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Raymond Wolters. Du Bois and His Rivals. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002.311 pp. $19.95.
The year 2003 proved especially important in W. E. B. Du Bois scholarship. Throughout the year, scholars convened at such varied sites as the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Stirling in Scotland, and Morgan State University in Baltimore to commemorate the 100th anniversary of The Souls of Black Folk, and in so doing to celebrate, as Raymond Wolters puts it, "the preeminent black scholar of his era." Along with the conferences came a flurry of publications. Significant book-length studies include Chester Fontenot and Mary Alice Morgan's DH Bois and Race: Essays Celebrating the Centennial Publication of The Souls of Black Folk (2002), Stanley Crouch and Playthell Benjamin's Reconsidering The Souls of Black Folk (2003), Dolan Hubbard's The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later (2003), and the preeminent work in Du Bois studies, David Levering Lewis's two-volume, Pulitizer Prize-winning Du Bois biography, Biography of a Race (1993) and The Fight for Equality and the American Century (2000). Du Bois and His Rivals, then, is among the latest of a number of discerning, well-crafted books published in part to commemorate the centennial of Du Bois's 1903 masterpiece.
In this most recent volume, Raymond Wolters (Keith Professor of History, University of Delaware) dubs W. E. B. Du Bois "the great pioneer of the American civil rights movement." Where most of the centennial publications analyze in some depth The Souls of Black Folk, Wolters, much like David Lewis, focuses on Du Bois the man, particularly on his work as a civil rights leader. In doing so, he also illuminates the lives of Du Bois's principal friends and rivalsseveral black leaders who came to the fore in the years before World War II. Accordingly, Wolters envisions his book as a group portrait.
The book's central argument is that Du Bois was philosophically a pluralist. Although the author fails to provide a precise definition of pluralism, he does offer, in support of his thesis, a number of compelling examples. He notes, for instance, that in pursuing his life's work-the realization of economic, political, and social justice for Blacks in America-Du Bois repeatedly rejected either/or approaches and embraced instead both/and solutions. This...