The Gift of Black Folk. The Negroes in the Making of America...Introduction by Edward F. McSweeney.

Boston: The Stratford Co., 1924 First edition. Part of the Knights of Columbus Racial Contribution Series. Publisher's blue cloth titled in gilt. . Octavo. Binding is bright and attractive aside from some slight darkening to spine and minor rubbing to corners. Minor marginal toning. A fresh, near-fine copy of a historical work that detailed the contributions of Black people to the United States from the first colonies to the present. In 1899, W.E. Burghardt Du Bois (1868 – 1963) published The Philadelphia Negro, his first major study of Black life in the United States. The monumental study was the result of over eight hundred hours of interviews in 2,500 households in Philadelphia's seventh ward. Du Bois' work in Philadelphia "prefigured much of the politically engaged scholarship that Du Bois pursued in the years that followed and…reflected the two main strands of his intellectual engagement during this formative period: the scientific study of the so-called Negro Problem and the appropriate political responses to it," (ANB). After completing the Philadelphia study and a study of southern Black life in Farmville, Virginia, Du Bois began teaching sociology and directing research at Atlanta University. He published the hugely influential collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) while at Atlanta, which brought Du Bois to the forefront of revolutionary Black scholarship in the United States. In 1910, Du Bois left Atlanta to join the NAACP as an officer, its only Black board member, and to edit its monthly magazine, the Crisis. By the publication of the present work, Du Bois was enmeshed in the study of Pan-Africanism, Marxism, and the colonization of Africa, and had begun to publish more radical contributions in the Crisis.