William Edward Burghardt Du Bois lived a life so full of conflictive action and reaction, so marked by radical gesture, so dramatically out of tune with the main thrusts of American life in the first half of the twentieth century that it is difficult to remember that by nature and training he was a scholar, a man driven to the encyclopedic recording of the social history of black folk. Born, in Thoreau's phrase, "in the very nick of time," Du Bois had thrust upon him the uncomfortable and often ill-fitting mantle of political activism, and the angry, untiring, original, and bitter ways that he bore "the black man's burden" in the political arena, in the courts, and in the marketplace overshadowed his private labors to redress history's judgment on the role of black folk in the making of America. What Du Bois did, at ninety-five, in one final...