The Negro

This classic treatise by W. E. B. Du Bois (1869-1963), the most important African American leader of the first half of the twentieth century and the cofounder of the NAACP, presents a brief history of Africa and people of African descent. To appreciate this pioneering work, published in 1915, it is important to recall its historical context. At the start of the last century, most whites had no appreciation of African Americans as fellow human beings worthy of dignity or as inheritors of a r...