Darkwater

Voices From Within the Veil

English · 7h 13m · History, Biography & Autobiography, Essays & Short Works

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest voices of the American experience, was born just after the end of the Civil War, was the first black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, founded the NAACP in 1909, and lived to the beginnings of the modern civil rights movement in the early 1960s. In the middle of his long life, he published Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, a deeply thoughtful reflection on how black Americans were still struggling under the weight of Jim Crow and backlash from Reconstruction. He writes lyrically on the common bonds of working-people, the importance of education and the care of the nation’s children, and considers the future of American democracy, recently challenged by the surveillance, repression and racial discrimination of the Wilson Administration, the strains of the First World War and the widening inequality of the post-war boom. Du Bois died in 1963, and was honored by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson during the March on Washington, the same event at which Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The book is considered the first of Du Bois's three autobiographies and was followed by Dusk of Dawn: An Autobiography of a Race Concept, and The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century. - Summary by Tom Shoesmith