Negro, The

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2001 by Valentine, Victoria

The Negro, by W.E.B. Du Bois (University of Pennsylvania Press, $14.95 paperback)

First published in May 1915, The Negro is one of W.E.B. Du Bois' Lesser-known writings. The significance of his sixth book, however, is formidable in that it is regarded as the first overall examination of the history of people of African descent written in English. In order to advance their own interests and harvest, unfettered, the rich resources of Africa, Europeans long denied the continent had a meaningful history. Du Bois' book was an attempt to overrule such dismissals. In his 1994 biography of Du Bois, David Levering Lewis noted that The Negro contained "broad characterizations of African peoples that would have been seen as invidious if propounded by a European scholar." But Lewis also conceded that the book "was a large building block in an Afrocentric historiography that has achieved credibility through the writings of scholars Basil Davidson, Martin Bernal and Cheikh Anta Diop." Most of The Negro, which is being republished with an afterword by Robert Gregg, an associate professor of history at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, is devoted to the history of Africa's various countries. The balance of the book, takes the reader to the West Indies, Latin America, the United States, and finally, offers a discussion of "The Negro Problems." Following are excerpts from reviews of The Negro when it was originally published in 1915.

- Victoria Valentine

"If [Du Bois] does not, to paraphrase Macaulay, always escape the danger of suffocation beneath the weight of his fuel, he has succeeded in making a book that will be informing to a multitude of readers."

- The Nation, June 10, 1915

"[The Negro] is written with an intellectual force, a breadth of Learning, and a judicial poise that compel respect." - The New York Times, July 11, 1915 - The New York Times, July 11, 1915

"The only point in which Dr. DuBois admits a difference between the negro and other races is to the advantage of the negro. The negro race has proved its capacity to produce extraordinary men. Dr. DuBois is one himself. There are very few of the convinced adherents of the doctrine of negro inferiority who can equal him in Literary skilL or breadth of scholarship."

- The New Republic, Sept. 11, 1915

"Condensed, well arranged survey. Sympathetic and very positive."

- American Library Association Booklist, October 1915

Source: The Book Review Digest (Eleventh Annual Cumulation, Reviews of 1915 Books in One Alphabet), Edited by Clara Elizabeth Fanning and Margaret Jackson, The H. W Wilson Company, White Plains, N.Y., 1916