W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the leading activist men of letters in 20th-century America. Du Bois organized, protested, laid out programs, petitioned, and raised questions of long-term strategy and short-term tactics. He wrote detailed scholarly investigations, Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction among them, as well as popular current articles. He was a commanding speaker and a prodigious correspondent. And yet, it was not until the 1980s...