Darkwater

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.