DU BOIS AND HIS RIVALS

The familiar clashes with Booker T. Washington, Walter White and Marcus Garvey occupy the center of this account of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), "the most prominent spokesman for his race in the United States" and those in his wake. During his long career, Du Bois also cooperated and collided with James Weldon Johnson, Monroe Trotter, Robert Moton and Emmett Scott, all of whom Wolters, a University of Delaware history professor, covers in this collective biography. His account of Du Bois's ambivalent and ambiguous response to American involvement in World War I is particularly noteworthy in its use of fresh primary material. Wolters's previous books, including The Burden of Brown, have questioned both school integration and affirmative action, and he presents Du Bois as a "pluralist," who "steered clear of both integration and separatism"—an interpretation that may find argument among historians. Either way, there is enough anecdotal material to ease the reader through the philosophical and temperamental differences that led into, but rarely out of, the "rivalries" of this seminal American. (May)