On the 27th August, 1963, the day before Martin Luther King electrified the world from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with the immortal words, “I Have a Dream”, the life of another giant of the Civil Rights movement quietly drew to a close in Accra, Ghana.
W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, just three years after formal emancipation of America’s slaves. In his extraordinarily long and active political life, he would emerge as the first black man to earn a PhD from Harvard; surpass Booker T. Washington as the leading advocate for African American rights; co-found the NAACP, and involve himself in anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa.
In this new biography, Bill V. Mullen interprets the seismic political developments of the Twentieth Century through the revolutionary life of W.E.B. Du Bois – focusing not just on his Civil Rights work, but also examining Du Bois's attitudes towards socialism, the USSR, China’s Communist Revolution, and the relationship between capitalism, poverty and racism.
