The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War

In this stirring intellectual history, Williams (Torchbearers of Democracy), an African American studies professor at Brandeis University, suggests that the failure of WWI to advance Black Americans’ civil rights profoundly affected sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and fueled his “maturation into an uncompromising peace activist.” Du Bois had encouraged Black men to enlist, believing that through “patriotism and military sacrifice, democracy would become a reality for African Americans.” These calls, Williams notes, earned Du Bois criticism in the Black press as a “traitor,” and he was proven wrong by postwar massacres of Black people across the U.S. during 1919’s “Red Summer.” Williams discusses how these events disillusioned Du Bois through a close reading of his manuscript The Black Man and the Wounded World, contending this unfinished account of WWI constituted Du Bois’s “atonement” for supporting the conflict and that his wrestling with its legacy sharpened his critique of white supremacy and imperialism. Williams convincingly renders Du Bois as a tragic figure whose optimism was dashed by the intransigence of racism, adding poignancy to a story about the limits and fragility of American democracy. At once a moving character study and a deeply researched look at a dispiriting era from the country’s past, this is history at its most vivid. (Apr.)