What the Negro Has Done for the United States and Texas.

£3,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

An important pamphlet by W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), one of the most important figures in twentieth-century sociology and the civil rights movement. Printed for distribution at the “Hall of Negro Life” at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, here Du Bois presents not just an overview of African American achievements, but makes that case that African Americans form the foundation of American civilization . The pamphlet is divided into seven topics: “Negro Labor and Exploration,” “Negro Music,” “Negro Literature, Science and Art,” “The Emancipation of Democracy,” “The Black Soldier,” “The Spirit of Religion,” and “Texas.” It’s in the section titled The Emancipation of Democracy that Du Bois finds his stride, noting that “the Negro is the central thread of American history. The whole story turns on him whether we think of the dark and flying slave ship in the sixteenth century, the expanding plantations of the seventeenth, the swelling commerce of the eighteenth, or the fight for freedom of the nineteenth.” This section highlights the importance of African Americans in American political life and that their influence has been continuous. Importantly, Du Bois clarifies: “ It was the black man that raised a vision of democracy in America such as neither Americans nor Europeans conceived in the eighteenth century and such as they have not even accepted in the twentieth century; and yet a conception which every clear sighted man knows is true and inevitable .” Du Bois sta

• Binding: Hardcover

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