The Gift of Black Folk

New foreword written by HeritageMom, Amber O'Neal Johnston. "During a time when the United States needed to be reminded of the contributions Black people have made to its democracy, freedom, music, literature, and more, W.E.B. Du Bois took on the task of enumerating the gifts that we've provided to our country. "When I began reading The Gift of Black Folk...the story that unfolded was one that I had never anticipated. We the People of the United States, all of us, have left our indelible mark on America the Beautiful."-Amber O'Neal Johnston
In 1924, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) penned The Gift of Black Folk in response to systemic racism in the United States, showing that "...the American spirit is a new and interesting result of diverse threads of thought and feeling coming not only from America but from Europe and Asia and indeed from Africa." Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and later became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. In 1909 he co-founded the NAACP. Du Bois was a lifelong leader and proponent of civil rights. Amber O'Neal Johnston is a writer, speaker, and home educator who blends life-giving books with a culturally-rich environment for her four children and others. She's the author of A Place to Belong, a guide for families of all backgrounds to celebrate cultural heritage and embrace inclusivity in the home and beyond, and she's known for sharing literary "mirrors and windows" on HeritageMom.com.

W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois (1868-1963) was a world historian, sociologist, journalist, novelist, civil rights leader, and Pan-Africanist. He was the first Black American to earn a doctorate at Harvard and was one of the founders of the Niagara Movement, which became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also founded the NAACP journal The Crisis and edited it for nearly a quarter of a century. Du Bois was a critic of Booker T. Washington, whom he felt was too willing to compromise about Black rights. A published writer as a teenager, Du Bois wrote prolifically until his death at ninety-five. His 1903 Souls of Black Folk is a founding text of the civil rights movement. In it, as well as in other books including the Dusk of Dawn, he used personal experience as a persuasive tool. Controversial, articulate, and impassioned, he had wide-ranging influence in the United States and around the world. Du Bois's communist beliefs led to conflicts with the US government in the 1950s, and he eventually settled in Ghana, where he died. Nonetheless, his attachment to his birthplace, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was a constant in his life, and his thinking on a broad range of issues has gained new attention in the twenty-first century. Each volume of David Levering Lewis's biography of Du Bois won a Pulitzer Prize.