This is a hard work to capture succinctly. A collection of re-worked essays that address the concerns of those working for civil rights in the early 20th century, looking at the failure of Reconstruction and unable to see the currents that would lead to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and its limited successes.

There are some things that place the writing in its particular time. There’s an acceptance of race, of racial differences and distinct, widely shared racial characteristics that is jarring to the modern ear. There’s also a casual anti-Semitism that’s perhaps even more shocking when deployed in the cause of emancipation by such a deep thinker who mainly overflows (at least in the main part of the book) with inclusivity towards white Americans.

The essays range in tone from the high idealisation of education in “Of the training of Black men” to the howl of anguish in “Of the passing of the first-born”. And then – in this edition, anyway – there’s the sudden volte face of Du Bois’s later thought in “The souls of White folk”, where he interprets the First World War as the start of an anti-colonial struggle that’s redolent of much recent writing in the same vein.

It’s only having read Du Bois that I (as a non-American) really come to appreciate his influence and hear the echoes of his thought. Certainly he is being channelled directly in Between the World and Me, and his ideas and even his speech patterns come through clearly in the voices of the modern civil rights movement.

5/5. Finished Monday 1 November, 2021.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)