A timeless legacy: celebrating 100 years of W.E.B. Du Bois' the souls of Black Folk - A Salute To Black History Month

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 13, 2003 by Kendra Hamilton

"The man is producing path-breaking book after path-breaking book without research assistants, without libraries, without big grants--the entire apparatus that any White scholar would have had available any day of the week. And the work is still fresh. There's probably no scholar of his generation who's less dated in terms of his arguments."

Marable recalls asking Dr. Herbert Aptheker--the prolific race scholar and literary executor of Du Bois' papers--how he would sum up Du Bois as a man and a thinker. "He looked at me with surprise. He said, `Manning! He was an artist.'"

Feagin agrees: "If Du Bois were alive today, he'd open up another book. It would probably begin, `The problem of the 21st century ...'"

--By Kendra Hamilton