"The Song of the Smoke" was initially published in 1907, between the time Du Bois was involved in the 1905 organization of the "radical" Niagara Movement (which demanded civil rights and other basic freedoms for black Americans), and his position as the only black founding member of the NAACP in 1909. By this time Du Bois had realized that if the African American "is regarded as an inferior creation, who can never successfully take a part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down [as a scholar]." He was, as Darwin T. Turner has noted, "a social scientist and a political leader who considered art— especially literature—to be a vehicle for enunciating and effecting social, political, and economic ideas."

Consequently, Du Bois wrote many novels and plays, as...