Darkwater by WEB Du Bois

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WEB Du Bois is one of the greatest American thinkers and writers. This is a collection of essays meant as a follow on to Souls of Black Folks and published approx 20 years later. Like Souls, it is a mixture of genres ... essays interposed with fiction, poetry and prayers. 

On these pages you see arguments for women sufferage, anti-poverty measures, raw explanation of the continued racial struggle in our country, perspective on WWI, Jesus in Texas --- where he witnesses a chain gang, has dinner with a wealthy white family and then witnesses a lynching, and more. I don't think you can be an american citizen without interacting with Du Bois. 

To start-Credo; Of Work and Wealth and The Damnation of Women. For fiction, read The Comet. 

Here is the very last paragraph of an essay called The Souls of White Folk:

"Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,--this modern Prometheus,--hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!" Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!"

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