At least sixty-two African Americans were lynched in 1906 and the city of Atlanta experienced one of the worst racial massacres in American history, but this could not quench Hallie Queen’s excitement. From her vantage point in February 1907, the nation was changing. One of two African American female students at Cornell University in upstate New York, she had been leading small-group discussions of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. The Cornell book clubs were the brainchild of a white student who had heard Du Bois lecture in Philadelphia at the Ethical Culture Society in 1906....

Shortly before joining the Communist Party in 1961 and rejecting the United States in favor of citizenship in Ghana, the ninety-two-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois stepped into the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University in 1960. He was there to share memories from his life with William T. Ingersoll, one of oral history’s earliest pioneers. Ingersoll queried Du Bois about his family history, his battles with Booker T. Washington, and his various plans to end racial discrimination and economic inequality. Perhaps because Du Bois had expended so much energy discussing religion throughout his career and perhaps because Du...

America’s cultural landscape was rocked by The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. First published in April 1903, reprinted numerous times since, and translated into dozens of languages, Souls consisted of fourteen essays, an introduction, and a conclusion. Blending history, sociology, autobiography, and fiction to discuss race in the United States, Du Bois created a powerfully moving book. A reviewer for the Nation maintained that it was “a profoundly interesting and affecting book, remarkable as a piece of literature.” The text’s influence knew few bounds, and readers from all sorts of backgrounds declared it a marvel. In 1907, novelist...

Reverend William L. Bull was deeply concerned. Massive economic, social, and religious forces were transforming the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the church seemed to offer few answers. But with Bull’s funds, the Episcopal Church’s Philadelphia Divinity School would help. It inaugurated a lectureship in “Christian Sociology” that asked lecturers to apply “Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, and Economic problems of the time.” Bull placed only one restriction on the lecture series. The “lecturer . . . shall be a believer in the moral teachings and principles of the Christian Religion.” Invited to campus...

Awaiting execution, Bigger Thomas sat brooding in his prison cell. The fictional lead of Richard Wright’s gripping novel Native Son (1940) now had to endure the visit of an African American minister from his mother’s church. The pastor begged Bigger to accept the love of God. “Fergit yuh’s black,” Reverend Hammond implored, “Gawd looks past yo’ skin ’n inter yo’ soul, son. He’s lookin’ at the only parta yuh tha’s His. He wants yuh ’n’ He loves yuh.” Bigger wanted to be left alone. The judge wasn’t going to forget Bigger’s blackness; neither would the jury. To pacify Reverend Hammond,...

Horace Bumstead believed that he knew the truth about religion in Du Bois’s life According to the longtime president of Atlanta University, when Du Bois applied for a professorship there in 1895, a number of university leaders wondered “about his religion.” “He’s studied in Germany,” they reasoned, “perhaps if you scratch him you’ll find an agnostic.” Bumstead considered Du Bois “one of those persons who, when asked their religion, reply that they ‘have none to speak of.’” Yet the president and friend of Du Bois knew this was not the case. As Bumstead later remembered of Du Bois’s years in...

“God is no playwright,” reflected the fictive Manuel Mansart of the Black Flame trilogy as he lay on his deathbed in Manhattan. Most “lives end dimly, and without drama; they pile no climax on tragedy nor triumph on defeat. They end quietly and helplessly—they just end.” In the case of the real W. E. B. Du Bois, Manuel could not have been more wrong. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, at 11:40 p.m. on August 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On August 28, Martin Luther King, Jr., electrified the nation with...