On April 18, 1903, A.C. McClurg and Company of Chicago published The Souls of Black Folk, just two months after the author's thirty-fifth birthday. Between 1903 and 1905, no less than six printings of the book were necessary to satisfy demand. Despite his young age, the author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868--1963), had become by the turn of the century "one of the two or three best-known Afro-Americans in the nation," as the historian Herbert Aptheker accurately observes. Indeed, Du Bois's emergence as a dominant pofitical figure in the Afro-American community as without parallel in the history of black leadership, because his vehicle to prominence was the written word...

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,"Thus speaks WE B Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, one of the most prophetic and influential works in American literature In this eloquent collection of essays, first published in 1903,Du Bois dares as no one had before to describe the magnitude of American racism and demand an end to it He draws on his own life for illustration,from his early experiences teaching in the hills of Tennessee to the death of his infant son and his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T.Washington.

Far ahead of its time, The Souls of Black Folk both anticipated and inspired much of the black consciousness and activism of the 1960s and is a classic in the literature of civil rights. The elegance of Du Bois"s prose and the passion of his message are as crucial today as they were upon the book"s first publication.

Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Forethought

Of Our Spiritual Strivings

Of the Dawn of Freedom

Of Mr. Booker T. Washingtonand Others

Of the Meaning of Progress

Of the Wings of Atalanta

Of the Training of Black Men

Of the Black Belt

Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece

Of the Sons of Master and Man

Of the Faith of the Fathers

Of the Passing of the First-Born

Of Alexander Crummell

Of the Coming of John

Of the Sorrow Songs

The Afterthought

Selected Bibliography