“Du Bois essentially defined black America in the twentieth century.”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
“I have been in the world, but not of it,” begins this searing and passionate book by legendary scholar W.E.B. Du Bois. A continuation of his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater describes the devastation of segregation, slavery, and the global color line that veiled half the world’s people in shadow.
First published in 1920, Darkwater gives voice to the rising power of the “darker races” around the world; it frames Africa’s blistering indictment of Europe in a study of the curious and twisted souls of white folk; and it includes Du Bois’s landmark essay “The Damnation of Women,” in which he explores gender inequality and the double burdens forced onto black women. Combining essays and analysis with poetry, allegory, and short fiction, Darkwater is an angry and eloquent argument that, as Du Bois writes, “a belief in humanity is a belief in colored men.”
This beautiful edition includes a new introduction from award-winning poet and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and a historical preface by historian Manning Marable.
About the Author
W. E. B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. He was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, was a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction in America challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era.
