w. e. b. du boise is writing ferocious editorials at the crisis magazine, the black socrates over the city including wall street, marcus garvey is just getting off to start and thinking in terms of the africanism m. you make mention of one of my personal favorites a. philip randolph. we associate them with different periods of the story but he's still on the board in this point of the game. the things that have the greatest impact in this situation is viewed by the looked like harlem. harlem is white, middle-class, depends on exactly where you were. it's the reproduction of a lot of lower manhattan and all of its authenticity. but then in the aftermath and the arrival of the subway that comes right up the west side in san juan hill where the struggles werego taking place ad then goes up the next avenue and there's a mass migration. blacks have never had a locale that they could call their own. there were a few streets, there was a small area, but they were vulnerable to the south side -- this out

w. e. b. du boise among many others. here with an intellectual tradition i could plunge into deeply, read with pride and claim as a part of my own heritage, and i learned a great deal but i had a lot more to learn, so i enrolled at the university of chicago for graduate school and then in chicago i encountered a whole constellation of ideas and phrases that were entirely new to me. one of the ideas is the idea thathat it moves essentially ine direction and culminates into a democratic capitalist order on a scale. it was said whatever the problems of the political and economic system, it was superior to any and all alternatives. the class of the soviet union and america's punitive victory in the cold war seemed to confirm the thesis. it's how they were diminished to put it mildly. it involved the desire to tell the story of anti-colonial writers and activists for whom the end of history did not cloud their collective dream world. it didn't limit their horizon of expectation, so these writers from

w. e. b. du boise. he's the first author to win the pulitzer prize for biography for the two successive volumes on the same subject. a lot of people may not know that his first book prisoners of honor was about the dreyfus is here and in the late 19th century france. he live11 books later, his biogf wendell wilkie was published in april but he's already contemplating another 12 book a family history of slavery. [inaudible] i feel like i should be singing except you would be very grateful when i don't. i am intimidated by the prospect of talking about the biography with all of you in the room. i feel like i'm being called upon to opine on baseball with the new york yankees sitting around me or with the boston patriots in the audience. instead of doing that, i think i will ignore the injunctions that not only talk about the autobiography but i was reading about bob earlier in the last few days he saw that offers that are not just conventional, and d am content with who spoke in a new voice about the value