W.E.B. Du Bois by David Levering Lewis6/28/2023 Now, forty years later, Professor Lewis has the widest reach of any historian alive, and has spent many years chronicling African, American, and European history. He began his academic career in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement as a young African American historian teaching at historically black colleges and universities and in Africa. For much of his life, David Levering Lewis expanded upon this insight into the dynamics of race and class in the United States. From this profoundly instructive trauma, I learned to assume the permanent possibility that, however solid the middle-class reinforcements, race could trump class in my life experience. In less than a year, as I remember it, our family went from the top of the social heap to pariah status in the dominant community and to an awkward presence as unemployables among its own racial group. He testified as an authority for the NAACP and against the discriminatory policies of the city public school system. He characteristically decided to stand on principle in a major civil rights case, Lewis recalled last year in the New York Times. His father, a high school principal, was, at one point, called to testify for the NAACP in a case against segregated education. "I think," David Levering Lewis has written, "that I came to an appreciation of the concept of social class in my earliest years." Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the age of Jim Crow, Lewis was the child of educators.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |