About the Book

Artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois' influential 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, providing historical and cultural contexts for his thoughts on the racial terror, sorrows, and hopes of the post-Reconstruction era. It vividly conveys the book's continuing legacy, effectively updating it for the age of Black Lives Matter.

Book Synopsis

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." These were the prescient words of W. E. B. Du Bois's influential 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk. The preeminent Black intellectual of his generation, Du Bois wrote about the trauma of seeing the Reconstruction era's promise of racial equality cruelly dashed by the rise of white supremacist terror and Jim Crow laws. Yet he also argued for the value of African American cultural traditions and provided inspiration for countless civil rights leaders who followed him. Now artist Paul Peart-Smith offers the first graphic adaptation of Du Bois's seminal work.

Peart-Smith's graphic adaptation provides historical and cultural contexts that bring to life the world behind Du Bois's words. Readers will get a deeper understanding of the cultural debates The Souls of Black Folk engaged in, with more background on figures like Booker T. Washington, the advocate of black economic uplift, and the Pan-Africanist minister Alexander Crummell. This beautifully illustrated book vividly conveys the continuing legacy of The Souls of Black Folk, effectively updating it for the era of the 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter.

Review Quotes

"[A] masterpiece...Peart-Smith's work in this text expresses the pain, frustration and the joy DuBois' text is known for. The art is both realistic and dreamlike....This retelling of The Souls of Black Folk deserves a place among the pantheon of great graphic texts like Art Spiegelman's Maus and Alan Moore's The Watchmen." --Ron Jacobs "CounterPunch"

"In this wonderfully innovative collaboration of image and text, Buhle, Boyd, and Peart-Smith present a graphic W.E.B. Du Bois whose immemorial words are so brilliantly visualized that Souls will speak to generations to come. Buhle, Boyd, and Peart-Smith's offering is superb."
--David Levering Lewis "Pulitzer Prize recipient for W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919"

About the Author

PAUL PEART-SMITH, an artist of Afro-Caribbean and British background, has been working in the comics industry since the early 1990s, when he worked on Judge Dredd. Co-curator of the comics exhibition Black Power, he now lives in Tasmania.

PAUL BUHLE has been a key creative force in the development of comics for more than fifty years, publishing one of the first alternative comics, as well as editing graphic novels on subjects ranging from the Wobblies to Che Guevara. He is the coeditor of Ballad of an American: A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson (Rutgers University Press).

HERB BOYD is a veteran journalist of African American life and culture, working frequently with artists.

JONATHAN SCOTT HOLLOWAY is the twenty-first president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is the author of The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans.