In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois began an essay on the American Civil War and Reconstruction in The Souls of Black Folk with a simple assertion: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” (Du Bois 1986, 372). While Du Bois can be faulted for holding to an excessively reductive position—it is simplistic to ignore the myriad other problems that bedeviled America at the start of the twentieth century, many of which bedevil us still—his emphasis on the difficulty of resolving racial problems has proved prophetic. The great advances of the nineteenth century, including the abolition of slavery in America, had not removed the blight of racism from American society. Du Bois did not live to see the end of the twentieth century, but he lived through more than half of it, during which time racism had not moved from its place as the most serious problem facing the United States. In fact, the day after Du Bois died in August 1963, a quarter of a million protestors gathered in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak. A hundred years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, King observed, “The Negro still is not free; one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land” (King 1963, 1).

While W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the centrality of “the problem of the color-line” remain salient, at the time he wrote The Souls of Black Folks, his pessimism about race was out of step with the dominant historical view of race relations. To America's increasingly professionalized, academic, white historians, the legacy of racism was not a central problem in American history. To the greatest historians of the age, America's story was the story of a nation conquering a continent, or the story of political conflict between elites who fought democratic elements for control of the country.