The story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I--and a new understanding of a great twentieth-century writer.
Deeply researched, crisply written ... Williams makes a compelling case that Close Ranks was the product of both calculation and opportunism ... By rendering this story in such rich archival detail, Williams’s book is a fitting coda to Du Bois’s unfinished history of Black Americans and the First World War.
A first-rate intellectual history ... Through dogged research, Williams has illuminated the mystery of the book that could not be written and that haunted its author to the end.
