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BOOK REVIEW                        MURPHY

In fact, one can conclude from the reading of both books that Du Bois takes up where Douglass left off. Even as did Douglass, Du Bois speaks not only for today but also for tomorrow. 

Indeed, when the book becomes available to the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean, it will, no doubt, find a brotherly response in recognition of the links that bind our people’s freedom struggles to the world’s oppressed peoples, led today by the heroic people of Vietnam, against twentieth-century American imperialism.

Herbert Aptheker, the book’s editor, gives us this interesting piece of information about the writing of the book: 

The manuscript was carried by the Doctor to Ghana (where he now lies in honored dignity, far from his native land, but united in the good earth with our forefathers in the land which our people once called home) late in 1961 and published, in somewhat shortened versions, in 1964 and 1965, in China, the USSR, and the German Democratic Republic. Rescued from Accra, after the military coup of early 1966, the manuscript is now published for the first time in the language of its composition and in full.

All his adult life Du Bois was a brilliant, teaching, people’s scholar who understood that intellect married to action nourishes the body and fertilizes the mind, providing us with a healthy understanding of the world in which we live.

And so it seems natural that he should open his narrative talking to us about his fifteenth trip abroad. For, as we come to see, this was not just another trip to view the sights and sounds of nature and to mingle, in a well-earned carefree abandon, with different peoples in different countries, speaking in different languages. Du Bois, a world figure, whose 90 years hung, with gentle pressure, around his neck like a lei, was fully engaged in the fight for peace, for the freedom of his people, for the freedom of all the world’s oppressed peoples.

He was accompanied by his wife, author Shirley Graham. The trip, lasting nearly a year, carried them to Britain, where they occupied the apartment of their good friend Paul Robeson; to France, Germany, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, the Soviet Union and China. Fatigue kept him from accompanying his wife to Ghana. 

With the skill and patience of the artist weaving a tapestry while explaining to us the working drawings of the design that will soon come into focus, Du Bois pauses for a moment to explain why the trip provided a landmark for him in the development of his thinking. 

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