When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the legendary American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois urged Black Americans to support the war effort and enlist in the military. He believed that full citizenship would become a reality for African Americans with a showing of patriotism and sacrifice in war. Already a renowned writer and activist for civil rights and social justice, Du Bois also planned a book on the service of African Americans in the war—originally seen as a celebration of their exploits and acceptance as equal citizens.
Many critics attacked Du Bois as naïve or even as “a traitor to his race” for his call to his fellow Black citizens to join the military in support of a racist country that segregated and discriminated against people of color as especially apparent in the Jim Crow South where Black people endured a caste system that deprived them of rights and promised only injustice, cruelty and violence to any who challenged this rigid hierarchy.
Du Bois’s hopes for full Black citizenship and civil rights were crushed by intractable racism. He gradually learned of the reality for Black troops: the rampant racism and horrific episodes of violence and intimidation of African American troops by officers in the segregated military as white supremacist politicians and other leaders questioned their accomplishments as well as their fitness and usefulness in the modern war machine.
Du Bois was haunted by his original enthusiasm for the war when he heard from Black soldiers and officers of their abuse at home and abroad despite their significant contributions to Allied victory. The widespread belittling, arrests, beatings, and lynchings of returning Black soldiers on American soil were particularly shocking to Du Bois.
His book on Black American service in World War I evolved from the hopeful celebration of Black achievement and progress to a painful record of racist hate, military injustice, gruesome assaults and murders, and belittling of Black military contributions during the war. Du Bois was impassioned about sharing this perspective on the war with the public and he devoted periods of time over the three decades after 1919 to research, writing, gathering resources, and interviewing Black veterans and others for his Great War book. Yet, despite his efforts to share this history, Du Bois never completed or published his book.
The story of Du Bois’s World War I history may have been lost but for the years of prodigious and exhaustive research by Brandeis University Professor Chad L. Williams. In his recent groundbreaking and illuminating book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Professor Williams recounts the Sisyphean efforts of Du Bois for decades to research and write and publish his book.
The Wounded World details not only Du Bois’s excruciating odyssey in writing and attempting to publish his war book, but also provides the context of his efforts as he juggled his busy life of college teaching, writing books and articles, advocating for civil rights and decolonization, traveling the world, engaging in professional partnerships and squabbles, and maintaining a personal life.
Professor Williams provides a riveting chronicle based on his prodigious archival work that uncovered drafts of Du Bois’s unpublished and long ignored book on Black people and World War I along with correspondence, notes, articles, and other overlooked resources. Students, scholars and general readers alike will appreciate Professor Williams’s The Wounded World for its innovative research and masterful writing as it conveys Du Bois’s poignant journey from hope to disillusionment to transformation and ultimately to commitment to a creating a more just and peaceful world.
Dr. Chad Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University where he specializes in African American and modern United States History as well as African American intellectual history. His first book, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians; the 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History; and designation as a 2011 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. He also co-edited Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and Major Problems in African American History, Second Edition (Cengage Learning, 2016). And he has published numerous articles in leading academic journals and collections, as well as in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation.
Further, Professor Williams has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the American Council of Learned Societies; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Ford Foundation; and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He earned both his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.
Professor Williams generously responded to questions by telephone from his office in Waltham.
Robin Lindley: Congratulations on The Wounded World and your impressive research. Before getting to your book, I wanted to ask you about your life as a historian. Was history something that you were interested in from childhood? Was there an event or incident that drew you to the study of history?
Professor Chad L. Williams: In various ways, I was always surrounded by history and African American history in particular, whether it was all the books that my parents and other family members had around the house, or jazz music playing, or posters on the walls.
Black History was a very organic part of my everyday experience growing up. I still remember the first quote unquote history paper that I wrote. I was in the fifth grade and wrote a research paper on the Little Rock Nine and, actually one of the members of the Little Rock Nine is my cousin Ernest Green. The experience in writing that paper instilled in me an appreciation for the craft of writing history. Of course, I didn't think about it this way at the time.
So I had the personal connections to African American history and its connection to the broader narrative of the struggles for civil rights and freedom. Being surrounded by history and being interested in reading about different historical moments was something that certainly stuck with me throughout high school and college at UCLA where I majored in history as well as African American Studies.
When I decided to go to graduate school at Princeton University, I quite frankly didn't think about history as a profession. I knew that it was something that I had a passion for and I wanted to follow those passions to see where to where they took me. And that journey inevitably led me to Du Bois.
Robin Lindley: Thanks for that background, Professor Williams. I'm sorry that I haven't read your prize-winning first book on Black Americans in the First World War, Torchbearers of Democracy. Did you see your book as the book on that war that W.E.B. Du Bois failed to finish?
Professor Chad L. Williams: No. Torchbearers of Democracy, which was my doctoral dissertation, came out of my graduate studies. I saw the vacuum of historical scholarship about the experiences of African Americans during that war, and specifically African American soldiers and veterans. There was literally just one book that I came across when I was reading for my general examinations.
I originally went to graduate school with intention of studying the Civil War and Reconstruction era specifically, but realized that there was this huge gap in our knowledge about World War I and specifically African American soldiers and veterans. There was little understanding of their historical experiences and how they represented during this time very powerful symbols of democracy and aspirations for citizenship and freedom. That was the motivation to write what would become my first book.
But it was actually in doing the research for my dissertation that I came across Du Bois and learned about his unfinished and unpublished book on the Black experience in the war. That was one of those amazing, too good to be true, graduate school moments when you encounter an archive that no one has fully explored. I found this 800-page manuscript by, of all people, W.E.B. Du Bois, that was never published and no one had ever talked about. I knew that, even in writing my dissertation and my first book, that I would return to Du Bois and that it would become my next project.
Robin Lindley: And now we have your new book, The Wounded World, based on the Du Bois manuscript you found. Your archival research is extremely impressive. Can you talk about how the book evolved? Is your book what you imagined when you started your research?
Professor Chad L. Williams: No, it wasn't. There was a long genesis behind the project. I initially encountered Du Bois's manuscript along with all of his research materials and correspondence related to his book in October of 2000. I had been living with and working my way through Du Bois's manuscript and his own archive for a number of years before I started writing The Wounded World.
I initially thought I would approach it as a more traditional intellectual history, and I was certainly interested in exploring Du Bois's unfinished manuscript itself and connecting it to Du Bois’s broader intellectual corpus and his intellectual evolution. I wanted to understand the significance of this project as a work of history that fit into a broader Black intellectual tradition around the First World War.
But as I began to write, I started thinking about the book in a different way, in a more cinematic way. I thought about the arc of the story I wanted to tell and to approach Du Bois as a character that needed to be fleshed out in all of his complexities to demonstrate his humanity and his brilliance, obviously, but also his flaws. I thought about the ways that I could use Du Bois's book as a narrative device to chart Du Bois's personal, political and intellectual evolution from one world war to the next. But I also saw my book as a larger story about the significance of World War I in the history of Black struggles for freedom and democracy in the 20th century.
Robin Lindley: Thanks for tracing your journey with the book. You focus on Du Bois’s life from the beginning of World War I until his death four decades later. of his life. At the onset of the war in 1914, he was already a renowned writer and thinker and probably the most prominent African American intellectual and activist at that time. He had already written The Souls of Black Folk, and he had helped found the NAACP. And he had posited the notion of a “double consciousness” when describing the awkward position of Black citizens in America. What did he mean by a double consciousness and how did that concept affect his thought on race in America?
Professor Chad L. Williams: He wrote about double consciousness, of course, in his classic 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, where he articulated this nexus of African Americans’ experience as they grapple with their identity and with the tension between being Black on the one hand and American on the other. He describes this as two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. This was his essential formulation for trying to understand the nature of African American identity, something that he theorized and wrote about extensively.
But what makes his experience during the First World War so important is that this was a moment where he was going to put theory into practice. He was going to use the war to test whether it was indeed possible for African Americans to reconcile their double consciousness and be seen as full American citizens. He believed that in fighting for their country, of putting their country first before their rights, that Black people would be rewarded with full citizenship, and that their double consciousness—those two warring ideals—would in fact be reconciled. As I write in the book, he had to reckon with the very painful reality that that wasn't the case.
Robin Lindley: His hopes were crushed, as you detail. And he was well aware of the brutality of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and the atrocities against that Black people faced. He had dealt with violations of rights and cruelty and lynchings through his work with the NAACP. Wouldn't some people see him as naive in 1917 when the US declared war and he encouraged Black people to enlist in the military in the hope that they would achieve full citizenship? How do you see his optimism for improved conditions for Blacks with military service at that time?
Professor Chad L. Williams: In hindsight, it's very easy to see him as naive and misguided. In fact, he saw himself as somewhat naive and misguided and wrong in the decision that he made to support the war and encourage African Americans to support the war. But I try in the book to take Du Bois seriously in the context of his times and where he was coming from in terms of a longer Black tradition of military service with war as a moment for African Americans to expand the boundaries of citizenship and freedom.
In some ways, he’s carrying on the tradition of Frederick Douglass who, during the Civil War, encouraged Black people to support the Union Army, to wear the blue uniform of the Union. By wearing the brass letters U.S. no one could deny Black people their citizenship and their freedom.
Du Bois envisioned the First World War as a moment akin to the Civil War, but on an even larger scale. He was a deeply democratic thinker and approached the war as a moment to expand the boundaries of democracy, not just for Black people in the United States, but throughout the entire African diaspora. So, I wanted to take Du Bois's hopes and aspirations very seriously, not to just view them as naive or misguided, but in the context of that moment to appreciate how much he truly believed that the war was going to be a moment of change and possibility.
Robin Lindley: Some other intellectuals labeled him a traitor to his race for his impassioned call for Blacks to enlist, as he expressed in his article “Close Ranks.”
Professor Chad L. Williams: Yes, absolutely. “Close Ranks,” as I write in the book, became one of the most traumatic episodes of Du Bois's life. He went all in for the American War effort, to the point where he angled for a captaincy in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department. And he wrote the very controversial editorial in The Crisis, “Close Ranks,” where he encouraged Black people to set aside their special grievances and close ranks with their fellow American citizens. He was labeled, among other things, “a traitor to the race” by his harshest critics. For someone like Du Bois who had committed his life to the service and uplift of his race that was one of the most devastating charges that could be leveled against him.
He had to reckon with the pain of that criticism but also, in all of his stubbornness and ego, he was determined to prove his detractors wrong. The best way that he knew how to do that was to write a book. In true Du Bois fashion, he planned to use his incredible gifts as an intellectual and as a historian to demonstrate why Black participation in the war mattered and ultimately why his support for the war was not misguided. Of course, he comes to a much different conclusion, but again, in the context of the times, he believed that his decisions were right in spite of all the criticism that he received.
Robin Lindley: Thanks for describing his rationale in calling for Black support for the war. I was struck that he was ostensibly a pacifist, yet he was attracted also to the trappings of military service, it seems. As you wrote, he respected the Black tradition of service in the military.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Du Bois, I think, had a deep sense of reverence for the Black military tradition. He had family members who had served in the American military in the American Revolution. His father served very briefly in the Union Army during the Civil War. As I write in the book, one of his closest friends was Charles Young, the most decorated African American officer in the United States Army at the time.
He was always attracted to martial figures and was also attracted to the romanticism of war itself. It was that combination which drew him into supporting the war and to being so committed to writing about its history. I try to demonstrate in my book Du Bois’s remarkable evolution from being a supporter of war in the context of the First World War to becoming an anti-war activist by the 1950s. His reckoning and disillusionment with his own failures when it came to the First World War were absolutely instrumental in shaping his anti-war convictions in the later years of his life.
Robin Lindley: And of course, by the end of the war, he learns of the racism and injustice Black troops suffered during the war, both at home and abroad. What a few things you learned about the reality for Black American troops who served during World War I?
Professor Chad L. Williams: Writing my first book, Torchbearers of Democracy, provided me with the knowledge and perspective to fully understand the experience of Black soldiers during World War I.
It’s estimated that 380,000 Black soldiers served in the United States Army. during the war. The Army was completely segregated. The vast majority of Black troops served as laborers. But there were two Black combat divisions that served amongst the roughly 200,000 Black soldiers who served overseas in France.
Du Bois was deeply invested in telling their stories and learning about their experiences. He traveled to France, as I write about, immediately after the Armistice. Then he learned about the racial discrimination that Black troops experienced and how the American army essentially transported Jim Crow white supremacy from the United States to France. Ugly rumors and lies and slanders were directed toward Black soldiers and Black officers. In particular, they were accused of being cowards and failures on the battlefield in spite of their many significant contributions to the Allied victory.
When Du Bois learned of the different horrific aspects of the experiences of Black soldiers and officers, it steeled his conviction to write unflinchingly honest history of the war.
Robin Lindley: And how do you see the French attitude, both the military and civilians, toward Black troops when compared to the American military’s treatment of Black troops?
Professor Chad L. Williams: It’s important to remember that the French were not colorblind. They certainly had their own issues when it came to race with their colonial troops from North and West Africa. But, without question, the way that the French approached race was different than the United States Army.
The French military was desperate for any troops, Black or white, that they could get and were willing to welcome Black soldiers into their ranks with open arms. The levels of fraternity, of camaraderie, that developed between African American troops and French soldiers and civilians were deeply troubling to white American officers as well as white Americans civilians, particularly in the South, back in the United States. That was one reason why there was so much effort to control Black soldiers in terms of their interactions with French civilians, and to also remind them of formal military policy. But also, in terms of racial violence, Black soldiers needed to remember their place despite being treated as human beings by the French. They had to come back home to a racial order in the United States that saw them as second-class citizens at best and less than human beings at worst.
Robin Lindley: What did you learn about the stateside treatment of Black troops during the war. You recount many shocking incidents of how the segregated military dealt with Black soldiers. One particularly striking example was the execution of Black troops in Texas after a “riot” in Houston. What happened?
Professor Chad L. Williams: The Houston Riot, as it was called at the time, was one of the most explosive moments during the war. A battalion of Black troops of the United States regular army were stationed on the outskirts of Houston. The troops had endured weeks and weeks of racial abuse from Houston police officers. Ultimately, their patience ran out and they marched into downtown Houston and shot up the town, killing several police officers and white civilians. This was a chilling moment when white Southerners worst fears came true.
Du Bois and other Black journalists and political figures had to reckon with this moment of Black soldiers essentially engaging in mutiny, recognizing that they were wrong and deserved whatever punishment came their way. At the same time, they recognized how unjust the trial and conviction and ultimate execution were. The accused soldiers did not receive due process and were executed without any dignity afforded to them whatsoever.
This injustice was an example of how the war was essentially fought on American soil as well as abroad.
Robin Lindley: As you note in The Wounded World, many white Southerners opposed Black service in combat units because the troops would be armed and trained for fighting in a war.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Absolutely. And those fears and anxieties date back to the American Revolution and to the Civil War when you have the fear of white Southerners that Black soldiers would foment rebellion. So there's a long history of those anxieties, particularly in American Southern history.
Robin Lindley: And, on their return to the United States, Black soldiers didn't achieve the full citizenship that Du Bois envisioned. Instead, many of these veterans, these men in uniform were met with hatred and violence, with arrests and beatings and lynchings. During the “Red Summer” of 1919, returning Black servicemen were among the targets of paroxysms of white supremacist racist violence.
Professor Chad L. Williams: That's absolutely correct. Black soldiers began returning back to the United States in the late winter of 1919, and almost immediately upon their return, they were faced with racial violence in the form of of lynchings in the South, but also were caught in race riots and massacres in places like Washington, DC, Chicago, and Phillips County, Arkansas. It’s a horrific moment throughout the spring and into the summer of 1919 of backlash against Black soldiers and African Americans more broadly in terms of their expectations for democracy in the aftermath of the war.
As I write, this was a very important moment for Du Bois, and it marked the beginning of his disillusionment with the war and its outcome.
Robin Lindley: The lies about Black service during the war were spread widely by white officers and politicians. For example, General Robert Lee Bullard belittled and disparaged Black wartime service in his memoir.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Yes. Robert Lee Bullard, one of the highest- ranking officers in the American Expeditionary Forces, published a highly touted memoir in 1925, and he devoted an entire chapter to essentially slandering Black soldiers in the 92nd Division and Black officers in particular. Bullard’s book was the perfect example for Du Bois of why he needed to write his own book, an essential history of Black soldiers in the war told in such a way that refuted the lies and the propaganda that was put forth by white officers that was being touted as the official historical narrative of the Black experience in the war.
Du Bois was committed to writing a counter history of the war that demonstrated how white supremacy was a central feature of the American Army, and how even in spite of that, Black soldiers made significant contributions to the Allied victory.
Robin Lindley: When did Du Bois’s view of the war and the service of the Black soldiers change from his idea that enlisting would improve their lot? Was it with his 1919 visit to the battlefields of France?
Professor Chad L. Williams: Du Bois’s visit to France was an eye-opening moment where the war was no longer a distant event. It became very real as he talked directly with Black soldiers and officers and heard from their mouths what they experienced.
He also toured the battlefields. He saw the Western Front. He saw the incredible devastation of the war up close and personal. The war became very real for him and no longer abstract. That's an important moment. He was beginning to question just what this war was about.
The aftermath of the war and the Red Summer of 1919 were crucial moments, as I describe in the book, that revealed his disillusionment with the war and reckoning with that. In 1920, he published a remarkable book called Dark Water. In that book, he asked how great a failure did the World War betoken? And he questioned whether the war was indeed a failure as early as 1919. But it's really not until around 1923 when he titles his book on the war The Black Man in the Wounded World, that he really began to view the war as a tragedy and as a global failure, and ultimately as a lesson in the failures and horrors of modern warfare.
Robin Lindley: And the writing and attempts to publish his book on the Great War became a Sisyphean task for Du Bois, and the book never was completed. You capture in painful detail all of his efforts to publish and to collaborate with other writers and to collect evidence and undertake exhaustive research for the book. He obviously was passionate about telling the story of Black service in the war, and he returned to the book several times in the last three decades of his life. You contend that “intellectual shell shock” may have been a reason that the he could not finish the work.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Yes. That's a term that I came up with to try to understand why Du Bois couldn't finish the book. He certainly was prolific during the period when he tried to complete The Black Man in the Wounded World, the title of his book. He published several other books and he was still writing articles and essays for The Crisis.
I had to wrestle with the question of why he able to be so prolific and complete all these other books, including one of his most significant books of history, Black Reconstruction, and yet he was unable to finish his book on the history of Black people in World War I. Ultimately, it came down to the war itself and his very complicated and tortured relationship to it. He was not able to fully conceptualize it as a historical moment, and he was not able to rationalize the war in terms of any redemptive value. He could not rationalize his own decision to support the war. It was the size, the scope, and the magnitude of the failure of the war as a historical moment that contributed to Du Bois's own failure in writing the book and, ultimately, not being able to complete it.
Robin Lindley: Thank you for that reflection on his challenges in writing the war history. Another world war loomed a couple of decades after the Great War and Du Bois obviously despised Hitler and Nazism and the racism of that regime. How did he address the enlistment of Blacks when the United States entered the Second World War against the forces of fascism and racism?
Professor Chad L. Williams: By the time the United States entered World War II, Du Bois was deeply cynical about war. As I write, he was standing on the sidelines when it came to African Americans voicing their support for the war. Ultimately, when the United States entered the war, he grudgingly accepted that African Americans must do their part, but he was clear that democracy would not be achieved by African Americans fighting in the war. He saw that there was no democracy before the United States entered the Second World War and there again would not be democracy after war. His disillusionment and disgust with war stemmed from the harsh lessons he learned during the First World War. By World War II, he was determined not to make those same mistakes again.
Robin Lindley: It must have been heartbreaking for him to see that the military was still segregated during World War II and that African American troops who returned to the United States after that war were met with the same furious racism and cruel violence that greeted them after World War I.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Yes. And I think that those parallels between what happened during and after World War I and World War II further steeled his anti-war beliefs and convictions. Certainly, the threat of atomic war was a big part of it. But he saw similar reactions of the United States to the hopes and aspirations of Black people both domestically and internationally were repeated after the Second World War. And for those reasons, he was even further, determined to oppose to war under any circumstances.
Robin Lindley: Again, you had a similar reality for Black troops during World War II in the rigidly segregated American military.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Yes, absolutely. There were a number of advancements during World War II, but the Army remained fully segregated. Black officers still were not afforded equal treatment. And there was again domestic racial violence, such as the Detroit Riot in 1943.
These parallels made Du Bois's inability to write about the history of World War I that much more tragic in many ways because he ultimately decided to stop writing the book, even though he saw his book as a potential lesson about the failures of war and the horrors of warfare as World War II rapidly approached. Du Bois was very much aware that, if he had somehow finished his book, perhaps it would have made a contribution as a warning not just to the United States but to the entire world about the failure of war and perhaps prevent another global tragedy.
Robin Lindley: You also discuss Du Bois's views of colonialism and how he believed that World War I started in Africa because these European belligerents all had colonies there. And he had a global view of racial issues that led to his involvement with the Pan-African Congress. What did you learn about Du Bois’s international views of the war? I think his ideas on colonialism and race may be new to some readers.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Du Bois was far ahead of his time in recognizing the colonial origins of the war and its connections to Africa with the competition amongst the different European belligerents for control of Africa and its human and material resources to the point where those rivalries exploded into essentially a European civil war. That was also connected to his Pan-Africanism.
Du Bois viewed the aftermath of the war as a potential turning point in the struggle for Black people for self-determination and ultimately for independence in Africa and in other parts of the diaspora. One of the reasons why he organized the Pan-African Congress in 1919 was connected to his history of the Great War, and those two efforts form a very important part of his politics and his intellectual life until his death in Ghana in 1963.
Robin Lindley: How do you see the legacy of Du Bois? A big question, of course. He left a rich, record of activism and scholarship, but he didn't complete his inspired book about World War I.
Professor Chad L. Williams: Du Bois was such a complicated figure. He was one of, if not the most important, figures in the history of Black struggles for freedom and democracy in American history. He changed over time. He had the capacity to change and evolve, and that's what made him so unique. And as I argue in my book, to understand him fully and to understand the ways in which he changed, we have to understand his relationship to World War I and just how deeply it impacted him in many different ways.
Robin Lindley: Du Bois is also seen as a founder of the modern civil rights movement.
Professor Chad L. Williams: That's 100 percent accurate. He was one of the co-founders of the NAACP. There's not an issue related to Black people in the United States and throughout the diaspora that Du Bois was not in some ways involved in during his lifetime. He was absolutely an essential figure in the history of the African American civil rights movement. And many of the issues that Du Bois was reckoning with we are still reckoning with today.
He titled his book The Black Man and the Wounded World, and I think Du Bois wrestled with a profound question with the title of this book. What does it mean to live in a Wounded World? What does it mean to live in a world that's wounded by war, by violence, by white supremacy, by colonialism and empire, by economic exploitation? And we're still grappling with those questions today in different ways. Du Bois was, I think, prophetic in his book even if he wasn't able to finish it.
Robin Lindley: Did Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King ever meet?
Professor Chad L. Williams: He never met him personally but they corresponded. And Martin Luther King, Jr. had a deep, deep appreciation for Du Bois. It’s interesting to consider the parallel arcs of their lives and activism. Just as Du Bois in the later years of his life was a committed anti-war activist, so was Martin Luther King Jr. That was just one of many reasons why Martin Luther King Jr. admired Du Bois and saw him as the towering figure that we fully appreciate today.
Robin Lindley: Thank you for describing their relationship. It would be fascinating to read those letters. I had a final question: with all the issues that we continue to face around racism and intolerance and inequality, where do you find hope now?
Professor Chad L. Williams: I find hope in the continued commitment of young people to fight for their rights and to have their voices heard. But also, as a historian, I find hope in the incredible work and scholarship that's being produced on the history of Black people in this country and their deep and ongoing struggles for civil rights and freedom and democracy.
Even as history continues to be under attack, that’s reflective of the power of history and the dangers of history and why, even in the face of reactionary forces, history will always remain an important weapon in the larger fight for civil rights and equality in this country.
Robin Lindley: Thank you, Professor Williams, for those words of hope at this challenging time. I appreciate your illuminating book and your tireless research. It’s heartening that you and other younger historians are developing innovative approaches to research and offering new perspectives on our history. Congratulations on your superb work and your book.
#
Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor emeritus for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. He is currently preparing a book of past interviews. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.