W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

The second volume of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography that The Washington Post hailed as “an engrossing masterpiece.” In this final magisterial volume, fifteen years in the research and writing, David Levering Lewis stunningly recreates the second half of W.E.B. Du Bois’s charged and brilliant career. Beginning with the return of World War I African American veterans to the riots and lynchings of the “Red Summer” of 1919 and ending with Du Bois’s self-imposed exile and death in Ghana forty-four years later, Lewis charts the dramatic evolution of the premiere architect of the civil rights movement and of the movement itself.