Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

By W.E.B. Du Bois and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A new edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ classic work of Black history and politics, featuring an introduction by award-winning poet and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A passionate and searing takedown the global color line—from the legendary Black radical and scholar who “defined Black America in the 20th century” (Ta-Nehisi Coates).

“I have been in the world, but not of it,” begins this searing and passionate book by legendary scholar W.E.B. Du Bois. A continuation of his celebrated work The Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater describes the devastation of segregation, slavery, and the global color line that veiled half the world’s people in shadow.

First published in 1920, Darkwater gives voice to the rising power of the “darker races” around the world; it frames Africa’s blistering indictment of Europe in a study of the curious and twisted souls of white folk; and it includes Du Bois’s landmark essay “The Damnation of Women,” in which he explores gender inequality and the double burdens forced onto black women. Combining essays and analysis with poetry, allegory, and short fiction, Darkwater is an angry and eloquent argument that, as Du Bois writes, “a belief in humanity is a belief in colored men.”

This beautiful edition includes a new introduction from award-winning poet and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and a historical preface by historian Manning Marable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784787776

W.E.B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an African American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and socialist. Born in Massachusetts, he was raised in Great Barrington, an integrated community. He studied at the University of Berlin and at Harvard, where he became the first African American scholar to earn a doctorate. He worked as a professor at Atlanta University, a historically black institution, and was one of the leaders of the Niagara Movement, which advocated for equal rights and opposed Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta compromise. In 1909, he cofounded the NAACP and served for years as the editor of its official magazine The Crisis. In addition to his activism against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of discrimination and segregation, Du Bois authored such influential works as The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). A lifelong opponent of racism and a committed pacifist, Du Bois advocated for socialism as a means of replacing racial capitalism in America and around the world. In the 1920s, he used his role at The Crisis to support the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and sought to emphasize the role of African Americans in shaping American society in his book The Gift of Black Folk (1924).

Reviews for Darkwater

[schraubd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Souls of Black Folk is far more famous, but I think this is a superior piece of work. It represents Du Bois at his most complex -- he's not starry-eyed over the promise of liberalism anymore, but nor has he given up hope entirely on America. The resulting ambiguity gives us some fantastic chapters of work that are must-reads for anyone interested in race in America.