Groundbreaking civil rights book republished

By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — The Ku Klux Klan was rising again. Segregation was the law, and Martin Luther King Jr. was not even born yet.

Amid the terror and oppression, civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois published a groundbreaking book in 1924 that challenged the pervasive stereotypes of blacks and documented their rarely recognized achievements.

His book, “The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America,” detailed the role of blacks with the earliest explorers to inventions ranging from ice cream to player pianos. He argued that blacks were crucial to conquering the wilderness, winning wars, expanding democracy and creating a prosperous economy by producing tobacco, sugar, cotton and rice and helping to build the Panama Canal.

“The Negro worked as farmhand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it would have been impossible,” DuBois wrote.

Now a new edition of the book is being published to mark the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which DuBois co-founded. The new edition also marks Black History Month in February and arrives with President Barack Obama taking office.

“African-Americans have served on the Supreme Court, in the Cabinet, and, finally, as president of the United States,” Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, wrote in the introduction. “‘The Gift of Black Folk’ allows us to fully appreciate these monumental achievements.”

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who edited DuBois’ works, including “The Gift of Black Folk,” welcomed the Knights’ reissuing their own edition. The book, which came during the Harlem Renaissance, sparked similar books that raised the nation’s consciousness of black achievements, he said.

“Black people were using art and historical narrative as weapons in the civil rights movement, trying to show that black people were innately as intelligent as white people, that they weren’t distinctly inferior by nature and the best way to do that they felt was by holding up the achievements of intelligent or artistic or creative black people,” Gates said. “And no one did this more brilliantly than the great W.E.B. DuBois himself.”