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W. E. B. Du Bois’s life was bookended by the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. In the period between the aftermath of the Civil War known as the Reconstruction era (1865–77) and the Civil Rights Movement years (1954–68), Du Bois altered American history – and, indeed, world history – by aligning himself with many of the most cutting-edge and controversial causes of his epoch.¹ Yet the public view of Du Bois is often that of an elitist advocate of “racial uplift” via a “Talented Tenth,” and, of course, the author of the 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays that ingeniously captured the complexities of African Americans’ past, present, and future.² After the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois took a hard-activist turn that ultimately culminated in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The next year, 1910, he inaugurated The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, the monthly magazine of the NAACP. Du Bois edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1910 to 1934. Under his editorship, The Crisis touched on an array of topics dealing with black history, culture, politics, economics, and the arts. Although it began with a monthly circulation of 1,000 copies, by its peak period (circa 1917–27) The Crisis reached more than 100,000 readers monthly.³

After his break with the NAACP in 1934, because he felt the organization wanted to mute his increasing militancy and commitment to Marxism, Du Bois published his radical revisionist history of African American enslavement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, Black Reconstruction, in 1935.⁴ Black Reconstruction explored the aftermath of the Civil War from the bottom-up points of view of the freedmen and freedwomen, black workers and white workers. The book revealed Du Bois’s serious study of Marxism and the shedding of many elements of his early elitist leadership model. As a result of the Great Depression, Du Bois ramped up his search for alternatives to the racism and capitalism he believed were deeply embedded in, and deforming, US democracy. This search led him back to Pan-Africanism – essentially the commitment to continental and diasporan African unification, decolonization, and liberation – which he first embraced at the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900. Du Bois gradually evolved from reformist to radical internationalist who traveled to, and openly supported, revolutions and anti-colonial movements in Russia, Japan, China, India, Africa, and the Caribbean. He spent roughly half of his life committed to what the Communist International (Comintern) called “world revolution” – the goal of fomenting socialist-oriented revolutions internationally.

After the publication of Black Reconstruction, a combination of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and Marxist internationalism dominated Du Bois’s thought. As a consequence of the Cold War and his many political misjudgments surrounding Marxism, it was Du Bois’s search for a democratic socialist model for Africa and its diaspora that got him into the most trouble during the last decades of his long life. For example, Du Bois was duped into supporting despotic and deformed versions of communism in Russia under Joseph Stalin (i.e., Stalinism) and China under Mao Tse-tung (i.e., Maoism). Even after the horrors of Stalinism were revealed in the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953 – such as the famines it caused and the brutal repression of Russian workers – Du Bois refused to publicly denounce and distance himself from Stalinism, stubbornly stating that he would not give in to anti-communism. Du Bois’s Marxism made him an easy target in the midst of the widespread anti-communist panic known as the “Second Red Scare” (circa 1945–55). Although he lived through the “First Red Scare,” which materialized in the aftermath of World War I and which marked the rampant fear of Bolshevism and anarchism, Du Bois’s increasing commitment to Marxism in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s brought his work to the attention of the notorious Cold War anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Du Bois fell victim to McCarthyism. Consequently, in 1951, Du Bois was indicted by the US federal government as an agent of a foreign state as a result of his work with the Peace Information Center, an organization committed to peace activism and nuclear disarmament. As detailed in his 1952 book, In Battle for Peace, the then 82-year-old Du Bois was arrested, handcuffed, searched for concealed weapons, fingerprinted, briefly jailed, and subsequently released on bail.⁵ However, his passport was immediately revoked and remained canceled until 1958. Du Bois’s misguided support for dictatorial leaders such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, who claimed to be communist and committed to Marxist principles, has caused many scholars to disregard or even lampoon his late-life work and instead focus almost exclusively on his early and middle years up to his resignation from the editorship of The Crisis in 1934.

Considering the complex nature of his life, scholarship, and activism, this volume’s primary objective is to provide a brief introduction to Du Bois’s discourse and chart his inimitable development from reformist social scientist to radical internationalist. Along the way, Du Bois innovatively synthesized the study and critique of race and racism, gender and sexism, class and capitalism, and colonialism and anti-colonialism. Indeed, his work can be characterized as an interesting combination of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, male feminism, and Marxism. Consequently, Du Bois: A Critical Introduction explores Du Bois’s solutions to the “problems” of racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism. Most scholarship on Du Bois seems to isolate one period or aspect of his polymathic thought. There is also a tendency to de-radicalize and domesticate his discourse by sanitizing it of its radical and internationalist elements, especially in his later socialist-cum-communist years. Du Bois: A Critical Introduction will instead examine the strengths and weaknesses in Du Bois’s development from reformist to radical to late-life revolutionary.