SOURCE: "W. E. B. Du Bois' First Efforts as a Playwright," in CLA Journal, Vol. 33, No. 4, June, 1990, pp. 415-27.

In the essay below, Daniel remarks on Du Bois's first drama, The Star of Ethiopia.

By the time he arrived in New York City in 1910 to assume duties as director of research and publicity for the newly established NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois was well on his way to becoming America's most prominent black scholar. Fifteen years earlier he had earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Harvard University and had studied in Germany with some of Europe's pioneer sociologists and distinguished German philosophers. He had conducted a study, The Philadelphia Negro, for the University of Pennsylvania, where he held a one-year appointment as a researcher, and had taught briefly at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where the black classics scholar William Sanders Scarborough was president. Leaving Wilberforce was...