Published forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Du Bois’s radioactive essays addressed an American nation that had still not yet found “peace from its sins.” Today, amid furor over voting rights, mass incarceration, police brutality and extrajudicial killing, the ghosts of white supremacy and ethnonationalism, and the apparent fragility of the equality and desegregation gains of the Civil Rights Movement, Du Bois’s work has proven prophetic, and more urgently necessary than ever. Since he penned these words in 1903, the fraught relationship between the races has dominated the country’s policies, economy, and social developments. Du Bois crafted what would become the most influential work about race in America: The Souls of Black Folk. “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” This infamous formulation is the central idea around which W.
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