W. E. B. Du Bois Souls of Black Folk

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois's influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk . The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era's promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws.