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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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Now, what is noteworthy about the First Pan-African Congress is this. The foundation of all that we are doing, the intellectual foundation, is the work, for the most part, of a distinguished American scholar, Dr W. E. B. Du Bois. Dr Du Bois happened to be in Paris in 1900 doing some activity of some kind or other, and Sylvester Williams was bright enough to ask him please to come to London to take part in this First Pan-African Conference. Dr Du Bois went, and was made Chairman of the committee which prepared the manifesto of the conference. And I tell you, you should read that document when you get a chance. Because even in those days, although they were making appeals to governments and persons in authority, asking them please to look at what was happening to Black people, and to use their influence in order to lift Black people from the low level at which they were being maintained, yet at the same time there was more than a spark of the Du Bois militancy, even defiance, which you will find in that document written in 1900. C. L. R. James: Towards the Seventh

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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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The Philadelphia Negro A Social Study (1899)

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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 Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration By Isabel Wilkerson Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest.

Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.

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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.

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Origins of Pan-Africanism Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa, and the African Diaspora By Marika Sherwood This 2012 book recounts the life story of the pioneering Henry Sylvester Williams, an unknown Trinidadian son of an immigrant carpenter in the late-19th and early 20th century. Williams, then a student in Britain, organized the African Association in 1897, and the first-ever Pan-African Conference in 1900. He is thus the progenitor of the OAU/AU. Some of those who attended went on to work in various pan-African organizations in their homelands. He became not only a qualified barrister, but the first Black man admitted to the Bar in Cape Town, and one of the first two elected Black borough councilors in London. These are remarkable achievements for anyone, especially for a Black man of working-class origins in an era of gross racial discrimination and social class hierarchies. Williams died in 1911, soon after his return to his homeland, Trinidad.

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My First Coup d'Etat And Other True Stories from the Lost Decades of Africa By John Dramani Mahama Though the colonies of sub-Saharan Africa began to claim independence in the late 1950s and ’60s, autocratic and capricious leadership soon caused initial hope to fade, and Africa descended into its “lost decades,” a period of stagnation and despondency from which much of the continent has yet to recover. Mahama, vice president of the Republic of Ghana, grew up alongside his nascent country and experienced this roller-coaster of fortunes. In this memoir, Mahama, the son of a member of parliament, recounts how affairs of state became real in his young mind on the day in 1966 when no one came to collect him from boarding school—the government had been overthrown, his father arrested, and his house confiscated.

In fluid, unpretentious style, Mahama unspools Ghana’s recent history via entertaining and enlightening personal anecdotes: spying on his uncle impersonating a deity in order to cajole offerings of soup from the villagers hints at the power of religion; discussions with his schoolmates about confronting a bully form the nucleus of his political awakening. As he writes: “The key to Africa’s survival has always been . . . in the story of its people, the paradoxical simplicity and complexity of our lives.” The book draws to a close as the author’s professional life begins. —Publishers Weekly

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The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry By Rita Dove Selecting poets and poems to represent a century of poetry, especially the riotous twentieth century in America, is a massive undertaking fraught with peril and complication. Poet Rita Dove-a Pulitzer Prize- winning former U.S. poet laureate, professor, and presidential scholar- embarked on what became a consuming four-year odyssey. She reports on obstacles and discoveries in an exacting and forthright introduction, featuring striking quotes, vivid profiles, and a panoramic view of the evolution of poetic visions and styles that helped bring about social as well as artistic change [...] Dove's incisive perception of the role of poetry in cultural and social awakenings infuses this zestful and rigorous gathering of poems both necessary and unexpected by 180 American poets. This landmark anthology will instantly enhance and invigorate every poetry shelf or section.—Booklist

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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