The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford World's Classics)

oxford world�� s classics

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on

23 February 1868. In 1885 he went to Fisk University where he

edited the Fisk Herald. After graduating in June 1888 he continued

his studies at Harvard College, gaining an MA degree in history in

1891. Following further study at the Friedrich Wilhelm University

in Berlin, he returned to the United States in 1894 to take a teaching

position in classics at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio. Du

Bois became the ?rst black to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard in

1895 and moved to Philadelphia the next year to pursue a sociological study of black life there. After accepting a faculty position in

economics and history at Atlanta University, he gained renown as an

intellectual in the next decade with the publication of The Souls of

Black Folk (1903) and his participation in the Niagara Movement, a

group of black leaders assembled in 1905 to promote full civil and

economic rights for blacks. In 1910 Du Bois moved to New York,

where he accepted a position at the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as the editor of the civil

rights organization��s monthly journal, The Crisis. In February 1919

in Paris, Du Bois organized the First Pan-African Congress, which

gathered delegates from the United States, the Caribbean, Europe,

and Africa. He continued to publish a steady stream of important

books, including Darkwater (1920), Dark Princess (1928), and Black

Reconstruction (1935). After a series of political con?icts, Du Bois

resigned from The Crisis in 1934 and returned to Atlanta University,

where he founded and edited another journal, Phylon. Increasingly

radical in his public criticism of US foreign policy and race relations

after the Second World War, Du Bois worked with paci?st organizations and the Council on African A?airs. After celebrating his

ninetieth birthday in New York, Du Bois toured Europe, the Soviet

Union, and China in 1958 and 1959. In 1961 he accepted the

invitation of Kwame Nkrumah, the president of independent

Ghana, to move to Africa. Du Bois died in Ghana on 27 August

1963, on the eve of the monumental civil rights protest march in

Washington, DC.

Brent Hayes Edwards is an associate professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The

Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black

Internationalism (2003), the co-editor of the essay collection Uptown

Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), and the editor of Joseph

Conrad��s Nostromo (2004) and Frederick Douglass��s My Bondage

and My Freedom (2005).

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OXFORD WORLD��S CLASSICS

W. E. B. DU BOIS

The Souls of Black Folk

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

BRENT HAYES EDWARDS

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868�C1963.

The souls of Black folk / W. E. B. Du Bois ; edited with an

introduction and notes by Brent Hayes Edwards.

p. cm.�C�C(Oxford world��s classics paperback)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978�C0�C19�C280678�C9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African Americans.

I. Edwards, Brent Hayes. II. Title.

E185.6.D797 2007

973��.0496073�C�Cdc22

ISBN 978�C0�C19�C280678�C9

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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