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Pan African leadership, as its history demonstrates,
will come from unexpected places and in its own time.
The first day we were in Accra we went to the
Du Bois Centre. Du Bois, an ardent and globally
significant Pan Africanist, is buried in Ghana.
W.E.B. Du Bois did not start off his professional
life as a Pan Africanist. In fact, when he was a
founding member of the NAACP, he was often the only
person of color integrating these meetings. Eventually,
he broke with the NAACP. As important as his NAACP work
was, it was as a Pan Africanist that Du Bois made his
mark internationally. He was one of the chief organizers
of the important Pan African Conferences, international
gatherings which fueled the then nascent African
independence movements. Attendees included many of the
initial heads of state of countries such as Ghana,
Kenya, and Nigeria.
Du
Bois' advocacy of Pan Africanism came as a surprise to
some who identified Du Bois as one of Garvey's
staunchest and unremitting critics. In his book, Dusk of
Dawn, DuBois sums up the conflict between himself and
Garvey in a charitable fashion, displaying none of the
bitterness and name-calling that was characteristic of
their long running feud.
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Books by & about W.E.B. Du Bois
The
Suppression of the African
Slave Trade (1896) /
The
Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) /
The
Souls of Black Folk:
Essays and Sketches
(1903) /
John
Brown.(1909) /
The
Quest of the Silver Fleece
(1911)
Darkwater:
Voices Within the Veil
(1920)
Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making
of America (1924) /
Dark Princess: A Romance
(1928) /
Black Reconstruction in America
(1935) /
Black Folk, Then and Now
(1939)
Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace
(1945) /
The World and Africa: An Inquiry
(1947) /
In Battle for Peace
(1952) /
A Trilogy:
The Ordeal of Monsart
(1957)
Monsart Builds
a School (1959) nd
Worlds of Color (1961)
/
An ABC of Color:
Selections (1963)
The
Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing
My Life from the Last
Decade of Its First Century (1968)
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Shirley Graham Du Bois,
His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of
W.E. B. Du Bois (1971)
Leslie Alexander Lacy.
The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois:
Cheer the Lonesome Traveler (1970)
Du
Bois on Reform: Periodical-based
Leadership for African Americans.
Edited and Introduced
by Brian Johnson.
New York Altamira Press (A Division of Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), 2005
A Du Bois Bibliography
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The Professor and the Pupil
The Politics and Friendship of W. E. B Du
Bois and Paul Robeson
By
Murali Balaji
Though
honored as two of the most influential
African-American leaders of the past
century, journalist and novelist Balaji
(House of Tinder) compensates in this
political biography for "revisionist"
historians who regularly omit Du Bois and
Robeson's long-standing involvement with the
Communist Party, distorting their impact on
anti-colonial and radical political thought,
eroding their legacies and diminishing their
courage in the face of McCarthyism. Du Bois
(1868-1963) began his career as an academic
and authored 34 books, most notably
The Souls of Black Folk,
co-founded the NAACP and was an early
advocate of Pan-Africanism. Best known for
his Show Boat performance of "Ol' Man River"
and his portrayal of Shakespeare's
Othello, Robeson (1898-1976) gained
international celebrity status (called
"America's No. 1 Negro") with starring roles
on Broadway and the London stage. |
With both narrative chronology and close reading of their work,
Balaji demonstrates how over time each became more radical,
moved into the communist orbit in the 1930's, and ultimately met
professional defeat in the 1950's when they refused to recant
their convictions. Though overly detailed and occasionally
rambling, this book provides a sharp look into an often
overlooked aspect of black history.—
Publishers Weekly
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
updated 6 October 2007
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