One of the greatest intellectuals this country has produced, DuBois dedicated his life to understanding the meaning of race, combating white supremacy and demonstrating the full humanity of Black people. He was astonishingly prolific, authoring 22 books in a variety of genres, with The Souls of Black Folk unquestionably his most famous.
In 2020, I imagine, I was not alone in turning to DuBois for guidance and clarity. A year when close to two million people around the world lost their lives to a terrible virus, 2020 will also be remembered as a time when Americans wrestled with the stability and very meaning of democracy. Along with a contentious election that tested the legitimacy of our institutions, we also experienced a dramatic reckoning with the country’s racist history and present. In great numbers, people read and thought and marched to declare that Black lives matter and demand that American democracy live up to its promise.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” DuBois wrote in Souls, and it remains true in the twenty-first century.
But another book by DuBois stands out right now as even more prescient and more attuned to America’s crisis of race and democracy. That book is Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, published one hundred years ago.
Revisiting the book today, one comes away with an enhanced perspective on the nation’s dark past and inspiration for how we can confront the uncertain days ahead. Envisioned as a sequel to Souls, Darkwater is a similarly experimental text, combining poetry, short story fiction, memoir, and previously published essays. Yet it differs in significant ways due to the context in which it was written: the traumatic years of the First World War and its aftermath. In ten chapters and accompanying interludes, DuBois explores the condition of being Black in relation to colonialism and empire, class and economic inequality, women’s rights and universal suffrage, labor and education, and other issues that reflected how much the world, and Black folk along with it, had changed since 1903.
Darkwater is steeped in rage. It exhibits DuBois at his most bitter about the catastrophic costs of white supremacy and the meaning of democracy for Black people. For DuBois, democracy was about more than just governments, elections, and individual political figures. It was an ethos, an ideal, and a goal to constantly strive toward. “Democracy is a method of realizing the broadest measure of justice to all human beings,” he wrote in Darkwater. America, then and now, has struggled to meet this standard. For this reason, Darkwater, even more so than The Souls of Black Folk, is the book of our times. One hundred years later, we are again grappling with the failures of democracy, the specter of Black death, and the tension between hope and despair. In Darkwater, DuBois reminds us that these challenges are not new.
