I just finished reading “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois. It was written in 1904 and was remarkably prescient. Du Bois was the first the first black to receive a PhD from Harvard. His writing is florid in the Victorian style but the images he paints with words are hauntingly vivid.
He wrote at the beginning of the second chapter “The Problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” He was right about that and his understanding of the complexity of the problem and its intractable nature are also absolutely correct. It would be very interesting to learn his sense of where we are today and what we should be doing to keep moving forward. In the same way that “Common Sense” was a precipitating document of the American Revolution, “The Souls of Black Folk” was a precipitating document of the civil right movement. Definitely worth a read.