Many of the most important writings of Du Bois's long and distinguished career are collected in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Meyer Weinburg, and originally published in 1970.

Autobiobraphy of a People (2000) is a compilation of writings by African Americans from the Colonial period to today, edited by Herb Boyd with a forward by Gordon Parks, and showing the melding of the African and American cultures into a single identity.

James Weldon Johnson was a black author who wrote around the same time that Du Bois did. He was active with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and became its first black executive secretary in 1916. His most famous book is the novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), which examines race relations at the time.

The Harlem Renaissance, an artistic...