The Books Briefing: Looking Back on Moving Forward
Historical texts on black progress: Your weekly guide to the best in books
When W. E. B. Du Bois devised the idea of “double-consciousness” in his 1897 Atlantic article “Strivings of the Negro People,” which he later included in his book The Souls of Black Folk, he set a new language for meditating on black progress in the United States. He’s one of many thinkers who devoted his life to analyzing and ruminating on the overwhelming effects of slavery, which still reverberate throughout American culture.
The black suffragist Anna Julia Cooper outlined, which emphasized the importance of education in achieving those advancements. Decades after the debut of
