The Heart of Hyacinth Book

W.E.B Dubois is best known for Souls of Black Folk,but was a prolific writer and public critic for the duration of his life. This collection of essays, poems and stories was published in 1920 and included items that had been published elsewhere.They show Dubois passion for justice and his anger at the ongoing degradation being experienced by black people due to Jim Crow. He also writes in support of women's rights and his opposition to war. They also show that Dubois was a forerunner of things such as civil rights, liberation theology and critical race theory. While each piece has its own integrity, I was particularly struct by the short story "The Comet" which tells the story of two people, a poor black man and a wealthy white woman, who survived a poisonous gas that followed the passing of Haley's Comet and how the white woman realized the black man's humanity in her hour of need. My brief summary does no justice to the creative way in which Dubois highlights the hypocrisy of racism in his day and ours. If anything troubled me it was how relevant Dubois words were. We have not come very far in the 92 years since this work was published.