Born three years after the end of the American Civil War, Du Bois died the year of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. He was a father of Pan-Africanism, an ardent supporter of anticolonial struggle, and an advocate of women’s social and economic equality, nuclear disarmament, universal public health and an end to wars everywhere. The first black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard, Du Bois wrote eloquently on a broad range of human-rights issues. At first he believed in from-the-top-down reform, but gradually turned from reformer to revolutionary, becoming active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, America’s first mass African-American civil rights organisation. Some major 20th-century historical events steered him permanently and irrevocably towards a Marxist analysis of society. Mullen regards Du Bois highly but criticises him for sometimes practising “a form of Third World nationalist boosterism that competed with his efforts to develop an historical-materialist analysis of history”, which made him vulnerable to Stalinism and dulled his capacity to understand that state capitalism wasn’t Marxism.
