 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the library. Yeah, and thank you for coming out tonight. Really appreciate seeing you for our discussion today with Chad L. Williams and Sarah Ladipo-Manuka for a discussion of Professor Williams' book, The Wounded World, W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War. I'm Shauna Sherman. I'm the manager of the African-American Center. And before we get started, I want to acknowledge that the library is located in the area now known as San Francisco, which is on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytu Sholoni peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land, the Ramaytu Sholoni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working, and learning on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, the elders, and relatives of the Ramaytu Sholoni community. I'll share. If you didn't already know about the African-American Center, it's on the third floor of this building, the main library. And it's a space dedicated to celebrating and promoting the culture and history of African-Americans. And it was founded in 1996 with the building of the main library and funded by community support. So we collect books, we partner with community, we host exhibits, and we also host programs like today's conversation, which we are very grateful for. Coming up on Thursday, May 25th at 6 p.m. in the African-American Center, we will be talking to Longtime and librarian who's now retired, Dorothy Lazard, on her migration to San Francisco as a child and her love of learning and libraries. So I want to thank the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for supporting our programs. And a big thank you to our partner Folio Books from Noe Valley, who are selling books outside. Please take some time to stop by their table today. And I didn't say so already, but thank you. Welcome to the online guest as well, because we have folks streaming in today. So we're here to celebrate the new book from San Francisco local Chad Williams. And so glad to see you here today to celebrate him. But before I welcome him and Sarah to the stage, I'll give you their brief bios. Chad L. Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African-American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of the award-winning book Torch Pairs of Democracy, African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era, and the co-editor of Charleston Syllabus' Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. His writings and op-eds have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts. Sarah Ledipo Manica is a writer of novels, short stories, and essays translated into several languages. She is the author of the best-selling novel Independence and the multiple shortlisted novel Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun. And has had work published in Granta, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Transfuge, among others. Name one of the 100 most influential Africans by New African in 2022. Sarah has served on a number of non-profit boards, including as boarder director for the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, and as board chair of the Women's Writing Residency, Hedgebrook. Sarah is a San Francisco Library laureate, an Audi finalist, a Mary Carswell-McDowell fellow, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her most recent book is Between Starshine and Clay, Conversations from the African Diaspora. Let's give a big hand to today's speakers. Thank you so much for that introduction, and thank you to everyone who's here and everyone who's participating online. And just want to give another extra big shout out to the San Francisco Public Library for who they are, what they do, and for hosting this wonderful event with Chad L. Williams. So Chad, it is so lovely to have the opportunity to speak to you about this book. It's, I love the cover, so I dressed to match. And it's a case of, you know, the cover doesn't lie. It's an amazing book. You've done a phenomenal job. It's, I'm always in awe of academics who are able to write a book as you have that appeals to the layperson. And it's published with FSG. For those who don't know, FSG is La Creme de la Creme when it comes to publishing companies. So, well done. Congratulations. Thank you so much, I genuinely appreciate it. So Chad, I would like to start, perhaps at a somewhat unusual place, but I think it's very appropriate given who's in the audience today. And I, as a reader, I often go first to the dedication and then the acknowledgments. And so that's where I went with your book. So this book is dedicated to mom and, or mom, mom and dad. That's about to give you the British for mom. And then you end your acknowledgments. I'm kind of going between two different books here, because one I've noted and the other one is my crisp, brand new one. So I want to read the end of the acknowledgments, which is just a line quickly. So you say, the only explanation I can offer for how I managed to finish the wounded world, considering the circumstances, is love. I owe them, mom and dad, everything and more. You're going to start the water work right off the bat, huh? So I wanted to start with, maybe I won't start the waterworks so much, but I wanted to start with you as a historian and where this has come from. And you've obviously dedicated this to your family, to your parents, the love of history. Where has that all started? Yeah, well, thank you again for being in conversation with me, Sarah. I'm such an admirer of your work. You're just truly inspirational in all that you do. And thank you for that question. I would say that my love for history indeed does begin with my family. We grew up, my sister and I, in an environment where we were just surrounded by history. We were surrounded by living black history. We grew up listening to music, jazz. Monterey Jazz Festival posters on the walls, books everywhere. It was just something that was constantly surrounding us. And then hearing the stories about my family and wanting to know more about the larger context in which we arrived, which we all arrived. And that really, I think, served as the foundation for me to formally study history, certainly in the different schools that I attended. But to also think about history and African-American history as something that is constantly with us, constantly surrounding us, constantly in motion. And that is absolutely necessary for understanding who we are in the present. And of course, it sounds cliche-ish that you don't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been. But I think in our case, it's absolutely true. History is such a crucial foundation and source of inspiration for making sense of the world that we live in and who we are as individuals, who we are as a people. And you've chosen in this book to focus on one of the greats American intellectuals of all time and historian, W.E.B. Du Bois. And so, for those who haven't had the privilege of reading the book yet, I wonder if you could just set this up a little bit and tell us you discovered this manuscript, a tome, an epic that W.E.B. Du Bois had been working on for decades and didn't publish. And no one had really addressed it before in the way that you've addressed it. So, tell us a little bit about how you came across this and how you had the audacity and the courage to tackle this. Well, it was a beautiful picturesque fall, New England Day in 2000, really. You're a novelist as well, right? Right. So, this book really comes out of my first book, which was my doctoral dissertation, Torchbearers of Democracy, Afro-American Soldiers in the World War I Era. And I just started doing research for my dissertation and I was visiting the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where the majority of Du Bois' papers are archived. And I'd seen a reference to Du Bois World War I materials. And I had no idea what it was. I thought, okay, I'm going there. It might be interesting. Folder, maybe some newspaper clippings. I go to the library, which is appropriately named the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, this huge towering library. I asked to see these Du Bois World War I materials. The librarian returns with six microfilm reels. So now I'm really intrigued. At this point, I load the first reel and I see this manuscript. This manuscript written by Du Bois on the Black Experience in World War I, over 800 pages long, that he never finished and ultimately was never published. In addition to the manuscript, excuse me, see, I'm getting choked up. It's just very emotional, even reflecting on it, all of Du Bois' research materials and correspondence related to this project that he worked on for over 20 years. And he gave this book, this remarkable title, The Black Man and the Wounded World. And astonishingly, no other historian had written about it. In all the books, the mountain of books written about Du Bois, no one had talked about what would have been one of his most significant works of history. So I was stunned, among other adjectives, but I was also obsessed with learning more about this book, learning more obviously about why he never finished it, how it factored into Du Bois' intellectual life, his political evolution, but ultimately, its significance to the larger story of the struggle for freedom and democracy for black people in the 20th century. And why do you think no one else had tackled it? You know, I'm still asking myself that question, but I think it has to do with our lack of appreciation for the significance of World War I itself, right? At least on this side of the ocean. World War I is kind of the forgotten war, right? It gets overlooked when we talk about the Civil War, certainly World War II, even the war in Vietnam for that matter. World War I doesn't have the same type of resonance in American history that other wars have, and I think that's also the case in terms of its significance in African American history as well. So I think that's an important part of why it has been overlooked, but also I think it's a lack of understanding about the significance of World War I in Du Bois' life and intellectual development and political evolution more specifically. Oftentimes, the focus on Du Bois in World War I centers around the very controversial editorial he wrote, which maybe we'll get to, close ranks, maybe some of the writings that he did immediately after the war, not really fully appreciating just how significantly World War I impacted him, how deeply it wounded him in many ways, and how we can't understand Du Bois, this towering figure, intellectual, right, who was so important in shaping the course of history in the 20th century without understanding how the war also was formative in that evolution. Well, let's delve into that a little bit. Let's, you referenced the piece, close ranks, and so I wonder if you can just briefly summarize that, but then also talk a little bit about what Du Bois saw when he went to France just after the war. I mean, I thought I knew things, and reading your book, I'm like, I obviously didn't know some of the conditions, just, you know, and obviously you're very familiar with this because your first book, Torchbearers for Democracy. Torchbearers of Democracy. Of Democracy, really delved into that. So tell us a little bit about those two things. Yeah, so Du Bois makes the very controversial decision to support World War I, and this was a decision that would ultimately shape the course of his life and career. He considered himself to be a pacifist, but he believed that this war, this war to make the world safer democracy was going to be a turning point in the history of black freedom and self-determination both in the United States as well as throughout the broader African diaspora. He thought about the legacies of black military service going back to the American Revolution, certainly going back to the Civil War when black people fought in the Union Army, achieved freedom and citizenship. He thought that World War I would be a similar moment on an even grander scale. But I think to fully appreciate Du Bois' decision to support World War I, we have to think about his classic book, The Souls of Black Folk, which he wrote in 1903, which I tell all my students, I'm not gonna let you graduate until you've read The Souls of Black Folk, but in that book, he talks about the double consciousness that African Americans experience in terms of their identity, this tension between being black on the one hand and American on the other, the sense of two-ness, these two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn to sander, his words. And Du Bois felt that World War I, the great war as it was described at the time was going to be the moment when those two warring ideals could potentially be reconciled. And he reflects, after the war, that it was during this time that he felt closer to being a full American than at any other moment in his life or since. So this was part of his motivation for writing arguably his most controversial editorial of his career, Close Ranks, in the July 1918 issue of The Crisis Magazine, which he edited for the NAACP. And in this editorial, he encourages African Americans to set aside their special grievances, set aside their claims for civil rights, their criticisms of the United States, and support their country unconditionally. Don't worry about lynching right now. Don't worry about Jim Crow. Don't worry about disenfranchisement, right? Support your country, and then we can worry about all those things after the war is over. Close ranks with your fellow white Americans and the allies. And he is heavily criticized for this editorial. His harshest critics accused him of being a traitor to the race, right? And as we know, Du Bois, someone who dedicated his life to the cause of fighting for his race, that was probably the most stinging criticism that you can levy at him. So this was really an important moment in shaping his decades-long reckoning with the history of the war and the decisions that he made in supporting it, trying to make sense through his own writing of history, why he supported the war, and ultimately what it meant for him personally, but also for the world. So he was just this great advocate rallying everyone, and then shortly after the war, when he gets to France, he gets there and he discovers so many things. One, two things really stand out for me, a memo that was written and shared with the French command. Basically, maybe I'll let you say what this memo said, and then he sees the conditions in which these troops who had fought, had laid their lives out, were treated, not to talk about when they came back to America, and then that sort of thing happened. So maybe you can just maybe talk about that memo and one or two of the things, because I think people are not necessarily or I wasn't aware of some of these conditions. Yeah, yeah. What if it's okay if I read from that, that section of the book? He's doing it. Because it's really a remarkable moment, and in the book I talk about all that Du Bois went through just to get to France. He spends three months in France, actually during the peace conference. He's one of the few African-Americans to actually get a passport to go to France, and I delve into all the machinations and drama surrounding that. But it's this remarkable experience where Du Bois is meeting with black soldiers and officers, hearing directly from their mouths about their experiences with American racism and white supremacy. And he's shocked. He's also meeting with black Frenchmen, right? He holds a landmark Pan-African Congress, which is only able to happen because of his relationship with this very influential Senegalese deputy to the French parliament, Blaise De Jong, who kind of becomes his partner when he arrives in France. So I can just kind of very briefly read of the moment when Du Bois is actually talking with Blaise De Jong and he learns of this memo that Sarah was referencing. So De Jong, without question, the most powerful black politician in France at the close of the war, immediately impressed Du Bois, who saw in the cunning deputy his continental counterpart. He was a cultured, highly articulate African who, like Du Bois, viewed the war and military service as a pathway toward expanding the boundaries of democratic citizenship for people of African descent and the educated elite in particular. Du Bois' elementary grasp of the French language made for a challenging conversation, but with Jackson's assistance, another African-American who he partnered with in France, he got his point across, emphasizing to De Jong that time was of the essence in organizing his Pan-African Congress. With direct access to Prime Minister Clemenceau, perhaps he could make Du Bois' Pan-African dreams a reality. De Jong proved helpful to Du Bois in other ways as well. During their meeting, in which Du Bois explained as best he could in his broken French, the reasons for his visit to France, De Jong provided his new American friend with a bombshell. Did you see what the American mission told the French about the way Negroes should be treated? De Jong asked excitedly. He handed Du Bois a document dated August 7th, 1918, marked Confidential. Titled on the subject of Black American troops, the memo had been written by Louis Lennard of the French mission at the AEF headquarters and distributed to French officers in command of Black troops. French officers needed to have, quote, an exact idea of the situation of Negroes in the United States, Lennard stated. The Black man was, quote, an inferior being, unquote, not to be seen as the white man's equal and racked with sexual pathologies that made him a, quote, constant menace. This was the reason why Lennard incorrectly declared, quote, the Black American troops in France have by themselves given rise to as many complaints for attempted rape as all the rest of the army, unquote. As a result, French commanders should avoid, quote, any pronounced degree of intimacy, unquote, between themselves and Black officers. Make a point of keeping the native contaminant population from, quote, unquote, spoiling the Negroes and, by all means, keep Black soldiers away from white women. I read it and sat very still, Du Bois remembered, of his shocking encounter with the memo. He was a smoking gun never meant for public eyes that bluntly revealed the United States Army's attempt to indoctrinate their French counterparts with the rules of American racism. Would it be possible to obtain a copy of this? He asked D'Yong as casually as possible. Take that, D'Yong responded. Yeah, so, I mean, that's just one example of the lengths to which America went to not only maintain its own racist ideology, but to try and influence everything else as well. Yeah. You've structured this book into three parts, hope, disillusionment and failure. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to this structure and why these three titles are particularly important? Yeah, so as I was thinking about the book, as it evolved over time as I was wrestling with Du Bois and his ideas, I really began to appreciate the story behind Du Bois attempting to write his definitive history of the war, really its epic nature, and thinking about it in a kind of cinematic way. I give a lot of credit to my literary agent who encouraged me to read books on screenplay writing and how to break up a story into three distinct acts. And to first think about the genuine hopes that Du Bois had, that other African-Americans and peoples of African descent had about the war, which was genuine, which was real. He genuinely believed, he genuinely hoped that the war was going to make a difference. When he goes to France, his disillusionment begins to take hold. He begins to see the failures of the war, how entrenched American racism and white supremacy was, how democracy was not going to become a reality, at least immediately. And that disillusionment carries on throughout the interwar period, right? As he returns back to the United States in the summer of 1919 to race riots and lynchings, the red summer of 1919, how European imperialism and colonialism becomes even more entrenched. Al, he begins to deal with a whole host of personal tragedies as well, related to the legacies of the war. So his disillusionment really shapes how he's thinking about the history of the war itself. And then there's the failure that he has to reckon with. The failure of World War I itself, especially by the time World War II arrives, and ultimately the failure of Du Bois to complete his book, which was interconnected with the failure of the war and ultimately his support for it. So thinking about those three themes as they carried kind of Du Bois throughout this journey really proved to be very generative in thinking about how to structure this book and also to make it accessible, right? I just wanna talk about hope a little bit, because it's something I've been thinking about a lot and my recent book just was sort of probing this notion of hope with various people that I spoke to. You know, hope, Barack Obama writes, The Audacity of Hope. Senator Cory Booker talks about having to resurrect hope every day. Anna DeVio Smith talks about being a hopeaholic and she sees problems as a reason to try and do something. You begin this book with a quote from Baldwin, who said, you know, I paraphrase, but had I been into Du Bois' position, I would have probably done thought the same as he did. Perhaps, he adds. And so, you know, I'm just sort of interested in this business of one has to hope. One doesn't have the luxury of not hoping. So I wonder if you can reflect on that a little bit, but also as you think about your book going out into the world and your hopes for the book in the times in which we live now. Yeah, now thank you for that question and hope is, and you write about it so beautifully in your work and the interviews, the conversations that you have. You know, oftentimes, you know, we view hope as being something kind of ephemeral, that that's something that is not tangible, wishful thinking, but hope has been such a central part of the black experience in this country in particular and has infused so much of the black freedom struggle and continues to shape struggles for black freedom and justice today. Du Bois is part of that history. He is someone who, as I write about in my book, hoped, but he attached that hope to struggle, to making that hope real and tangible, but also reckoning with the failures of hope and I think that's reflected in the title of his book, The Black Man and the Wounded World. Such a great title, which I stole for the title of my book because it was so good, but Du Bois, I think, is asking a profound question. What does it mean to live in a wounded world? What does it mean to hope in a wounded world? A world that's wounded by the scars of war, violence, white supremacy, empire and colonialism, economic exploitation, right? All of these issues, these pressing issues that Du Bois was struggling with, right? Along with hoping that the world would be better, struggling to make sense of these issues, the same issues that we are still, in many ways, struggling with today, right? We are still in that wounded world that Du Bois was writing about, right? And I think we can take some inspiration from that. Hopefully people will read my book and see Du Bois even as he failed, right? Still fighting, right? Still fighting to fix the wounded world and passing on that task to us today. Can we talk about failure? We've talked about hope. And again, I think I find myself almost resisting this word failure. I mean, I get it. You wouldn't be the only one because I got some pushback for that, right? It's okay. He didn't publish the book, et cetera, but how do we make this definitive statement? And I don't actually think that's what you're making. I don't think you're saying it's definitive failure or is it just a step along the path? One maybe doesn't reach one's ideals or goals. But there are hurdles, there are challenges we don't necessarily reach what we've hoped for. But a failure, what does that mean exactly? Yeah, I had a lot of tough conversations with some very prominent Du Bois scholars. What do you mean you're describing Du Bois as a failure? Du Bois is not a failure. It's Henry Lewis Gates. He wasn't one of them. Okay. He wasn't one of them. I haven't gotten any pushback from him yet. But I think it's something that Du Bois himself had to reckon with as it related to World War I. He writes an incredible book which I talk about in my book entitled Dark Water, which he publishes in 1920, right? At least shortly after the end of World War I. And he asks in that book, this profound question, how great a failure and a failure in what does the World War be token? So he's asking this question in 1920, right? Shortly after, I mean the war is just concluded and he's already starting to think of it, already starting to wrestle with it as a failure, right? So that was a question that he had to answer himself, right? And that's a question he tried to answer through writing his epic history of the war that he ultimately never finishes, right? So there's the failure of the war that he has to reckon with, which ultimately, I think, contributes to his own failure in not completing the book because the war was so traumatic, so disillusioning, such in a monumental failure that he wasn't able to muster the strength, the intellectual focus, the moral courage, as I write about in the book, to ultimately complete it. But I think in his failure, he also grows. I write about failure being generative for Du Bois and it's really critical to thinking about the arc of his life and his evolution. By 1951, the federal government tries to put W.E.B. Du Bois in jail for his anti-war activities. Really, he's 83 years old and they're ready to throw him in jail, right? So I had to think about how is it that Du Bois, who in 1918 is encouraging black folks to close ranks and to set aside their special grievances, support their country and this war? How is it by 1951 the federal government is ready to throw him in jail, right? Because he is such a committed peace activist, right? Part of that evolution has to do with the failure of World War 1 and how his reckoning with that failure ultimately radicalized him, steals his convictions and serves as just yet another example of really what a phenomenal individual he was and what he was willing to ultimately sacrifice. I just glance at the time and I can't believe time's gone so quickly. So I'm going to ask one more question and open it up. But if there are not a lot of questions, I'm going to just keep going here. Hope, disillusionment and failure, for me, are strong words but words that I recognize as a writer. Feelings that I've gone through as a writer and I wonder, this is such a epic project that you took on. So I'm imagining that it wasn't all perfect sailing and so I don't necessarily want to hear about all the ups and downs. But did you ever wonder, am I ever going to finish this book? And then now that you've come to the end of this book and you've gone through your hope, disillusionment, failure, and triumph, I will add a fourth chapter for you. I finished my book. Du Bois didn't finish his book. I finished my book. How do you think Du Bois would look upon what you have written? Because I know you've thought about this as a writer. Yeah, well there were certainly moments when I was working on this project where I thought I might indeed end up like Du Bois and not ever finish this book. Because it just kept growing and growing and the story kept becoming more expansive. I didn't set out to write 12 chapters and to have the story really end in the 1950s. But that's really how long Du Bois was wrestling with the history and legacy, both historically as well as personally, with the war. So absolutely, it was a challenging book to write. Initially, I was admittedly very nervous about writing about Du Bois, because he's such a towering figure. And so many people had written about Du Bois. What could I possibly say that was new? So kind of mustering up the courage to tackle Du Bois, but to also approach him in a way that other scholars, historians hadn't done before, to present Du Bois in a way that showcased all of his brilliance, but all of his complexities, all of his flaws, really the full breadth of his humanity. That's something that I was very, very committed to and took a long time to do. I hope that Du Bois would appreciate my book. He was pretty snobby, had a pretty outsized ego. So I wouldn't be surprised if he thumbed his nose at me. But I think this was such an important part of his life and his work. And it was one of his biggest regrets that he never finished this book, one of the biggest regrets in his life and career. And he actually writes in, as I talk about in my book, in one of his other books, Dusk of Dawn, which he published in 1940, that he collected while he was in France, a whole host of documents that he tried to write this history, and that he believed that one day these materials deserve to see the light of day. As a lesson, and these are his words, in the spiritual lesions of race conflict in a critical moment in American history. So I hope that I've done Du Bois' justice in bringing this history to light, but also, again, talking about the ongoing legacies of those spiritual lesions that Du Bois was wrestling with as it related to the war. Well, I'll speak on behalf of him. I think he would be very proud. I hope so. I mean, I think one of the things that we have, that you have as a historian, that he didn't have at that time, was the advantage of the passage of time. And retrospectively, he managed to finish this amazing book on reconstruction, and so he had a passage of time. And I think it's, I don't know if you feel this as a historian, but it's hard when you're actually kind of in the middle of things to have to look back and write this epic story. Absolutely. I mean, he was part of the history that he was trying to write about. He was writing about himself, in addition to writing about the history of the war, a history that was still very much the present for Du Bois. Throughout the 20s and 30s, the legacies of the war, the wounds of the war, were still being felt every day. And he had to wrestle with that. And that's reflective in how the book itself evolves, how he initially views it as this kind of triumphant story about democracy and how black soldiers fought to win the war. By the time he decides he's not going to finish the book, by the late 1930s, he's envisioning it as an explicitly anti-war book, as a lesson about the horrors of modern warfare, a warning call about the Second World War, which he actually sees the seeds of with his own eyes. So you're right, he didn't have the luxury of hindsight, the passage of time, of distance that he had with writing a book, another epic history, like black reconstruction. And I think that's a big reason why he ultimately wasn't able to finish the book. Well, thank you so much. I'm going to reluctantly look into the audience and ask if there are questions, but I'll jump in quickly if there are not questions to continue the conversation. So I think there's going to be a roving mic. So if anyone wants to put their hand up. Hi. Given how Du Bois felt about black Americans participating in the war in 1918, was Tulsa, just a few years later, just devastating for him? Tulsa was devastating for black Americans all over the country. But Tulsa was just one of numerous racial massacres that black people had to experience in the aftermath of the war. And I write about this in the book. So when Du Bois comes back to the United States in 1919, during the Red Summer, where you have race riots in Washington DC, where black people literally being assaulted in front of the White House while Woodrow Wilson is sitting inside, all out race war in Chicago, a horrific massacre in Arkansas, black soldiers, veterans being assaulted, lynched, still wearing their uniforms in some cases. So Tulsa was really part of this horrific wave of racial violence and backlash against the hopes and aspirations that black people had in the aftermath of the war. In some ways, as bad as it sounds, Du Bois had almost become, in some ways, used to it. I don't want to say he was ever desensitized to it. But I haven't seen any writings by Du Bois, specifically about Tulsa at the time. He was neck deep in organizing another Pan-African Congress in 1921. So at least I haven't seen any public commentary on Tulsa. But he was certainly aware of it. And there was actually a photograph of Tulsa of the Greenwood neighborhood that was literally bombed during that pogrom, obliterated. That photograph ran in the Crisis Magazine, which he was the editor of. And one could easily have mistaken it for a French town being shelled during the war. It was that horrific. There's actually probably a little more of a comment, I guess, than a question. But I've always kind of believed, or at least I've kind of come to the conclusion that we failed to succeed. So I mean, as far as you put in that section, you're concluding your book with failure. And as you just said, how as Du Bois grew and became more into his convictions, this experience that he went through trying to put together his book, he probably wouldn't be the Du Bois that we know of. He wouldn't have gone through this exercise of trying to put together this book. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think you're spot on that. This was such a challenging experience for him to try and write this book. And he's writing other books along the way. I mentioned he's writing Darkwater, The Gift of Black Folk, which he published in 1924, Black Reconstruction. He writes a novel. He wrote two novels. That's why I discovered it. I'm like, wait, what? I didn't know that. He was just ridiculous. He had 22 single-author books. I wrote 22 books. One of them he didn't finish. But he was just so prolific. And as he's wrestling with the failure of the war, he's also infusing all of those ideas into his other works, whether it's questions about the ultimate meaning of democracy, pan-Africanism, the place of black people in the United States as a central part of American history, Black Reconstruction, Dark Princess, his novel thinking about third world solidarity movements. All these ideas that he's wrestling with, as they relate to the war, he's also using it to shape just his remarkable intellectual output and his political commitments as well. As I argue at the end of my book, in the end, Du Bois believed that it wasn't the writing of this book, which was going to be his ultimate testament about the legacies of the war. It was going to be his political commitments, his convictions of fighting for peace. And that's how he dedicates the remaining years of his life, of fighting for peace in the context of the Cold War, McCarthyism, where he's essentially persona non grata by the late 1950s, leaves the United States altogether in 1961, even facing that backlash of being branded as un-American. He is still staking claim to America and fighting for America in the best way that he knows how, which is criticizing it. I'm sorry. Let's laugh. Have you read the portrait of him in the kid's book for Stamped, the kid's version of Stamped? I'm familiar with the kid's version of Stamped. Because it wasn't very generous, the portrait of Du Bois, and I was wondering what your thoughts were about that. Well, I think without having seen that particular portrayal of Du Bois, I think he's still a very complex figure. And part of his complexity is just how his views changed so much over time. I mean, he lived 95 years. He was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, during Andrew Johnson's presidency, during Reconstruction. He dies in 1963, August of 1963, in Ghana, literally on the eve of the March on Washington, just an incredible life. So when we think about Du Bois, we have to ask ourselves, OK, which Du Bois are we talking about? Are we talking about early Du Bois? Right after he gets his PhD, first African-American, to get his PhD from Harvard, he just studies at the University of Berlin. Are we talking about Du Bois in during World War I, during and after the war? Are we talking about Du Bois in the 1930s when he begins to move to the left? Are we talking about Du Bois by 1961, who joins the Communist Party? So it makes him difficult to pin down. And I think in some ways, that's the problem with a lot of the scholarship portrayals of Du Bois. That was one of the reasons why I was so hesitant to jump into the fray and study him. But he's worth reckoning with, because he's that important of a figure. Did any black African people from the French colonies in Africa participate in World War I? If so, did Dr. Du Bois comment on this in his writings? Yes, he did. And as a matter of fact, he envisioned writing an entire chapter devoted to the experiences of African soldiers who served in the French army. He was envisioning writing a global and specifically a diasporic history. He saw the war from the start as connected to the future of Africa, that the roots of the war, as he writes about in his landmark piece in 1915, titled The African Roots of War Lay in European Empire and Colonialism. The exploitation of African peoples in terms of their human resources as well as their material resources. So he was deeply interested in the African dimensions of the war, the specific participation of African soldiers in the war. So a very important part of the history that he was imagining and hoped to tell. And he played a very pivotal role in the Pan-African Congresses from the very beginning, which is also a part of this. Yeah, yeah, so the Pan-African Congress that he organizes in 1919. As I read with Blaise DeYonc, who was the champion of recruiting African soldiers from Senegal to serve in the French army. And Du Bois organizes subsequent Pan-African Congresses in 1921, 1923, 1925. So that's an important part of the legacy of the war as I talk about in the book. He participated in the first one as well, which was 1900, I think. 1900, yeah, yeah, with Henry Sylvester Williams, yep. Yeah, a couple of questions in the front. We're in trouble now. I admit I have not finished reading your book, but what about his family? I don't hear much about children or with him being so busy politically, et cetera, et cetera. I don't hear much about the family. That is such a good question. Thank you for asking that. You know, Du Bois, just keeping it real, he was not a very good husband and he was not a very good father. I start off the book with his daughter Yolande and his wife, Nina, going to Europe, going to England in the early months of the war. His daughter was going to boarding school. He sent his daughter to boarding school right outside of London, right when the war starts. And his wife kinda goes over there to accompany her. All the while Du Bois remains in the United States. He's doing his Du Bois thing, writing editorials and books. I guess you can say he was concerned for their safety, but not enough to like, hey, maybe it's not a good idea for my wife and kid to be over here in Europe during this war. So that's just kinda illustrative of how Du Bois really put himself first in terms of his relationships with his daughter and his wife, who suffered emotionally as a result. He was very patriarchal. He was a supporter of women rights politically, but when it came to his personal life, he believed that women had a particular role to play. So there's a lot more I could have said about Du Bois' family, his personal relationships with other women. Yeah, yeah, that would have been another book, though. Well, it's interesting. There's a little part in the book where you describe his daughter's wedding, which what I remember about it was that it was expensive. And I said, somehow I'm channeling into it. You may be not correctly that he was very happy about how expensive the whole thing was. It was the wedding of the year in Harlem. I mean, he spent thousands of dollars on it. I think his daughter had like 16 bridesmaids. She married County Cullen, who was the star of the Harlem Renaissance, right? Famous African-American poet, who also happened to be gay and went on his honeymoon accompanied by his best man. Okay, we don't need to go there, all right? So this is gonna be Chad's next book. The Tea on Du Bois. But I wanna just pause for a moment, if you'll allow me and just highlight the person who's just asked this very good question. Willard Harris, who is 103 years young. I'm just embarrassing how I do this all the time. And she is a local legend. Yeah, round of applause. But I wanna say, and she's someone that I have a chapter on in my book as well. And as I was reading your book, Chad, and you talked about soldiers coming back to America, and I think there was one instance where a soldier bumped up against another white person, and that started off something horrendous and maybe even led to a lynching. He didn't step off the sidewalk for this white person. And Willard and I go for weekly walks. And Willard has said on a number of occasions, I don't even think I've really mentioned this to you, how she doesn't have to step off the sidewalk for others. Willard was born in the year that women were first given the right to vote in 1919. Do you imagine anything? And so Willard is such a treasure, because I see, you know, she's lived this incredible long life, and you just kind of see flashes of history. It's a long time back. And so for me reading your book, I feel like I got even more out of your book with some of the incredible conversations and stories that dear Willard Harris has shared. So big shout out to Willard and what she has done in so many ways in her long life and continues to inspire so many of us. Yeah, thank you, thank you. And get Sarah's book because she talks about, oh yeah, yeah, I'm about to give it to you. Actually, I think it's because of Willard that I first came to know your wonderful mother, and this is how I came to know of your work. So all roads lead back to Willard Harris. Absolutely, yeah. Do we have time for one more question or I think we have one more question. Well, I actually have two. The first was whether Du Bois really failed to write to finish the book or whether he decided not to write it. I'm not totally clear on that. And the second is what his position was on the Second World War. So I think that the answer to your first question is both, right? I think he did decide that he wasn't going to finish the book. And that decision was reflective of his failed attempts to write the book itself. How even despite the 800 pages that he drafted, you know, the numerous applications for funding from different philanthropies and foundations, he was not able to finish the book. And that was, in his view, a failure. But again, I think it goes back to the earlier question. That failure was not something that Du Bois let define him. That he used that to continue to grow, evolve, to write more books, but to also instill his political convictions as well. And in part, that failure is directly connected to World War II, right? He actually travels to Europe in 1936. In the summer of 1936, he's in Germany. As Adolf Hitler is showing off the Third Reich to the world during the Olympic Games, right? He's seeing the next World War literally on the horizon. In addition to that, he travels through the Soviet Union, he visits China, he visits Japan, right? So he comes back to the United States thinking that I need to finish this book because the next World War is about to go down. And people need to see what happened during this first World War before it's too late. By 1940, as World War II erupts, he makes the decision, right, to abandon working on the book. And again, I think that decision is linked to the final confirmation of the failure of World War I itself as World War II arrives and all the catastrophes that come along with it. But in terms of his stance on World War II, by that time, he's incredibly cynical, right? I mean, he believes that, you know, we've been there, done that, right? We are not gonna have democracy. We didn't have democracy before this war and we're not going to have democracy afterwards, right? I mean, he ultimately comes to the realization that, of course, black folks are gonna do their part like we always have, right? But make no mistakes, right? This isn't going to lead to a better world, yeah. We might have time for one last question, yes. Okay. Say that. To wait till they get a mic so that we can hear. You said that you used a screenplay book to also help section the book into three parts. Do you want this to be a film? And if so, do you have a director in mind or anything like that? Hey, if someone wants to buy the rights to it, I'm happy to start negotiating, right? I know there's some lawyers in the room that could help me out with that. You know, I mean, I don't know. And I think there certainly is a good biopic to be made about Du Bois, right? Gotta find the right person to play him. And maybe this would be a good way to tell that story about Du Bois' life. Because again, his life is so huge and sprawling. How do you capture all of Du Bois in one story? So who knows? We'll see. Henry Lewis Gates Jr. has been doing some small acting things, I think. Who can play him? Oh, wow. Cause Du Bois is a hero of Henry Lewis Gates Jr. And I often think he sort of follows in the footsteps in a way. So that's a very good question. Yeah, that's a good question. Chad, thank you so much. There are books available in the back, outside. I'd encourage you to buy as many copies as you can. If you know any producers or directors, please pass them on. And Chad, just congratulations. It's a phenomenal book. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you.