Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk gave the world the idea of double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, and it remains the foundation stone of Black intellectual writing.
Across fourteen essays, Du Bois moves from history to memoir to music, arguing with unanswerable elegance for the full humanity and equal destiny of African people everywhere. For readers across Africa and the diaspora, it reads less like history than like a letter finally delivered.
