Abstract
The year 2003 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s most celebrated publication, The Souls of Black Folk. An astonishing work of literary, historical, and sociological merit, Souls has inspired generations of academicians and activists alike drawn to the politics of identity, the color line, double consciousness, the talented tenth, and theories of race. The year also marks the fortieth anniversary of Du Bois’s death in Ghana in August 1963. Save for Souls, the memory of Du Bois appears perpetually in danger of passing into oblivion, given the concerted efforts on the part of established powers to radically curtail his contributions to twentieth-century social and political thought. It seems that the commemoration of Souls—written by Du Bois in his early thirties—sanctions an official burial of the next 60 years of the author’s life, which were devoted to scholarly examination of and struggle against racist exploitation and exclusion at home and U.S. imperialism and colonialism abroad. Though his relationship to the university was strained, his commitment to education as a primary mechanism for individual self-determination and collective democratization never wavered. Even as he explored the transformative potential of more public sites of pedagogy, he continued to produce groundbreaking studies in urban sociology, histories of the transatlantic slave trade, and his monumental Black Reconstruction in America, as well as several now-classic works in the field of education and numerous works of poetry and fiction (including five novels).
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Notes
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992 [1935]), 377.
Claude Lemert, Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of Society (New York: Routledge, 2002), 223.
William Greider, “Rolling Back the Twentieth Century,” The Nation (May 12, 2003), 11–19.
Kevin Baker, “We’re in the Army Now: The G.O.P.’s Plan to Militarize Our Culture,” Harper’s Magazine (October 27, 2003), 38–39.
Lewis Lapham, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Harpers (August 2003), 10.
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, Revised and Expanded Edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 247.
Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 25.
Louis Uchitelle, “Blacks Lose Better Job Faster as Middle-Class Work Drops,” New York Times (July 12, 2003), C14.
Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the `Race Question’ in the U.S.,” New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002), 56.
Paul Street, “Race, Prisons, and Poverty: The Race to Incorporate in the Age of Correctional Keynesianism,” Z Magazine (May 2001), 25–31.
Mark Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 19.
Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984), 443–44.
David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002).
Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina, “To Cut Failure Rate, Schools Shed Students,” The New York Times (July 31, 2003), Al.
Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton and The Harvard Project on School Desegregation. Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: The New Press, 1996), 341.
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 55.
Henry Giroux, The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (New York: Palgrave, 2003);
William Ayers et al., Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools (New York: New Press, 2001);
Gary Orfield and Mindy Kornhaber, Raising Standards or Raising Barriers? Inequality and High-Stakes Testing in Public Education (New York: Century Foundation, 2001).
Paul Krugman, “State of Decline,” The New York Times (August 1, 2003), A21.
Greg Winter, “Tens of Thousands Will Lose College Aid, Report Says,” New York Times (July 18, 2003), Al2.
Gerald Early, “The Way Out of Here,” New York Times Book Review (March 3, 2002), 12
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© 2004 Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux
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Giroux, H.A., Giroux, S.S. (2004). The Return of the Ivory Tower: Black Educational Exclusion in the Post-Civil Rights Era. In: Take Back Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982667_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982667_6
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