Black & Red — 40th Anniversary Edition

Description

Originally published in 1986 and now out of print, this extensively researched study forced a reevaluation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ later years.

In Black & Red, Gerald Horne shows that Du Bois’ later activities were the culmination of a lifelong commitment, which Du Bois resolutely followed despite the threats of antiblack Cold War-era McCarthy repression.

Until Horne’s manuscript, historians argued that there was a radical shift in Du Bois’ political activities in his later years. World War II, the evolution of his political perspective—which led to his ouster from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—and the Justice Department’s indictment of him for failure to register as a “foreign agent,” were evidence, they argued, that Du Bois had lost his way.

However, Horne shows how the confluence of Cold War anti- communism and attempts to discredit the civil rights and anti- colonial movements influenced the evaluation of Du Bois’ legacy.

Instead, Horne reinterprets Du Bois’ final decades and argues that 1944-1963 most fully materialized a life devoted to equality, colonial independence and socialism.

This 40th Anniversary Edition includes a new Foreword by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Senior Research Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor of Forging Freedom in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Twilight Years: No Deed But Memory.