By David Levering Lewis

February is the month of America’s emancipators. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, emancipator of African-American citizenship, was born February 23, 1868. Du Bois’s eloquent turn-of-the-century meditation, The Souls of Black Folk, explained Americans of color to themselves with a saliency that still inspires and defines them today.

Du Bois was a principal founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, created 100 years ago this month, and whose militant monthly, The Crisis, he edited as the voice of uncompromising racial equality for a quarter century. All Americans owe Du Bois a considerable debt for the historical masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America, which changed forever our understanding of the shameful suppression of racial democracy in the post-Civil War South. The long march from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” equivocation in 1896 to Brown v. Board’s mandate for integration in 1954 would have been even longer and harder without the mind and pen of W. E. B. Du Bois

When this Black History month ends five days after Du Bois’s birthday, it will have marked the unique first weeks in office of a president of color elected for the content of his character and ability who is pledged to fundamental changes in our dysfunctional status quo. Candidate Barack Obama’s arresting metaphor of our shared DNA at the heart of his memorable Philadelphia Address articulated a universal appeal that may have definitively redefined how race will play out in twenty-first-century America. The new men and women of what Obama has called the “Joshua generation” are the Moses generation’s great-grandchildren. What would Du Bois, the Mosaic lawgiver, make of the interpretations given the tablets by the Joshuas who now lay claim to the racial promised land?

The New England-born and bred Du Bois criticized his country’s shortcomings as much from a youthful Calvinist’s intolerance of moral slothfulness as from an aged socialist’s impatience with the rigged outcomes of unregulated capitalism. Calling for “a vast social change,” he wrote in a 1951 op-ed that America’s democratic ideals were salvageable only by drastically “curbing the present power of concentrated wealth.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted that Du Bois was a personality “history cannot ignore,” yet Du Bois had been virtually excised from his country’s mainstream narrative when Dr. King spoke these words in a Carnegie Hall birthday tribute in February 1968, five years after Du Bois’s death in self-imposed exile in Ghana, still lucid and confrontational at age 95. Famous at 50, Du Bois often claimed that his death was practically requested at 75.

In his Carnegie Hall tribute, King spoke as a civil rights leader whose evolving economic philosophy owed a great deal to Du Bois’s socialism and whose deep distress about his country’s militarism also echoed the latter’s fierce reproach of American imperialism. The old contrarian’s death on the eve of the historic 1963 March on Washington was announced as King prepared to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The generational baton had passed with stunning symbolic appropriateness. Six weeks after his Du Bois tribute, King died from a sniper’s bullet in Memphis.

Du Bois set the ground rules for American race relations more than 100 years ago in a concise prediction internalized by generations of African Americans and many others – that the color line would be the great American problem of his century. Most Americans appear to believe that race as a problem that long divided them has now become the solution for national understanding and solidarity. To be sure, the complexities of the American twenty-first century do beggar those of the last. Du Bois’s twentieth-century problem was a color-line actually without color, for it was starkly black and white. However, this century is on its way to being brown and yellow as well as white and black. Still, as Du Bois might well have argued, to concede that a historic racial dyad has yielded to a polychrome present does not mean that race has been transcended as a potent force in our national life. Rather, as Du Bois himself predicted in his final years, the future problems of the color-line will be problems of the cash and credit line in which the problems of the past will play a cruelly significant part.

It should not be overlooked in the enthusiasm of the present that without Du Bois’s militant ideals, mobilizing language and the persistent demands for change flowing from the hundred-year-old NAACP, President Obama’s audacious hopes would have remained visionary. Fifty-five years after the Brown decision, one may venture the hypothesis that history has begun to catch up with Du Bois’s understanding that genuinely inclusive democracy exists only as economic democracy becomes a reality.

David Levering Lewis, Julius Silver Professor of History at NYU, has written biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois. An abridged edition of his two-volume Pulitzer Prize-winning  biography of Du Bois, will  appear shortly.