The eloquent passages of his writing quoted in W.E.B. Du Bois called out the contributions already made by Blacks to American culture in an era before jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop and integrated professional sports.īasevich is sometimes reductive (comparing Barack Obama to Nikolas Sarkozy) and too self-conscious in her role as a white philosophy professor advocating for Du Bois-a Black philosopher, historian, sociologist and storyteller. He was not for assimilation, holding instead that cultures should coexist, that traditions should inform the future. However, as Basevich mentions, he might have frowned on contemporary movements for robbing themselves of sustained momentum through their “democratic leaderlessness.”īasevich sketches Du Bois’ biography and surveys the evolving trains of his thought through a worldview based on his belief that we can repair the world we inherited and create the society where we ought to live. His mission was to show that Black lives matter. In the darkness of Jim Crow when Blacks approached the public forum hesitantly, when even their full humanity was denied by science (anthropologists, eugenicists, Social Darwinists), Du Bois outspokenly demonstrated that Blacks are morally equal. Du Bois, Elvira Basevich summarizes his life and thought from the perspective of the world of Black Lives Matter. With an optimism that only faded in his final years, Du Bois assumed the capacity for white Americans to refine their moral sensibility and repair the racial conundrums that marred the republic from its inception.
His most influential work came early, especially The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the foundational text for African American sociology. Du Bois was the first Black to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. A public intellectual and civil rights leader, W.E.B.
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