Dusk of Dawn

Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept is an autobiographical text by W. E. B. Du Bois, which, published in 1940, examines Du Bois's life and family history in the context of contemporaneous developments in race relations.

Preceded by the more well known The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Dusk of Dawn focuses on a number of topics: Du Bois's relationship with Booker T. Washington, his reasons for leaving the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and presenting a new concept of race.

In contrast to Washington's Up From Slavery, a generic blend of slave narrative and autobiography, Dusk of Dawn traces the genealogy of the race concept as it has affected Du Bois's life. Du Bois elucidates his theoretical writing with personal experiences, and connects those experiences to the larger historical and social phenomena he identifies as central to the function and development of race in the United States. Reviewing the book in 1940, Metz P. Lochard, editor of the Chicago Defender, said of the work, “It is no mere autobiography in the conventional sense… [Du Bois] very adroitly utilizes his life experience as an axis from which he surveys the whole panorama of American civilization with its vice and virtue, its prejudice and philanthropy, its consistency and grace; and above all with its contradictory and conflicting interpretations of race, Christianity and Democracy.”

Du Bois described the concept saying:

This was the race concept which has dominated my life, and the history of which I have attempted to make the leading theme of this book. It had as I have tried to show all sorts of illogical trends and irreconcilable tendencies. Perhaps it is wrong to speak of it at all as "a concept" rather than as a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies. At any rate I hope I have made its meaning to me clear.

The chapters of Dusk of Dawn can be divided thematically into three sections. The first four chapters focus on autobiographical information, contextualizing each anecdote in the relevant current events of its time. The next three chapters shift to a more ideological subject—the concept of race. Du Bois uses these chapters to theorize on race as a psychological complex of irrational logics and habits which are perpetuated to support an economically exploitative society. The final two chapters return to autobiography, chronicling Du Bois’s life and ideology from 1910 to 1940.

...
Wikipedia