewed the problems of racism as intimately connected with capitalism. The publication of this updated edition follows more than one hundred celebrations recently marking the 100th anniversary of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Marable broadens earlier biographies with a new introduction highlighting Du Bois's less-known advocacy of women's suffrage, socialism, and peace and he traces his legacy to today in an era of changing racial and social conditions.

In his 1952 book In Battle for Peace, published when W. E. B. Du Bois was eighty-three years old, the brilliant black scholar announced that he was a “citizen of the world.” Citizen of the World chronicles selected chapters of Du Bois’s final three decades between the 1930s and 1960s. It maps his extraordinarily active and productive latter years to social, cultural, and political transformations across the globe. From his birth in 1868 until his death in 1963, Du Bois sought the liberation of black people in the United States and across the world through intellectual and political labor. His tireless efforts documented and demonstrated connections between freedom for African-descended people abroad and black freedom at home. In concert with growing scholarship on his twilight years, the essays in this volume assert the fundamental importance of considering Du Bois’s later decades not as a life in decline that descended into blind ideological allegiance to socialism and communism but as the life of a productive, generative intellectual who responded rationally, imaginatively, and radically to massive mid-century changes around the world, and who remained committed to freedom’s realization until his final hour.

The present volume is quite different from the other two autobiographies by Du Bois not only because of its additional two-decade span, and the significantly altered outlook of its author, but also because in it—unlike the others—he seeks, as he writes, "to review my life as frankly and fully as I can." Of course, with the directness and honesty which so decisively characterized him, he reminds the reader of this book of the intense subjectivity that inevitably permeates autobiography; hence, he writes, he offers this account of his life as he understood it and as he—would like others to believe—it to have been. Certainly, while Dr. Du Bois was deep in his ninth decade when he died, longevity was the least remarkable feature of his life. As editor, author, lecturer, scholar, organizer, inspirer, and fighter, he was among the most consequential figures of the twentieth century. Necessarily, therefore, the full and final accounting of that life and his times becomes an indispensable volume.

The American Dream and Dreams Deferred: A Dialectical Fairy Tale shows how rival interpretations of the Dream reveal the dialectical tensions therein. Exploring often neglected voices, literatures, and histories, Carlton D. Floyd and Thomas Ehrlich Reifer highlight moments when the American Dream appears both simultaneously possible and out of reach. In so doing, the authors invite readers to make a new collective dream of a better future, on socially just, multicultural, and ecologically sustainable foundations.