The Negro

by W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Gregg (Contribution by)

Overview

Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. So begins The Negro, the first comprehensive history of African and African-derived people, from their early cultures through the period of the slave trade and into the twentieth century.

Originally published in 1915, the book was acclaimed in its time, widely read, and deeply influential in both the white and black communities, yet this beautifully written history is virtually unknown today. As a wellspring of critical studies of Africa and African Americans, it directly and indirectly influenced and inspired the works of scholars such as C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Herbert Aptheker, Eric Foner, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. One of the most important books on Africa ever written, it remains fresh, dynamic, and insightful to this day.

The Negro is compelling on many levels. By comparing W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis with subsequent scholarship, Robert Gregg demonstrates in his afterword that The Negro was well ahead of its time: Du Bois's view of slavery prefigures both paternalistic perspectives and the materialist view that the system was part of the capitalist mode of production. On black contributions to the Civil War and to the emancipation of slaves, historians have yet to acknowledge all that Du Bois delineated. In his discussion of Reconstruction, Du Bois preempts much later historiography. His identification of segregation as an issue of class rather than race is almost forty years ahead of C. Vann Woodward's similar thesis. As to the matter of race, Du Bois is clear that the concept is a social construct having no foundation in biology.

Intellectually and historically prescient, Du Bois assumed globalization as a matter of course, so that his definition of the color line in The Negro links all colonized peoples, not just people of African descent. With the resolution of the Cold War and the ascendancy of the global market, Du Bois's sweeping vision of Africans and the diaspora seems more relevant now than at any time in the past hundred years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812291759
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	11/24/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, author, and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His pioneering work The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study was originally published in 1890 by, and remains available from, the University of Pennsylvania Press. Robert Gregg is Associate Professor of History, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is the author of Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History.

Table of Contents

	Preface	21
I	Africa	23
II	The Coming of Black Men	33
III	Ethiopia and Egypt	43
IV	The Niger and Islam	59
V	Guinea and Congo	73
VI	The Great Lakes and Zymbabwe	89
VII	The War of Races at Land's End	101
VIII	African Culture	113
IX	The Trade in Men	147
X	The West Indies and Latin America	163
XI	The Negro in the United States	183
XII	The Negro Problems	225
	Suggestions for Further Reading	235
	Index	247
	Maps
	The Physical Geography of Africa	22
	Ancient Kingdoms of Africa	100
	Races in Africa	112
	Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern	233

Editorial Reviews

Du Bois's 1915 volume is one of the earliest histories of African peoples and their cultures. It runs from European colonization to the 20th century. (LJ 8/01) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Holt published the general history of African Americans in 1915, the year the death of Booker T. Washington left Du Bois (1868- 1963) as nearly the sole African American political and intellectual leader. Kenneth W. Goings (African-American and Africana studies, Ohio State U.-Columbus) contributes an introduction placing it in the context of his life and the times. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Hot on the heels of David Levering Lewis's second and final volume of his DuBois biography comes this scholarly yet engaged study of the African diaspora, first published in 1915, and left out of the collected DuBois published by The Library of America. Like Lewis, the editors no doubt considered this a minor work by the controversial intellectual (1868—1963), whose long career spanned the centuries, ending with this co-founder of the NAACP as a hardened communist. But Robert Gregg, who provides a helpful afterword here, argues the merits of a this wide-ranging narrative that begins with prehistoric Africa, follows the migrations to Egypt, the engagement with Islam, the self-sufficiency of pre—slave-era Africa, and the passages to the Caribbean and the US. Not just relevant in terms of DuBois's career, as Gregg documents, this even-tempered treatise serves as "history, anthropology, social commentary" and "as an elegy on the condition of migrancy." DuBois also anticipates the better Afrocentric scholarship, and the notion that race is a social construct. Important by any standard.

Kirkus Reviews

"The whole is written with an intellectual force, a breadth of learning, and a judicial poise that compel respect."

New York Times

"The book ought to be generally read, for it contains more than mere information. It gathers and sets forth authentic data which form the kind of historic background essential to race consciousness."

James Weldon Johnson

"Important by any standard."—Kirkus

"The book ought to be generally read, for it contains more than mere information. It gathers and sets forth authentic data which form the kind of historic background essential to race consciousness."—James Weldon Johnson

"The whole is written with an intellectual force, a breadth of learning, and a judicial poise that compel respect."—New York Times

From the Publisher