W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most prolific African American authors, scholars, and leaders of the twentieth century, but none of his previous biographies have so practically and comprehensively introduced the man and his impact on American history as noted historian Shawn Alexander's W. E. B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist. Alexander tells Du Bois' story in a clear and concise manner, exploring his racial strategy, civil rights activity, journalistic career, and his role as an international spokesman. The book also captures Du Bois's life as a historian, sociologist, artist, propagandist, and peace activist, while providing space for the voices of his chief critics: Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Walter White, the Young Turks of the NAACP-not to mention the federal government's characterization of his ever-radicalizing beliefs, particularly after World War II. Alexander's analysis traces the development of Du Bois' thought over time, beginning with his formative years in New England and ending with his death in Ghana. Paying significantly more attention to the many pivotal and previously unexamined intellectual moments in his life, this biography illustrates the experiences that helped bend and mold the indispensable thinker that W.E.B. Du Bois became: the kind whose crowning achievement is his continued relevance in contemporary culture, from classrooms to curbsides.

Shawn Leigh Alexander is associate professor and graduate director of African and African American studies and director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas, where he specializes in African American social and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published an anthology of T. Thomas Fortune's writings, T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator (2008); a study of African American civil rights activity in the post-Reconstruction era entitled, An Army of Lions: The Struggle for Civil Rights before the NAACP (2012); a reprint of William Sinclair's classic 1905 study, The Aftermath of Slavery: A Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro (2012); and a collection on racial violence after the Civil War, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings (2015).