THE most disquieting sign of my mounting years is a certain garrulity about myself, quite foreign to my young days. I find a growing tendency to fix innocent listeners with my stem eye, despite their all too evident longing to escape, and to tell them what life has meant to me. In this case I have been most easily persuaded that Crisis readers are more than anxious to know about me, simply because I am having a birthday. Selah!  [p.167]

* A phrase involving "past" was replaced with a phrase invoking "the South":
1914 [2nd stanza]
"But out of the past of the Past's grey past, it screamed from the top of the sky,"
1920 [2nd stanza]
"But out of the South, — the sad, black South — it screamed from the top of the sky,"

* The word "guard" was replaced with "ward":
1914 [last stanza]
"Black mother of the iron hills that guard the blazing sea,"
1920 [last stanza]
"Black mother of the iron hills that ward the blazing sea,"

Very impressive is the force of feeling behind the essays and sketches and poems of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois' "Darkwater" (Harcourt, Brace and Howe.) In a sense the successor of Booker Washington, the editor of the Crisis reveals himself here as a very different type of leader and one far less digestible from the traditional American point of view. Where Booker Washington was a Fabian, Du Bois is a temperamental insurgent: he is, for the Negroes, a nationalist of the true Mazzinian stripe. But, before everything else, he is a poet, a poet who knows how to handle statistics; bitter, passionate, eloquent. He is a thinker, too: well-conducted are his arguments on the position of Negro women, on the Negro as servant, on the status of the black face in international affairs. What will shock many readers into thinking on their own account is Mr. DuBois' disillusionment with America as a moral protagonist in the new era. "Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood," he says, "America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned. . . . America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker people are concerned." As the spokesman of the Negro race he thus ranges himself beside the representatives of the immigrant population who, disabused and unassimilated, confront the assumptions of American history with a terrible question which the next generation will have to answer.

     This work is a collection of essays by the well-known author of Souls of Black Folk, The Philadelphia Negro, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, and The Negro. The aim of the work is to show that the Negro problem is essentially connected with the problem of work or wages or education and government which, when solved, will mean also the solution of the race problem. To give his point of view, the author, therefore, describes his childhood, training, and outlook on the world as a Negro. To show the "vast emotional content of the social problem,[*] he has inserted between the chapters, bits of poetry and fancy which interpret the bewilderment, the disappointment, the longing and the faith of millions of men. The work ends with a brief philosophy of duty and death and a story and a hymn looking toward human unity.
     This book, therefore, follows the trend of thought characteristic of Dr. DuBois. As in the beautifully written essays entitled Souls of Black Folk he has here put himself forward as a person representative of millions of black men seriously suffering from social proscription. Although his contention that the race problem is interwoven with the economic problems of the country is presented as the reason for directing more attention to this problem, the author does not treat the race question from an economic point of view. This has been the defect of the historical works which Dr. DuBois has written. He is at best a popular essayist with a bit of poetic genius. In all of his discussions of the race problem his mind has not as yet been adequate to the task of scientific treatment of the question. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade is a literary compilation or digest of State and national legislation to curb an evil, but it does not exhibit any relief or a unifying influence. The Philadelphia Negro is an ordinary report on social conditions which a local secretary of the Urban League could now compile in almost any large city in about three or six months and his The Negro is merely a summary of a number of popular works setting forth such history of Africa as a few travellers have been able to learn from the outside. It is hoped, therefore, that Dr. DuBois will take his task more seriously that he may finally write a scholarly economic treatise in this long neglected field. —————————

 * Note 1: The quotation mark at the start of this phrase appears to be in error. I was not able to locate within Darkwater either the phrase "vast emotional content of the social problem", or any of its subphrases that might point to a theme similar to the reviewer's.
 Note 2: I will observe that the anonymous reviewer (a) did not consider the importance of The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade as a "compilation or digest of State and national legislation", one which various historians of the era acknowledged as meticulous in detail; and (b) did not consider the historical -- that is, path-breaking -- significance of The Philadelphia Negro.

    Darkwater. By W. E. B. DuBois. 276 pp. $2.00. Harcourt, Brace & Howe, New York. An eloquent and, at times, a poignant appeal to the American people for a "square deal" to the Negro. Its recital of the limitations, injustice, wrongs and cruelties suffered by the black man in this Republic at the hands of his white fellow citizens makes one feel that democracy has still a long way to go. Thoughtful white men ought to read this book, written as it is by a great Negro leader, who discloses the aspirations of his own people to be accorded their full measure of rights. —————————

 Note (Citation): I.J. Swanson. "The Book-Shelf" [DuBois's Darkwater]. The Expositor, 21:12 (September 1920): 1117-18.

     Dr. Du Bois, as is well known, is the editor of "The Crisis" and one of the most urgent propagandists of race equality in the United States. "Darkwater" is the record of his convictions. It contains a picture of the relationship between white and colored citizens of the United States which is both moving and disquieting. The Outlook recognizes the unhappy background from which Dr. Du Bois's utterances have sprung; it knows the underlying tragedy of the struggle which he paints. Nevertheless it is convinced that the final solution of the problem of race relationship [sic] in America will not be found, must not be found, through the means which Dr. Du Bois advocates. Dr. Du Bois is too close to the struggle to see clearly the problems involved. His work is a creation of passion rather than intelligence. It is, on the whole, a volume which will convince only those already convinced of the justice and soundness of his position. —————————

 R. Williams' Note: The periodical's name, The Outlook, was not italicized.

    Dr. DuBois is given to staring relentlessly at just those things upon which many people are careful to shut their eyes. Hence such people will wish that his book had not been written. Actually it is a book so skilfully put together, so passionately felt, so lyrically expressed, that it will be read widely. May it also be read wisely, dispassionately!
    The themes which come and go through it, some developed at length, others merely hinted at, are many: black women as mothers, as workers, as victims of masters; children as discoverers of the white man's antipathies, checked in the opportunity to grow and develop; workers elbowed aside, scorned, trodden under by the civilization of East St. Louis; citizens denied representation in their government; travelers deterred by the Jim Crow car; soldiers rebuffed by their white compatriots -- these are samples. The autobiographical reference is frequent. Thus and so it feels to be a Negro -- how long will the white man's conscience sanction depreciation of the black?
    But the book is more than an appeal for justice. It is partly an articulate argument. A chapter on politics, for example, is a reasoned statement of the proper role of majorities and minorities in any society, and makes a skilful use, for the purposes of analogy, of the argument for suffrage for women. At a good many points, strikingly in the matter of education, what is asked for the Negro is asked at the same time for the white man.
    Behind the European war, whatever the ideals of individuals, was the white man's fierce contention for control of the colored races, yellow and brown as well as black (but was not one colored race inspired also with the white race's ambition?). Since, however, the colored races include two-thirds of the world's population, true faith in humanity, Dr. DuBois declares, requires faith in the colored skin. This faith he seeks to justify, putting Christ and all the Asiatics in the same group with the Negroes -- a lumping together of dissimilars which is surely not to be justified.
    A chapter on the possibilities of education begins with the life-story of Coleridge-Taylor, whose heredity was as largely white as it was Negro. At such points as these the skeptical or hostile reader (for whom of necessity the book is written) will wish for greater objectivity.
    With Dr. DuBois' recommendation that Africa be developed by and for Africans and not through such exploitation of races as several European governments have sanctioned, many persons will have full sympathy. If the institutions of the civilization that grew up in such circumstances should turn out to be impressively different from those made by white men, there could be no occasion for surprise, and perhaps there would be occasion for congratulation.
    I believe that Dr. DuBois has overstressed in his book the points of identity, not only of the colored races as such, but of the white and black races especially; yet I am equally sure that white men have overstressed the points of divergence. The signal service of this book is that it quite magnificently points out the white man's error and makes clear as day the fact that the "race question" is, at least to a great extent, a question of social environment. A book so genuine as Darkwater is a book to respect. It leaves perplexing questions unanswered -- but whose book upon the Negro does not?
—————————

 Note: Darkwater was not italicized or underlined in the original text.

    '90—W. E. Burghardt DuBois, "Darkwater", Harcourt, Brace & Howe: a companion volume to "The Souls of Black Folk", dealing with the place of the darker races in the modern world. —————————

 Note 1 (Citation): Harvard Alumni Association. Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 22:31 (6 May 1920): p.725.
Note 2: The "'90" refers to 1890, the year that Du Bois graduated with a Bachelor's degree from Harvard University.

 I DID not think . . . I did not know . . .
    What pale excuse is this I make
In answer to my brother's woe,
    Age-long, for deep injustice sake!

Across his mute and patient soul,
    While I have gone my heedless way,
The shadows of a fate might roll
    That deepened night and darkened day.

. . . But I have read a burning page,
    That glowed with white and soul-wrung fire,
And now no more I may engage
    My conscience with a feeble hire.

For all the wrong I did not heed,
    Chance-born in happier paths to live,
I cry unto my brother's need
    One word of love and shame . . . forgive!

"When several good books on the same or closely related subjects have appeared, one is chosen to head the group, and the others are described in appended notes which attempt so to characterize each of the books that the librarian may select the one best adapted to her need." (p.5)

      "A bitter cry against the treatment of the negro. Written with intense feeling by a cultured negro, [sic] artistic and often oversensitive in temperament. Combines autobiography, the essay, story and poetry."
—————————

Note 1 (Citation): New York State Library Bibliography Bulletin 70, No.730, 15 March 1921 at p.7.

In the Forethought to The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois prophesied that the "problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line." A hundred years later, ecological crises join racial crises as perhaps the emergent problems of the twenty-first century. In Du Boisian spirit, my project explores how the color line and what I call the ecological line—the line that runs between humans and their environment—intersect. "Ecology of the Color Line: Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941" reimagines many literary genres and critical disputes traditionally focalized through problematics of race and politics: the Washington–Du Bois debates on racial uplift, New Negro cultural nationalism, the Great Migration narrative, black Marxism, and ethnic proletarian literature. Employing methods of environmental historicism, archival research, and intersectional analysis, my project argues not only that intertwining racial and ecological problems erupted along the color line, but also that these problems form a constitutive element of our thinking about Race and politics in twentieth-century American literature. [p.ii]

Chapter two, "Du Bois at the Grand Canyon: National Parks and Double Consciousness in Darkwater," focuses on how Du Bois works with and against the emerging conservation and wilderness preservation movements of the early twentieth century. My reading of Darkwater's chapter "Of Beauty and Death" examines Du Bois's juxtaposition of visits to national parks such as the Grand Canyon with anecdotes about life under Jim Crow, bringing double consciousness to bear on the history of conservation. Through montage and surrealist formal techniques, he uses Colonel Charles Young—the highest-ranking black military officer at the time and acting superintendent of Sequoia National Park in 1903—as a figure who embodies the intertwined histories of Jim Crow and conservation. For Du Bois, the national parks become an environmental correlative for integration and democratic pluralism, shifting "culture" and "nature" from oppositional to differentiated modern spaces. [p.iii]

 "The Comet," a melodramatic short story . . ., is an exceptional piece, because it unambiguously displays DuBois's view of "race" as a social construct. Further, his depiction of "race" as purely the creation of social forces . . . offers a prophetic, but also illusive, humanist vision of the world sans the veil of "race." The content and message of "The Comet," I believe, displays an ironic stance towards "race." A vision, a dark vision, if you will, that saw through the pathology and absurdity of "race," and sought to display the sickness of the American "racial" politic.
[Footnote omitted; italics in original]

     Wherever the Negro has been fairly tested he has made an honorable record for himself; has demonstrated his capacity to do what other races have done. All over the southland are unmistakable evidences of his progress; unmistakable evidences of his capacity to do what other men have done. And yet, in spite of the record which he is making, the daily, hourly proof that he is offering of his ability to succeed, the old theory of his inferiority is still maintained, is still insisted upon; is still accepted as true. Instead of revising their theory in view of the facts, in stead of rejoicing in the ever-growing evidence of the black man's progress and aiding in every possible way to hasten his development, the fact that he is forging to the front seems only to intensify the feeling against him. [....] Everywhere the black man is beset by perils. He doesn't know what a day may bring forth; he doesn't know what day he may be shot down, or some member of his family, or some friend or acquaintance murdered. We have just had an exhibition, a most shocking exhibition of the constant peril in which this race is forced to live, in the unprovoked, brutal and dastardly assaults that were made upon members of it in Atlanta, Ga. Assaults not upon the guilty, not upon the criminal classes, but upon all Negroes indiscriminately. The country was horrified; the whole civilized world stood aghast; and yet what took place in Atlanta may take place in any southern city at any time; the spirit that pervaded Atlanta--the murderous, blood thirsty, Negro-hating spirit--is the spirit that pervades the entire South; it needs only the occasion to call it forth. —————————

 Note: The full citation is: Francis J. Grimke, The Atlanta Riot: A Discourse [delivered] October 7, 1906. Washington, D. C.: s.n., 1906.