“War, White Supremacy And The Failure Of Democracy”

Chad L. Williams was astonished when he encountered an 800-page unfinished and unpublished manuscript by W.E.B. Du Bois while working in the archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on his dissertation research during the early 2000s. Although he tackled other projects after coming across the unpublished manuscript, he came back to it because he was “inspired to tell the story of this unknown book—why Du Bois decided to write it, what it was about, and why [Du Bois] ultimately failed to complete it.” Williams shared, “I wanted to understand the significance of World War I in Du Bois’s life and work, while also exploring the meaning of World War I for Black people and the struggle for freedom and democracy in the 20th century more broadly.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American scholar, sociologist, historian, and activist, is familiar to many Americans in part due to David Levering Lewis’s two Pulitzer Prize winning biographies — W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Given the nation’s familiarity and the significant number of books written about the venerable intellectual, I asked Williams what we can learn from his book and analysis. He shared, Du Bois’s unfinished and unpublished manuscript on the Black experience in World War I—which is titled “The Black Man and the Wounded World”—would have been one of the sociologist’s most significant works. According to Williams, Du Bois “devoted more than twenty years researching, writing and trying to complete the book.” He added, “For the first time, with my book — The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and World War I, we learn about Du Bois’s forgotten project and gain a new appreciation for how World War I shaped Du Bois’s life, work and political evolution.”

In his classic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois described the painful tension–the “double consciousness”—of being Black and being American that Black people still grapple with today. One of the most powerful themes in Williams’ book is how Du Bois initially envisioned World War I as an opportunity to reconcile that tension—and his subsequent disillusionment.

As Williams’ discusses in The Wounded World, African Americans, and especially soldiers, “faced a heart-wrenching question during World War I: how do you support your country, volunteer to fight and die for your country, while still not being treated as an equal citizen and often times not even as an equal human being?” According to Williams, “It’s a question that Du Bois tried to find an answer to in 1918 and throughout his life. And it’s a question we are still trying to find an answer to in 2023.”

At the very same time that African American soldiers were fighting for their country during World War I, Black citizens were being lynched in the United States. And during the summer of 1919, shortly after World War I — a dire period in our history referred to as “Red Summer” — White supremacists lynched 83 African Americans with 11 of those individuals having served in the military. Attacks on African Americans took place across 26 cities that summer, and membership in the Ku Klux Klan increased rapidly.

In writing this important book, Williams continues the struggle that Du Bois found himself in — answering the question: What does it mean as a Black person to live in a world wounded by war, white supremacy and the failure of democracy?”