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"TO BE A POOR man is hard," writes WE.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), "but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships." In a single sentence one hears the author's characteristic note of firm- ness and outrage combined with an almost biblical cadence, a sense of gravity and wisdom. More than a hundred years after its first appearance at the turn of the twentieth century, this book a medley of essays and meditations on the meaning of race in America - has become a touchstone, offering a road map for those who wish to travel to freedom.
There is real indignation here, a note of anger amplified and modulated in the writing of future African-American writers. For sure, the poets and novelists, playwrights and essayists of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement looked to Du Bois as a hero, someone who produced a voice of steely self-confidence in the face of virulent racism and its pale but no less deadly cousin, benign neglect. They saw him as a prophet, in that he declares repeatedly throughout his book that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." In this visionary dec- J laration, so often quoted, he foresees that race will play a pivotal role in modern times. Other ideological rifts, of course, absorbed the twentieth century as a whole: the struggles of liberal democracy against Fascism and Communism being central to the twentieth-century story line. But the race issue has been a dominant concern in the world, from the long resistance to apartheid in South Africa to various campaigns to overthrow colonialism in Asia, India, and elsewhere. In the United States, the efforts to overcome segregation have been, and remain, absorbing - one thinks, of course, of the civil rights marches, the Freedom Riders, the Black Panthers, and so forth. African Americans continue to wrestle with the legacy of slavery and the violence of poverty and neglect that dogged them during the era of Reconstruction, those blighted years in the South after the Civil War. That was a time when newly liberated slaves worked, without much traction, to improve their status. In the twentieth century,...