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 volume

William 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.

This book deals with the forgotten history of the civil rights movement. The American Left played a significant part in the origins of that movement, whose history has traditionally been focused on the later 1940's and early 1950's. This approach needs serious re-thinking in light of what took place in the later 1930's with the organization and activity of groups like the Southern Negro Youth Congress that brought both African-American and white workers and students together in the fight for economic and social justice. Thanks to the post-World War II Red Scare such groups as well as Left African-American leaders like Esther and James Jackson have been overlooked or excised from an exciting, controversial, and important story. With all due credit to the churches which played such a pivotal role in finally winning Blacks their civil rights, the early history involving the Left, workers of both races, and the labor unions must be assimilated into America's memory, for there were important continuities between what they did and the later church-based struggle. This book was published as a special issue of American Communist History.

This book deals with the forgotten history of the civil rights movement. The American Left played a significant part in the origins of that movement, whose history has traditionally been focused on the later 1940's and early 1950's. This approach needs serious re-thinking in light of what took place in the later 1930's with the organization and activity of groups like the Southern Negro Youth Congress that brought both African-American and white workers and students together in the fight for economic and social justice. Thanks to the post-World War II Red Scare such groups as well as Left African-American leaders like Esther and James Jackson have been overlooked or excised from an exciting, controversial, and important story. With all due credit to the churches which played such a pivotal role in finally winning Blacks their civil rights, the early history involving the Left, workers of both races, and the labor unions must be assimilated into America's memory, for there were important continuities between what they did and the later church-based struggle.

This book was published as a special issue of American Communist History.

Reared in Freedmen's Town, Texas, Emmett J. Scott was a journalist, newspaper editor, government official, author, and chief of staff, adviser, and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington. He was frequently called "the power broker of the Tuskegee Machine": he was a Renaissance man, scholar, and political fixer. However, his life has not received a full examination until now. Built upon fifty years of research, Maceo C. Dailey's Emmett J. Scott offers fascinating detail by describing Scott's role in promoting the Tuskegee Institute. Before his death, Dailey had nearly singular access to the Scott papers at Morgan State University, which have been officially closed for decades. Readers will finally be exposed to Scott's behind-the-scenes contributions to racial uplift and will see Scott's influential role in advancing not only the Tuskegee Institute but also the Booker T. Washington agenda. Editors Will Guzmán and David H. Jackson lend their own expertise in bringing Dailey's lifetime project to fruition. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, a close friend of Maceo Dailey, provides a timely foreword. Former Black Panther Party chairwoman Elaine Brown, granddaughter of Emmett J. Scott, reflects on her relationship with Scott and his impact in the afterword. Taken together, this work of biography is an impressive reference and an essential endeavor of recovery, one that restores to prominence the life and legacy of Emmett J. Scott.

Resonating as profoundly today as when it was first published to widespread critical acclaim a decade ago, God's Crucible is a bold portrait of Islamic Spain and the birth of modern Europe from one of our greatest historians. David Levering Lewis's narrative, filled with accounts of some of the most epic battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished-a beacon of cooperation and tolerance-while proto-Europe floundered in opposition to Islam, making virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war and slavery. This masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe. Essential and urgent, God's Crucible underscores the importance of these early, world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today's headlines.

"In every important respect, Lewis' anthology is a worthy companion to his classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue. His selections, chosen with imagination and flair, reflect his uncommon mastery of the subject. This volume offers a fresh and brilliant portrait of African American art and culture in the 1920s."—Arnold Rampersad. Gathering a representative sampling of the New Negro Movement's most important figures, and providing substantial introductory essays, headnotes, and brief biographical notes, Lewis' volume—organized chronologically—includes the poetry and prose of Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and others.

Selected by W.E.B Du Bois and published together for the first time, a collection of 150 rare and beautiful photographs of African Americans out of slavery and beyond, with essays by Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis and the MacAthur fellow, African American photo historian Deborah Willis.

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.

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the ?middle passage, ? but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In "Middle Passages," award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, "Middle Passages" offers a unique perspective on African Americans? ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, published "Darkwater" -- a powerful collection of essays, verse and fiction -- in 1920, two decades after his most famous book, "The Souls of Black Folk." Throughout his long life and extraordinary career as a scholar, activist, writer and educator, Du Bois's body of work illumined America's understanding of the "problem of the color line." While much of his early texts were sociological investigations of the Black community, the author increasingly incorporated autobiographical, poetic and spiritual elements into his works. The results are some of the most electrifying commentaries ever written on race and class in America.

After decades of obscurity, this literary jewel is presented with a new introduction written by David Levering Lewis, author of "W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919" and "W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963; " Lewis is the foremost scholar of the work of Du Bois.

"If "The Souls of Black Folk" achieved its singular impact through W.E.B. Du Bois's masterly interweaving of the personal and the universal in such a way that each appropriated something of the illustrative and symbolic value of the other, much of "Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil" was a cri de coeur in which the author's anger at the absurdities of racial prejudice crackled through the text like electric jolts that scorched, illumined, or stunned."

-- David Levering Lewis, from the Introduction

Acclaimed by leading historians and critics when it appeared shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this foundational biography wends through the corridors in which King held court, posing the right questions and providing a keen measure of the man whose career and mission enthrall scholars and general readers to this day. Updated with a new preface and more than a dozen photographs of King and his contemporaries, this edition presents the unforgettable story of King's life and death for a new generation.

The States and the Nation Series, of which this volume is a part, is designed to assist the American people in a serious look at the ideals they have espoused and the experiences they have undergone in the history of the nation. The content of every volume represents the scholarship, experience, and opinions of its author. The costs of writing and editing were met mainly by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. The project was administered by the American Association for State and Local History, a nonprofit learned society, working with an Editorial Board of distinguished editors, authors, and historians.

In the wake of one of the most tumultuous Republican conventions ever, the party of Lincoln nominated in 1940 a prominent businessman and former Democrat who could have saved America's sclerotic political system. Although Wendell Lewis Willkie would lose to FDR, acclaimed biographer David Levering Lewis demonstrates that the corporate chairman-turned-presidential candidate must be regarded as one of the most exciting, intellectually able, and authentically transformational figures to stride the twentieth-century American political landscape. Born in Elwood, Indiana, in 1892, Willkie was certainly one of the most unexpected, if not unlikely, candidates for the presidency, only somewhat less unlikely than Barack Hussein Obama. Although previously marginalized by journalists like Theodore H. White and David Halberstam as a political invention of rich newspaper publishers, the Willkie who emerges here is a man governed by principles who seldom allowed rigid categories to stand in his way. Even as a young man, he quickly distinguished himself as a reform-minded lawyer, whose farm-boy haircut, hayseed manners, and sartorial indifference bespoke common-man straightforwardness but concealed an ambition that propelled him at forty to chairman of Commonwealth and Southern, the country's third-largest private utility holding company. It was Willkie's vehement opposition to government regulation of the free-market economy and his success in wrenching a fabulous monetary settlement from the Tennessee Valley Authority that attracted the attention of Republican leaders, who, like Willkie, felt that FDR was turning the office into an imperial presidency. Successful at outwitting the isolationist wing of his own party, Willkie took on Roosevelt during one of the nation's darkest periods, creating an unlikely alliance of supporters, including anti-big-government business leaders and black voters, who rightly felt excluded from New Deal benefits. Despite receiving the largest percentage of Republican votes in a generation, Willkie lost but, in the process, proposed sweeping civil rights reform a full generation before the civil rights era and a progressive "new conception of the world" that remains inspirational at a time when our own national belief system has become alarmingly immoral and rudderless. Rather than continue a political battle that could have weakened the nation during its darkest hour, a defeated Willkie reconciled with the president and embraced the war effort, while writing One World, a visionary credo that hoped to instigate an international movement for the betterment of the world's people. In rejecting America's penchant for exceptionalism, Willkie championed this internationalism more passionately than any American politician before him, creating a sovereign philosophy of liberalism that balanced free enterprise with social responsibility. His untimely death at fifty-two in 1944 left this prophetic vision tragically stillborn.